Description
Book SynopsisExamines the role of television in public space at different points in the history of the medium. The author explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community that television generates outside the home.
Trade Review“
Ambient Television offers a long overdue consideration of television spectatorship through a study of television's strategic positioning in a variety of public environments outside the home. Anna McCarthy's superb historical research has unearthed much fascinating material which will be of interest to artists and media critics. Anyone wishing to understand more fully our ever expanding media culture will benefit from McCarthy's astute analysis and historical insights into television's complex place in the public sphere.”—John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum
“An entirely original book,
Ambient Television is brilliantly conceived, researched, and argued. Scholars in material culture, media history, and television studies are likely to recognize this virtuoso treatment of TV outside the home as an instant classic.”—Andrew Ross
“An unusually rich, ambitious, and engaging work. McCarthy has produced a significant piece of scholarship that will have wide impact upon the way television is taken up in the academy and elsewhere.”—William Boddy, Baruch College
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Public Lives of TV 1
Part I. Histories and Institutions
Rhetorics of TV Spectatorships Outside the Home 27
1. TV, Class, and Social Control in the 1940s Neighborhood Tavern 29
2. Gendered Fantasies of TV Shopping in the Postwar Department Store 63
3. Out-of-Home Networks in the 1990s 89
Part II. Places and Practices
Reading TV Installations in Daily Life 115
4. Shaping Public and Private Space with TV Screens 117
5. Television and Consumption at the Point of Purchase 155
6. Television While You Wait 195
7. Terminal Thoughts on Art, Activism, and Video for Public Places 225
Notes 253
Works Cited 287
Index 305
