Television—the Housewife's Choice? The 1949 Mass Observation Television Directive,Reluctance and Revision

This article considers the responses of women, many of whom describe themselves as housewives, in the 1949 Mass Observation Television Directive, in order to interrogate some of the broader assumptions around television's relationship with ‘the housewife’ as key to its success. Against the backcloth of social histories revising ideas about gender, modernity and suburbia in the post-war period, this article considers some of the ways in which initial reluctance towards television was recorded and negotiated. It presents three themes around tensions between home and leisure, the domestication of entertainment and ‘going out’, and the appreciation of particular genre, which suggest that the adoption of television as mass entertainment by women might not have been as smooth a process as we have come to understand.     

An Initial Exploration of Students’ Mindsets,Attitudes, and Beliefs About Public Speaking

This study investigated how students’ implicit theory that public speaking abilities can be developed and improved (i.e., growth mindset) was related to their apprehension, perceived competence, and beliefs regarding public speaking. Growth mindset was associated with lower apprehension and higher self-perceived competence. Growth mindset was also associated with the belief that public speaking involves reflection, revision, and adapting to one’s audience rather than merely transmitting information. Correlations were consistent with hypotheses.     

Parents’ Use of the V-Chip and Perceptions of Television Ratings: The Role of Family Characteristics and the Home Media Environment

Nearly 20 years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it is unclear how its mandates influence current parents’ mediation behavior. Parents of 2- to 17-year-old children (N = 1,431) were surveyed about their awareness and perceptions of the TV ratings system and use of the V-chip. Most (81%) parents knew about the ratings system and found it to be only “somewhat useful.” Only 16% of those parents had ever used the V-chip. Ratings awareness and perceptions and V-chip use varied with family characteristics. Policymakers should revisit how to provide better tools for mediating children’s viewing in this new information age.     

Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone

Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.     

Expanding Television’s Cultural Forum in the Digital Era: Prime Time Television,Twitter, and Black Lives Matter

Twitter updates and expands television’s cultural forum model by letting viewers speak to current events such as the Black Live Matter (BLM) movement. This article analyzes 1,985 tweets in response to three television episodes (Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife, and Scandal) that dramatized BLM, and identifies five common themes in how viewers address these representations: thematic appropriateness, timing, producers’ qualifications, institutional critiques, and the purpose of entertainment television. This study concludes that Twitter facilitates a meta-commentary, which expands traditional discussions of entertainment programming, and that these programs transcend “mere” entertainment to become critiques of larger social movements.     

Age-Based Ratings,Content Designations,and Television Content: Is There a Problem?

An analysis of 9 week-long samples of prime-time network programming broadcast between the fall of 1997 and the fall of 2003 found that more than 8 out of 10 programs were labeled with an age-based rating (TV-G, TV-PG, TV-14, or TV-MA), whereas fewer than 4 in 10 programs were also labeled with content-based ratings (V, S, L, or D). Although programs with age- and content-based ratings accurately reflected sexual and violent content, a sizable number of programs without content-based ratings also had sexual and violent content. Ratings provide parents with incomplete information on which to base viewing decisions.     

The Changing Cataloging Culture: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Cataloger Values?

ABSTRACT

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Standing Committee on Training was charged with the development of a training model to support the Program, promote the values of timely access and cost-effectiveness in cataloging, and to expand the pool of catalogers who cataloged to mutually accepted standards. This article describes the training philosophy developed by the Standing Committee on Training and adopted by the Program. The training model assumes that it is important to maintain an adequate supply of original cataloging; to accept the concept of a national cataloging standard; to increase acceptance of cataloging copy; to avoid duplicative cataloging; and to increase the timeliness of contribution to national cataloging databases.     

