The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways:
• by situating the consumption of television within the full range of structures, patterns and practices of everyday life;
• and by retrieving the importance of location as fundamental to these structures, patterns and practices – and, consequently, to the experience of television.
This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television – in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts.
Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted.
Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.
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In recent years non-fiction history programmes have flourished on television. This interdisciplinary study of history programming identifies and examines different genres employed by producers and tracks their commissioning, production, marketing and distribution histories.
Published December 6th 2012 by Routledge
Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 2nd Edition
The twentieth anniversary edition of Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers brings this now-canonical text to a new generation of students interested in the intersections of fandom, participatory culture, popular consumption and media theory.
Supplementing the original, classic text is an interview...
Published November 6th 2012 by Routledge
In this comprehensive textbook, now updated for its third edition, Jonathan Bignell provides students with a framework for understanding the key concepts and main approaches to Television Studies, including audience research, television history and broadcasting policy, and the analytical study of...
Published October 30th 2012 by Routledge