New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States

by William Boddy

Overview

New Media and Popular Imagination places the current technological upheaval in audio-visual culture in the context of previous periods of twentieth-century media innovation. Examining popular and industry responses to the introduction of radio, television, and digital media into the home, the book underscores the continuities and disjunctions in the ways in which electronic media have been anticipated, promoted, and resisted in twentieth-century America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198711469
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2004
Series:	Oxford Television Studies
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	9.22(w) x 6.46(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

William Boddy is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and Co-Ordinator of the Film Studies Program at the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

List of Figures     xii
Introduction     1
Cinema and Wireless in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination     7
Wireless Nation: Defining Radio as a Domestic Technology     16
The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor: Promoting Post-war US Television     44
US Television Abroad, 1960/1990: Market Power and National Introspection     56
'Mission Number One is to Kill TV': Remaking the Domestic Television Apparatus in the 1990s     68
Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs: The Transition to Digital Broadcasting in the USA and UK     79
Redefining the Home Screen: The Case of the Digital Video Recorder     100
Marketers Strike Back: Virtual Advertising     108
How God Watches Television: Early Responses to Digital Television     123
High Tech in a Falling Market: Interactivity and Advertising Form in Contemporary US Television     136
'Too Easy, Too Cheap and Too Fast to Control': Intellectual Property Battles in Digital Television     152
Conclusion     165
Index     169

Editorial Reviews

"A concise yet complete overview of public consciousness of new media. Boddy is a distinguished media historian, and he offers here a fascinating, fresh look at the history of the technology and social impact of cinema, early radio, television, computers, cable television, and digital media. ... Very well researched and indexed, this book should be in all collections supporting study of broadcast history, media, and communication. Essential, upper-division undergraduates and above."—Choice

From the Publisher