Entertainment Studies 2001 Abstracts
Entertainment Studies Interest Group
Focus Group Analysis: Can It Help Explain Present Audience Discontent with Broadcast Network Television? • William J. Adams, Kansas State University • This study used focus groups to investigate audiences dissatisfaction with the major U.S. broadcast networks. The study found a strong perceived lack of variety. However, the term variety actual meant three separate things. While participants gave lip service to a separation between news and entertainment, follow up questions indicate they see no real. Participants had strong anti-business sentiments based on the belief that networks and producers held them in contempt. While participants strongly objected to sex and violence, they could not agree on what represented objectionable content.
Is there sufficient evidence to regulate popular music and music videos?: A review and critique • David J. Atkin and Robert Abelman, Cleveland State University • For nearly half a century, the evolution of rock music has been marked by controversy over its social influence. To a large degree, arguments by the pro- and anti-regulation/censorship camps echo those encountered in debates over the effects of media violence and pornography generally (e.g., Jeffres, 1997). The present study reviews empirical work on the content and effects of violence in rock music and music videos. In evaluating whether the research meets the high burden for regulatory intervention, we must first establish (1) whether the content of these popular arts is, in fact, providing an increasingly toxic content environment, and (2) whether such contents actually influence audience attitudes and behaviors. A review of the literature suggests that assailants of popular music have needed to “fill in the blanks” of their empirical arguments with selective citations to the voluminous literature on general media effects (e.g., with TV violence). The specific literature on popular music and music videos provides little in the way of longitudinal, externally valid findings that can establish a “smoking gun” with media influences as potent causal agents with human behavior. Implications for media regulation are discussed.
Zelda 64 and video game fans: A walkthrough of games. intertextuality and narrative • Mia Consalvo, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee • This paper argues that in order to better understand and theorize video games and game playing, it is necessary to study the activities of gamers themselves. This research examines game fans’ construction of walkthroughs, which guide other players through the action and story of the game. It is argued that these walkthroughs function as narratives for gamers, which are read intertextually by game fans. Further, gamers should be considered active creators of meaning regarding games, as they inhabit many of the characteristics of traditional media fans, including active reading of the media text, construction of media texts to share with other fans, and knowledge of intertextual relations between various media forms.
Front Page Women: Images of Women in Film Version of the Classic Play The Front Page. • Douglass K. Daniel, Ohio University • Four film versions of the play The Front Page, considered by many the definitive work of fiction about newspaper reporters, retained misogynistic elements over nearly six decades. Rather than changing with the times, the stereotypical women characters who dared to enter the man’s world of the press room were crushed by it. Even in the most recent version, made in 1988, women remained the pawns of men when not merely disruptive and annoying.
I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!: FEMALE AFRICAN AMERICAN ARITISTS AND THE JUSTIFATION OF VIOLENCE IN MUSIC VIDEO • Michele S. Foss and Stephynie Chapman, The University of Florida • This essay explores the ways in which three African-American female musicians justify their use of violence within music video narratives. What are these artists saying in their videos? What do these videos teach viewers about African-American women? Whether a product of the progressive day and age or a product of the frequently controversial hip-hop genre, these videos make a timely cultural comment about an art form that continues to become more assertive.
Sins and Virtues of Prime Time Television: Fictional Characters as Role Models • Kendra L. Gale, University of St. Thomas • This paper is a content analysis of the moral character of fictional characters on popular prime-time, American television programs. This study uses the cardinal sins and virtues: 1) to assess the moral values of characters; 2) to document the overall presence or absence of moral themes in prime time sitcoms and dramas; and 3) to examine the consequences of particularly sinful or virtuous behavior. Characters are assessed for their potential as role models.
Reality Television Goes Interactive: The Big Brother Television Audience • Lisa Gandy and M.J. Land, Georgia College & State University, and Lisa McChristian, Elon College • Reality television was taken to a new realm in the summer of 2000. Television audiences and Internet audiences were married through a voyeuristic, interactive experience. This study attempted to better understand the audience attracted to these interactive, realistic television shows. Utilizing previous studies on audience interactivity, a random telephone survey of Big Brother viewers was administered. Big Brother viewers that browsed the show’s website before and after the show were demographically more likely to be younger, more educated, and PC owners. Big Brother website visitors were significantly more likely to plan to watch the television show, eliminate distractions to that viewing and be more involved during the television show than non-Internet website users.
Wong Kar-Wai: An International Auteur in Hong Kong Film-making • Timothy R. Gleason, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Qi Tang, Bowling Green State University and Jean Giovanetti, Freelance Writer • Wong Kar-Wai is the premier “auteur” of Hong Kong cinema. This paper analyzes his film, Chungking Express using the “auteur as structure” approach. The analysis reveals Wong utilizes a French New Wave style to represent his view of a Hong Kong undergoing social and political transformations. This research is significant because it introduces the work of an internationally-acclaimed director to mass communication scholars and deciphers a film inherently complex to interpret.
‘Natural Born Killers’: An Aesthetic-Ethical Deconstruction of Violence in (and of) the Mass Media • Joseph Harry, Slippery Rock University • The 1994 film Natural Born Killers is analyzed from a postmodern literary and aesthetic-ethical interpretive stance to consider the film’s own ethos pertaining to violence as both personal, family-dysfunctional issue and as cultural-media event. The theoretical position, and the film’s own chaotic, schizophrenic narrative, both provide a means to understand the film’s contradictory moral outlook from a deconstructivist ethical perspective, embracing complexity, irony and moral indeterminancy as a potentially inescapable and problematic outcome of ethical evaluation within a media-fragmented culture.
