Ambient Television

McCarthy Anna McCarthy

Description

Although we tend to think of television primarily as a household fixture, TV monitors outside the home are widespread: in bars, laundromats, and stores; conveying flight arrival and departure times in airports; uniting crowds at sports events and allaying boredom in waiting rooms; and helping to pass the time in workplaces of all kinds. In Ambient Television Anna McCarthy explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community that television generates outside the home.Discussing the roles television has played in different institutions from 1945 to the present day, McCarthy draws on a wide array of sources. These include retail merchandising literature, TV industry trade journals, and journalistic discussions of public viewing, as well as the work of cultural geographers, architectural theorists, media scholars, and anthropologists. She also uses photography as a research tool, documenting the uses and meanings of television sets in the built environment, and focuses on such locations as the tavern and the department store to show how television is used to support very different ideas about gender, class, and consumption. Turning to contemporary examples, McCarthy discusses practices such as Turner Private Networks' efforts to transform waiting room populations into advertising audiences and the use of point-of-sale video that influences brand visibility and consumer behavior. Finally, she inquires into the activist potential of out-of-home television through a discussion of the video practices of two contemporary artists in everyday public settings.Scholars and students of cultural, visual, urban, American, film, and television studies will be interested in this thought-provoking, interdisciplinary book.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Americas
• Television
• Media studies
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383130
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

A M B I E N T

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Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural PowerEdited by Lynn Spigel

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D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N 2 0 0 1

© Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Text and photographs, except figs. , , , , , , and , © Anna McCarthy, . Fig.  and all drawings except fig. , © Rachel Harrison, . Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

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Acknowledgments, ix

Introduction: The Public Lives of TV, 

P A RT I : H I S T O R I E S A N D I N S T I T U T I O N S Rhetorics of TV Spectatorship Outside the Home, 

1

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TV, Class, and Social Control in the s Neighborhood Tavern, 

Gendered Fantasies of TV Shopping in the Postwar Department Store, 

Out-of-Home Networks in the s, 

P A RT I I : P L A C E S A N D P R A C T I C E S Reading TV Installations in Daily Life, 

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Shaping Public and Private Space with TV Screens, 

Television at the Point of Purchase, 

Television While You Wait, 

Terminal Thoughts on Art, Activism, and Video for Public Places, 

Notes, 

Works Cited, 

Index, 

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Many individuals and a variety of institutions provided invaluable assis- tance to this project as it developed from its inception in . I must first thank six mentors. Mimi White taught me how to think about television and gave me support, encouragement, and friendship besides. I am in- debted to Jim Schwoch for his many careful readings and for his intellec- tual generosity as a historian and theorist of electronic media. Tom Gun- ning and Laura Kipnis both taught me how to write and how to enjoy writing; I thank Tom for inspiring a love of the archive and for kindling my visual and historical curiosity. I thank Laura for her friendship and discernment and for demonstrating the creative, and political, work of cultural criticism. I am also particularly grateful to Mark Williams, who inspired the dissertation that became this book, and to Jeanine Basinger, my first teacher, who remains a model in the classroom and in the movie theater. This project was supported at different stages by a number of institu- tions. Several research trips were funded by a dissertation year grant from the Graduate School of Northwestern University and by a research grant from the University Film and Video Association. Some research was also completed over the course of two fellowships, one from the Alumnae of Northwestern and one from the Smithsonian Institution. The College of Arts and Sciences and the department of Communications Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided valuable support in the form of a research-and-study leave. I also thank the department of Cinema Studies in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for crucial research support in the final stages. Many curators and librarians generously shared their knowledge and time during the research process. I wish to thank the staff of the Louisiana