Search results for ""Author Lynn Spigel""

In TV Snapshots, Lynn Spigel explores snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Like today’s selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture. Drawing on her collection of over 5,000 TV snapshots, Spigel shows that people did not just watch TV: women used the TV set as a backdrop for fashion and glamour poses; people dressed in drag in front of the screen; and in pinup poses, people even turned the TV setting into a space for erotic display. While the television industry promoted on-screen images of white nuclear families in suburban homes, the snapshots depict a broad range of people across racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds that do not always conform to the reigning middle-class nuclear family ideal. Showing how the television set became a central presence in the home that exceeded its mass entertainment function, Spigel highlights how TV snapshots complicate understandings of the significance of television in everyday life.

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In Welcome to the Dreamhouse feminist media studies pioneer Lynn Spigel takes on Barbie collectors, African American media coverage of the early NASA space launches, and television’s changing role in the family home and its links to the broader visual culture of modern art. Exploring postwar U.S. media in the context of the period’s reigning ideals about home and family life, Spigel looks at a range of commercial objects and phenomena, from television and toys to comic books and magazines.The volume considers not only how the media portrayed suburban family life, but also how both middle-class ideals and a perceived division between private and public worlds helped to shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and reception of postwar media and consumer culture. Spigel also explores those aspects of suburban culture that media typically render invisible. She looks at the often unspoken assumptions about class, nation, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation that underscored both media images (like those of 1960s space missions) and social policies of the mass-produced suburb. Issues of memory and nostalgia are central in the final section as Spigel considers how contemporary girls use television reruns as a source for women’s history and then analyzes the current nostalgia for baby boom era family ideals that runs through contemporary images of new household media technologies.Containing some of Spigel’s well-known essays on television’s cultural history as well as new essays on a range of topics dealing with popular visual culture, Welcome to the Dreamhouse is important reading for students and scholars of media and communications studies, popular culture, American studies, women’s studies, and sociology.

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Between 1948 and 1955, nearly two-thirds of all American families bought a television set—and a revolution in social life and popular culture was launched. In this fascinating book, Lynn Spigel chronicles the enormous impact of television in the formative years of the new medium: how, over the course of a single decade, television became an intimate part of everyday life. What did Americans expect from it? What effects did the new daily ritual of watching television have on children? Was television welcomed as an unprecedented "window on the world," or as a "one-eyed monster" that would disrupt households and corrupt children? Drawing on an ambitious array of unconventional sources, from sitcom scripts to articles and advertisements in women's magazines, Spigel offers the fullest available account of the popular response to television in the postwar years. She chronicles the role of television as a focus for evolving debates on issues ranging from the ideal of the perfect family and changes in women's role within the household to new uses of domestic space. The arrival of television did more than turn the living room into a private theater: it offered a national stage on which to play out and resolve conflicts about the way Americans should live. Spigel chronicles this lively and contentious debate as it took place in the popular media. Of particular interest is her treatment of the way in which the phenomenon of television itself was constantly deliberated—from how programs should be watched to where the set was placed to whether Mom, Dad, or kids should control the dial. Make Room for TV combines a powerful analysis of the growth of electronic culture with a nuanced social history of family life in postwar America, offering a provocative glimpse of the way television became the mirror of so many of America's hopes and fears and dreams.

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In TV Snapshots, Lynn Spigel explores snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Like today’s selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture. Drawing on her collection of over 5,000 TV snapshots, Spigel shows that people did not just watch TV: women used the TV set as a backdrop for fashion and glamour poses; people dressed in drag in front of the screen; and in pinup poses, people even turned the TV setting into a space for erotic display. While the television industry promoted on-screen images of white nuclear families in suburban homes, the snapshots depict a broad range of people across racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds that do not always conform to the reigning middle-class nuclear family ideal. Showing how the television set became a central presence in the home that exceeded its mass entertainment function, Spigel highlights how TV snapshots complicate understandings of the significance of television in everyday life.

