TV

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only fifteen minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting the weekly showing of sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. The revelation that answers were fed to contestants on quiz shows was a national scandal, the Vietnam War, and JFK''s assassination were unprecedented eruptions of real-time disaster into the placid televisual world. If this seems a distant past, that''s a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us. Today we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders.Weaving together personal memoir and social history, reflecting on key moments in the history of TV programming, the evolution of the material object that once was a "set" and now dominates entire rooms, and how TV has been depicted in movies such as A on , Broadcast News and Network , Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV as it has shaped habits of consumption, ethical values, social relations, and our very ability to discriminate between the scripted and the spontaneous, the factual and the spun, image and reality. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic .>

Entertaining A thought provoking and interesting read.

Vorwort
Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades.

Autorentext
Susan Bordo is Professor Emerita at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she held the Otis A. Singletary Chair in Humanities. She has published many influential books, on subjects that range from femininity, masculinity, and the body (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body and The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private) to Anne Boleyn (The Creation of Anne Boleyn) and, most recently, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, a play-by-play account of the gendered double-standards and stereotypes, political forces and media culture that contributed to Clinton's loss in the 2016 election (2017) and Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman and Other Writing on Politics and the Media 2016-2019 (2020.) Her widely cited books and articles are considered paradigms of accessible, interdisciplinary scholarship.

Inhalt

Preface

1. Waiting for Joseph Welch
2. We Have Six Televisions
3. Growing Up with TV in the Fifties and Sixties
4. The Erosion of the Fact-Based Universe
5. If George Orwell Could Critique Broadcast News
6. Intersections of TV, "Reality," and Reality
7. TV Deconstructs Gender
8. Epilogue: July 4, 2020
   Acknowledgments
   Notes