Nick Couldry

Anna McCarthy

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the Internet to the shopping mall.

Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age

MediaSpace

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.

Visual Culture and Public Space

Ambient Television

Explores the pervasiveness of television in our homes, bars, stores, and more, discussing the roles television has played in different institutions from 1945 to the present and documenting the uses and meanings of sets in the material culture of built environment. Simultaneous.

How do you forgive the unforgiveable? Is it possible to truly be free from what others have done to you? Each of us has a story and has experienced hurt in some area of our lives. Whether in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, we all have experienced pain and disappointment. If not dealt with, these wounds begin to impact our everyday life at a crippling rate. We live bound by fear, insecurities, anger and jealousy; often chalking it up as "normal." Yet, in reality, we are being held captive by what others have done to us. We desire freedom from our pasts and our pain yet struggle with how to attain it; we wonder if it is even possible. Addressing a broad spectrum of issues from common offenses to abuse and betrayal, the author leaves no question as to God's opinion of mistreatment, and how we can heal and live a life of freedom from our past and present hurts. With practical tools, you will discover that freedom isn't just possible; it's attainable.

A Journey to Freedom and Healing

Forgiveness Is Not An Option

“McCarthy has written about an aspect of the 'golden age of television' seldom detailed in histories of early television. This is the story of how some of the largest American commercial corporations of the 1950s used the new medium of television not with the sole intent of advertising their products but to effect social reform on television viewers in order to create 'good citizens.' Highly recommended.” —Choice “In this engaging and original study, Anna McCarthy examines the high civic hopes once held for U.S. commercial television by the liberal social, political, and business elites who made up the 'governing classes.'” —Journal of American History 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. Anna McCarthy is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is the co-editor of the journal Social Text, as well as the author of Ambient Television.

Anna McCarthy

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