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While critics have long disparaged commercial television as a vast wasteland, TV has surprising links to the urbane world of modern art that stretch back to the 1950s and '60s. During that era, the rapid rise of commercial television coincided with dynamic new movements in the visual arts - a potent combination that precipitated a major shift in the way Americans experienced the world visually. "TV by Design" uncovers this captivating story of how modernism and network television converged and intertwined in their mutual ascent during the decades of the cold war.Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphics were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendily modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists - including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon - also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks.Dizzy Gillespie, Ernie Kovacs, Duke Ellington, and Andy Warhol all stop by in this imaginative and winning account of the ways in which art, television, and commerce merged in the first decades of the TV age.

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In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it.With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future.Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

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While much research into television has been historical, textual, or empirical, this volume approaches the topic from a sociocultural and feminist perspective, to address important questions from the viewpoint of the audience as well as from that of the industry. The contributors examine the ways in which the television industry seeks to deliver a female audience to its advertisers while inserting itself into women's lives, both at home and in the marketplace - hence the concept of a private screening in which the outside media world is brought into the personal space. The volume analyzes how television delivers "consumption" to its female audience by displaying commodities and lifestyles that attempt to engender an idealized sense of community and how audiences understand television programming and how these programs construct definitions of "femininity".

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An engaging exploration of the relationship between avant-garde art and American network television from the 1940s through the 1970s The aesthetics and concepts of modern art have influenced American television ever since its inception in the 1930s. In return, early television introduced the public to the latest trends in art and design. This engaging catalogue comprehensively examines the way avant-garde art shaped the look and content of network television in its formative years, from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. It also addresses the larger cultural and social context of television. Artists, fascinated with the new medium and its technological possibilities, contributed to network programs and design campaigns, appeared on television to promote modern art, and explored, critiqued, or absorbed the new medium in their work. More than 150 illustrations reveal both sides of the dialogue between high art and television through a selection of graphic designs, ephemera, and stills from important television programs—from The Twilight Zone to Batman to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and more—as well as works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Lee Friedlander, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, and many others. Revolution of the Eye uncovers the cultural history of a medium whose powerful influence on our lives remains pervasive.Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyExhibition Schedule:Jewish Museum, New York (05/01/15–09/27/15)Museum of Art at Ft. Lauderdale, Nova Southeastern University (10/25/15–01/10/16)Addison Gallery of American Art (04/09/16–07/31/16)Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (10/20/16–01/08/17)The Smart Museum, University of Chicago (02/16/17–06/11/17)

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The first edition of this book immediately became a defining text for feminist television criticism, with an influence extending across television, media and screen studies – and the second edition will be similarly agenda-setting. Completely revised and updated throughout, it takes into account the changes in the television industry, the academic field of television studies and the culture and politics of feminist movements.With fifteen of the eighteen extracts being new to the second edition, the readings offer a detailed analysis of a wide range of case studies, topics and approaches, including genres, audiences, performers and programmes such as 'Sex and the City', ‘Prime Suspect’, Oprah and Buffy.With a new introduction to the volume tracing developments in the field and introductions to each thematic section, the editors engage in a series of debates surrounding the main issues of feminist television scholarship. They explore how television represents feminism and consider how critics themselves have created feminism and post-feminism as historical categories and political identities. Readings consider women who are engaged in various aspects of television production on both sides of the camera and examine how television targets and imagines its female audience, as well as how women respond to and use television in their everyday lives. Feminist Television Criticism is inspiring reading for film, media, cultural and gender studies students.Contributors: Ien Ang, Jane Arthurs , Sarah Banet-Weiser ,Karen Boyle, Marsha F. Cassidy, Geok-lian Chua ,Bonnie J. Dow, Joanne Hollows, Deborah Jermyn , Annette Kuhn, Elizabeth MacLachlan, Purnima Mankekar, Tania Modleski, Laurie Ouellette, Yeidy M. Rivero, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Kimberly Springer, Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat, Susan J. Wolfe.

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