Search results for ""Author Anna McCarthy""

At the dawn of television in the early 1950s, a broad range of powerful groups and individuals—from prominent liberal intellectuals to massive corporations—saw in TV a unique capacity to influence the American masses, shaping (in the words of the American philosopher Mortimer Adler) “the ideas that should be in every citizen’s mind.” Formed in the shadow of the Cold War—amid the stirrings of the early civil rights movement—the potential of television as a form of unofficial government inspired corporate executives, foundation officers, and other influential leaders to approach TV sponsorship as a powerful new avenue for shaping the course of American democracy. In this compelling political history of television’s formative years, media historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes to bring back into view an entire era of civic-minded programming and the ideas about democratic agency from which it sprang. Based on pathbreaking archival work, The Citizen Machine poses entirely new questions about the political significance of television. At a time when TV broadcasting is in a state of crisis, and new media reform movements have entered political culture, here is an original and thought-provoking history of the assumptions that have profoundly shaped not only television but our understanding of American citizenship itself.

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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.

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