COM 151 Mass Media and Popular Culture

"Sizing up and taking down the things we read, watch, and play, this all-star team of analysts provides a series of delights and surprises that will make you ponder anew the deep structures that inform our lives, even when we think we're off-duty."--Kyle Smith, movie critic, New York Post Contemporary popular culture, from books to film to television to music to the deepest corners of the internet, has provoked a great deal of criticism, some of it well deserved. Yet for many Americans, and particularly for younger Americans, popular culture is culture. It is the only kind of cultural experience they seek and the currency in which they trade. In Acculturated, twenty-three thinkers examine the rituals, the myths, the tropes, the peculiar habits, the practices, and the neuroses of our modern era. Every culture finds a way for people to tell stories about ourselves. We rely on these stories to teach us why we do the things we do, to test the limits of our experience, to reaffirm deeply felt truths about human nature, and to teach younger generations about vice and virtue, honor and shame, and a great deal more. A phenomenon like the current crop of reality television shows, for example, with their bevy of "real" housewives, super-size families, and toddler beauty-pageant candidates, seems an unlikely place to find truths about human nature or examples of virtue. And yet on these shows, and in much else of what passes for popular culture these days, a surprising theme emerges: Move beyond the visual excess and hyperbole, and you will find the makings of classic morality tales. As the title suggests, readers will find in these pages "ACulture Rated." This lively roundtable of "raters" includes not only renowned cultural critics like Caitlin Flannigan and Chuck Colson, but also celebrated culture creators like the producers of the hit ABC comedy Modern Family and the host of TLC's What Not to Wear. Editors Christine Rosen and Naomi Schaefer Riley have tasked these contributors--both the critics and the insiders--with taking a step or two back from the unceasing din of popular culture so that they might better judge its value and its values and help readers think more deeply about the meaning of the narratives with which they are bombarded every waking minute. In doing so, the editors hope to foster a wide-reaching public conversation--one that will help all of us to think more clearly about our culture. Free excerpts, videos, and additional commentary available on www.acculturated.com.

In African Americans and Mass Media, Richard T. Craig explores the relationship among the lack of media ownership diversity, in addition to the political, and economical, influences, and policy developments influencing media ownership. Craig also addresses the concern of growing media monopolies and the decline in minority media ownership since the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Focusing the policy argument on this act and the deregulation of media ownership, this book explores, the jeopardy jeopardizing of diminishedas well as the influence on content. Observing Black Entertainment Television (BET) in the last five years of African American ownership and the first five years of conglomerate ownership--paralleling the first decade after the Telecommunications Act was passed--the book includes information about the changes made to information programming on the network. Craig asserts that despite the overwhelming presence of African Americans holding executive positions with the network, Viacom, BET's current owner, influences the network's programming and relegates the cultural identity of the network to profit interests. BET is observed as a case study reflective of the importance ethnic media and perspectives reflective of cultural ethnic identities, targeting ethnic audiences. African Americans and Mass Media chronicles the significance of ethnic media, drawing particular attention to African American media in the United States, and advocates for increased communication policy development bolstering minority ownership.

This text provides a survey of the relationship between children and those mass media found in the home--radio, television, and the Internet. Using a theory-based approach, with attention to developmental, gender, ethnic, and generational differences, author Rose M. Kundanis explores the nature of these relationships and their influences on children and families, looking at the experiences children have at various developmental ages and across generations. She reviews children's own experiences with media and examines the variety of effects that can operate due to children's perceptions at different ages, including fear, aggression, and sexuality. The text includes theory and research from mass communication, developmental psychology, education, and other areas, representing the broad spectrum of influences at work. Features of this text include: *side-bar interviews with teens who work in media and people who develop policy or programming for children's media; *in-depth explanations of the Generational Theory and the Developmental Theory as they apply to children and the media, plus a survey of other applicable theories; *description of the key points of the Children's Television Act of 1990, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and other relevant legislation; and *questions and activities to extend the exploration of topics. This text will help students develop a critical understanding of the relationship of children and the media; the variables affecting and influencing children's response to media; the theories that explain and predict this relationship; and the ways in which children use the media and can develop media literacy. It is appropriate for courses at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level, including children and media, media literacy, mass communication and society, and media processes and effects, as well as special topics courses in education, communication, and psychology.

Mass culture theory, studying mass culture and the Frankfurt School were, in part, the antecedent of media studies, cultural studies, critical theory and bits of sociology. Despite the importance of certain key writings, over the years many theorists have been ignored or misappropriated. But in more recent times key texts have been rediscovered, republished and are once again being studied. 'Critical Theories of Mass Culture: Then and Now' revisits the work of leading critical theorists, explores and explains their work and highlights their thinking in regard to present day issues of mass culture.

This insightful book tracks the concept of culture across a range of scholarly disciplines and much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries--years that saw the emergence of new fields and subfields (cultural studies, the new cultural history, literary new historicism, as well as ethnic and minority studies) and came to be called "the cultural turn." Since the 1990s, however, the idea of culture has fallen out of scholarly favor. Susan Hegeman engages with a diversity of disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political science, to historicize the rise and fall of the cultural turn and to propose ways that culture may still be a vital concept in the global present.

Foregrounds contributes to the development of theories of learning, in particular to theories of learning mathematics. It is relevant to students, student teachers, and researchers in the field of education as well as in mathematics education. Foregrounds contains six parts. Part I provides a summary of the notion of foreground as it has developed since the author introduced the idea in Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education. In Part II, the reader meets some students who tell us about their neighbourhood, about drug dealing, violence, and about playing football. They tell us about their teachers, about mathematics, and about what they would like their teachers to do. They tell us about their hopes, expectations, and frustrations.

Over the past 20 years, significant evidence has accumulated supporting the use of mass media campaigns in smoking cessation efforts. Studies have shown that smoke cessation campaigns can change beliefs and attitudes about quitting, increase motivation to quit and stimulate quit attempts. Also discussed in this book is the role of mass media in shaping and presenting certain forms of national identity; the prosocial messages in animated cartoons; the political use of fear and news reporting in Italy; media depiction of risky driving and adolescent driving behaviors; and the Axelrod Model of social phenomena and mass media.