Fall Colors 2000: The State of Diversity in Broadcast Network Prime Time Television • Katharine Heintz-Knowles, Children’s Media Research and Consulting, and Jennifer Henderson, University of Washington • Network television came under fire during the 1999 season for it’s lack of racial diversity. Network executives responded with assurances that the 2000 season would be more inclusive of racial minority characters. This paper examines the racial diversity in the first two episodes of each entertainment series airing during prime time on the six broadcast networks for the Fall 2000 season. The study discovered that the network prime time world is primarily a white one, with African Americans making a visible presence and all other racial minority groups being virtually invisible. While a vast majority of programs have entire casts that are racially mixed, most of the racial minority characters are included in secondary and guest roles. When just opening credits casts are considered, the authors discovered that more programs featured racially homogeneous casts (either all white or all black) than racially mixed casts.
The Influence of Media Ownership on News Coverage: A case of CNN’s Coverage of Movies • Jaemin Jung, University of Florida • The purpose of this study was to examine whether media conglomerates use their own media outlets to promote their media products. Specifically, CNN’s coverage of movies was content analyzed to see differences based on the ownership. The findings suggest that CNN, a subsidiary of Time Warner, showed favoritism toward their parent company’s movies. While CNN increased the amount of coverage of Time Warner’s movies after the merger with Time Warner, it reduced the coverage of its competitors’ movies.
That Which Unites and Divides Us: A Study of Television Audience Meaning-Making • Karen E. Kline, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania • This paper examines the social practices surrounding television that were enacted by a group of regular viewers of the television program Picket Fences. The ethnographic data provide a portrait of active audiencehood revealed through the ways respondents asserted control over their viewing experiences and the specific terms of their engagement with this program and its characters. At the same time, respondents generated ideologically diverse interpretations that reflected the racial and social class differences among them.
Mass Media Use and Teen Sexuality: Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health • Myra Gregory Knight, Elon College • This study examined the cultivation of sexual attitudes and behaviors among adolescents based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a representative sample of U.S. high school students. The study found that television viewing alone was not linked with any of the sexual attitudes tested but that sexually suggestive media use and overall media use were. Both television viewing and sexually suggestive media use were associated with an increased risk of sexual debut.
Offense and Harm as Predictors in a Third-Person Effect Variation Study • Ron Leone, Stonehill College • The purpose of this study is to examine how personal offensiveness to, and perceived harmfulness of, violent and sexual film content relates to the setting of minimum age limits for viewing movies containing examples of each. Using third-person effect as a theoretical framework, a 2×2 experiment was conducted. Subjects were asked to assess how harmful they believed what they viewed was, and, instead of responding to “effects on self” items, subjects indicated levels of personal offensiveness to the material. It is hypothesized that subjects will find sex more offensive than violence, and personal offensiveness will outweigh perceived harmfulness as affecting behavior (setting a minimum age limit for viewing). Findings are mixed: although sex appears to not be more offensive than violence, personal offensiveness does seem to outweigh perceived harmfulness when setting a minimum age limit for viewing sexual and/or violent movie content.
Bodies on Display: ESPN’s Coverage of the NFL Draft • Thomas P. Oates, University of Iowa • The 2000 NFL Draft was the occasion for an intense and remarkable media spectacle. ESPN’s production included television, magazine and internet coverage. This paper considers these texts from a critical/cultural perspective in order to interpret the complex ways in which assumptions and assertions about various forms of power are woven into the narratives produced by ESPN. The paper presents the argument that the draft coverage celebrated technological capitalism, masculinity and military values.
Latinas and African American Women in the Film “The 24-Hour Woman” • Diana I. Rios, University of Connecticut and Meta Carstarphen, University of North Texas • This essay examines women of color in “The 24-Hour Woman.” We examine how the film reconstructs images of Latinas and African American women and critique the extent to which the film breaks new ground. Our analytic approach includes “mestiza” (Sandoval, 1998; Anzaldua, 1987) and “womanist” (Walker, 1983) perspectives. The mestiza and womanist frameworks are appropriate for this film analysis since they lend insight into woman character thinking and development throughout the film narrative.
THE COMEDY CAMPAIGN: The Growing Influence of Humor in Presidential Elections, A Uses and Gratifications Approach • Laura K. Smith, University of Texas • In the year 2000, news and entertainment programs dedicated a great deal of comedic attention to the presidential race. Taking a Uses and Gratifications approach, the author examines the role of comedy among the young electorate. She concludes comedic programs, while popular, are among many sources young people use to learn about the candidates. The author also examines motivations driving young people to non-traditional sources and finds motivation can significantly affect the impact of jokes.
View the Right Way: Encoding/Decoding and the Critical Reception of Do the Right Thing • Mark W. Sullivan, Towson University • Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing became quite controversial upon its 1989 release. The unusually large amount of printed commentary generated by the film provides a rare opportunity to examine a variety of actual response to one text to help understand just how polysemic a text might be. Belying the theoretical potential of “selective perception” leading to an infinite number of individual decodings, the response quickly clustered into just two meanings.
Colonial/Censorship Burdens • See Kam Tan aand Annette Aw, Nanyang Technological University • This paper examines censorship with respect to colonialism. It specifically seeks to understand the operation of such prohibitive powers, their vigilance and failure, through a disursive analysis of Tsui Hark’s feature, Dangerous Encounter – 1st Kind (1980). Three interrelated questions guide the analysis: Is censorship all-powerful? How is censorship dealt with at the site of production? Can censorship engender an creative impetus of its own, beyond its initial debilitating capacity?
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