Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Social Learning Theory In The Frontline Documentary “The Merchants Of Cool”, Alixe A. Wiley

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

In the Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the relationship between major media conglomerates and their hedonistic teenage customers is examined through exploring the different tactics industries use to discover and market the next “cool” thing. Industries maintain what the documentary refers to as a “feedback loop” with their customers, which is a cyclic, supply-and-demand relationship that blurs the line between fiction and reality. It has become impossible to tell which side is imitating the other: who do the products and trends that define popular youth culture belong to? What's more, are the sexual and aggressive hormone-fueled behaviors on …

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: Nationalist Rhetoric And International Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

Typical of an international tendency, the history of television in Ireland has been framed by national boundaries. This paper argues that viewing the history of television solely through institutional sources and a nation state-bound perspective obscures transnational influences and homogenises diverse audience experiences. Moreover, such histories may serve to reproduce a limited range of types of nationalist rhetoric. The research presented here explores the history of television in Ireland through life story interviews. This reveals views of the nation, its global context and processes of social change quite different to those discussed in orthodox histories. Arguably, this shift in historical …

Global Transmission And Local Consumption: Navajo Resistance To Mainstream American Television, Sam Pack Ph.D.

Journal of International and Global Studies

A common assumption maintains that the global outreach of mass media inevitably leads to deleterious consequences for native communities. Indeed, different scholars have argued that awareness of the outside world from television results in the homogenization of local cultures. However, images viewed through the electronic peephole radically transform not only an understanding of the outside world, but the way indigenes define themselves and their relationship to each other. By presenting subaltern audiences with an idealized other, television compels the emergence of an objectified self. “Who are ‘we’?” would not have been asked—or asked in the same way—were it not for …

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

The Fair City Production Line: An Examination Of Soap Opera’S Potential Contribution To The Public Sphere, Edward Brennan

Articles

Between December 2000 and February 2001 the Irish soap opera Fair City ran an unprecedented, risky and controversial abortion storyline. This came before a looming referendum on the legality of abortion. Here, Fair City was not just offering entertainment, but provoking debate and discussion on a divisive issue in Irish society. In this case, and many others, it appears that soap opera, by promoting such discussion, may contribute to the formation of public opinion in contemporary civil society. Heretofore, most academic studies have overlooked the possible consequences of soap opera for civil society, public opinion and the democratic process. This …

Professional Wrestling: From Sport To Sports Entertainment, Ryan Diesem

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

College Students' Media Consumption And Their Voting Habits, Peggy Anne Prudhomme

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

You Still My Girl?: Adolescent Femininity As Resistance In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sophie Levy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

History is where the dead things are. Buffy, as her Watcher Rupert Giles tells her mother Joyce, resists the historical. She lives very much in the now, and history of course, is very much about the then he stammers, aware perhaps of the history echoing in his British accent (Angel I:7). The show's appeal, however, resides in its battle with history, not its denial. History is the repressed but resurrected, whether personal -- Giles' dark age of demon-worship comes back to (almost) kill him (The Dark Age II:8) -- or cultural, such as the Master's bad Old World …