Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Political Economy Of Reali-Tv, Chad Raphael

Communication

From the sea change in U.S. television in the 1980s emerged a programming trend variously described as "infotainment," "reality-based television," "tabloid TV," "crime-time television," "trash TV," and "on-scene shows."[1][open notes in new window] The welter of terms created by television critics to describe these new programs masked their underlying connection as a response to economic restructuring within the industry. This essay offers a rough categorization of these programs, sketches the industrial context from which they emerged, and points to the economic problems they were meant to solve.[2] Although my focus here is on political economy, rather than on textual or …

Ethics @ Email: Do New Media Require New Ethics?, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

As more and more day-to-day interaction in business and academia has begun to take place through electronic mail, probably every one of its users has experienced some breakdown. By now, we have come to expect occasional hardware failures, but the human ones still catch us by surprise.

That message we dashed off with no ill intent is received with hard feelings. Or it is forwarded to someone we never meant should see it. Or, unbeknown to us, it is read by our boss.

E-mail has raised a host of ethical questions about how we treat one another and how we …

Understanding Audience Understanding, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

Communication study has approached the issue of audience understanding of messages from the perspective of the message and from that of the audience. On the one hand, the "powerful-message" construct paints the audience as passive recipients of the meaning presented in the media. On the other hand, the "active audience" construct places most interpretive power in the audience, stressing their selectivity of messages, their use of the media, their social positions, and their ability to generate new messages based on the media. A middle position sees audience understanding emerge from an interaction between messages and audience members.