All About Whom? Stock Photos,Interactive Narratives and How News About Governmental Surveillance Is Visualized

A two-stage analysis examined visuals in news related to governmental surveillance, finding that just as surveillance has shifted from visual evidence to dataveillance, journalism is shifting its notion of visual evidence from photojournalism to journalistic data representations. First, a card sort analysis of news visuals was conducted on two news sites before and after Edward Snowden's document leak in June 2013. The news images remained relatively consistent, relying heavily on accessible official and stock photography sources. Second, a review of The Guardian's contemporaneous “NSA Files: Decoded” multimedia package found personalized, data-rich visual storytelling techniques. Between the two approaches is a vast difference in how surveillance is represented and made accessible, with implications for the visual coverage of other challenging news topics.     

Television and Family Values: Was Dan Quayle Right?

In this article, we explore the extent to which heavy television viewers' beliefs about the real world are consistent with the most repetitive and overarching patterns that television presents, especially in its dramatic entertainment programs. We test the hypothesis (put forth by many besides Dan Quayle) that television encourages viewers to embrace alternatives to the traditional 2-parent family. For purposes of conceptual clarity, we chose to focus on the question of illegitimacy and single parenthood, which is most directly related to the Murphy Brown controversy and is frequently touched on in many strands of political discourse. We reviewed previous research on television portrayal of the family and then used the 1988 and 1994 General Social Surveys (Davis & Smith, 1996) to assess relations between television viewing and judgments about illegitimacy and single parenthood. The data do not contradict Quayle's contention that television viewing is contributing to fraying of traditional family values.     

Who Do We Think We (and They) Are? The Audience and the Researcher as Participants in Sociomaterial Practice

The article problematizes the ontological and epistemological separation of the audience researcher from the very audience the researcher wishes to investigate. After all, every researcher co-constitutes the research outcome, and every researcher can potentially be articulated also as audience participant. The text consequently suggests conceptualizing the researcher as well as the researched as participants in and contributors to sociomaterial practice by building on insights from Critical Psychology. Thinking audience research in the light of such an understanding challenges widely accepted divisions between those who do research and those who are being researched, as well as between theoretical and empirical work, between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Finally it is argued that the researcher's perspective on the sociomaterial relations of concern is necessarily situated and limited. Hence, engaging in audience research as social research calls for investigating other practice participants' perspectives on these relations so as to collaborate on tackling problems of shared concern.     

Depository libraries,the Internet,and the 21st century?

The convergence of Internet technology and federal information policy are encouraging federal information producers and users to adopt a new direct model of information dissemination of federal information from producing agency to end user. On the surface, this trend would appear to remove the traditional middlemen—the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and depository libraries—from the dissemination model. To assess the impact of the Internet model on the future viability of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), the traditional GPO/depository library model of information dissemination is examined in four areas, keeping in mind the underlying intent of the FDLP to assure access to federal information in all congressional districts.     

Communicating About Chronic Caregiving in the Workplace: Employees’ Disclosure Preferences,Intentions, and Behaviors

A growing number of Americans are living with chronic health conditions that require informal, ongoing care from family members who are also in the paid labor force. In this exploratory study, communication privacy management is used to make sense of chronic caregiving (N = 48–64) and noncaregiving (N = 174–178) employees’ disclosure preferences, intentions, and behaviors in the workplace. We find that workers in general anticipate that they would disclose to many individuals at work about their caregiving, but employees actually disclose much less information to far fewer people at work when they occupy the chronic caregiver role. For chronic caregivers, positive perceptions about coworker supportiveness predict increased disclosure behaviors. Finally, future research directions as employers, workers, and policy makers prepare for the complex challenges associated with negotiating paid work and unpaid chronic caregiving are provided.     

Constructing Television Communities: The FCC,Signals, and Cities, 1948–1957

This study analyzes the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) efforts to define the television “community” as it formulated a national television system. The first opportunity came with the Sixth Report and Order, when the FCC made no provision for tailoring signal contours to existing communities. The second came when the FCC established program guidelines for new TV licensees and mandated a broad, amorphous community to be served by local programming. Such communities often bore little relation to local political, cultural, or social units. These spatial dimensions, which efficiently served network advertisers, still exist in many U.S. television communities.     

Do We Still Need Reference Services in the Age of Google and Wikipedia?

With the continuing development of web resources and Internet search utilities, the role of reference services is changing in the modern library. Traditional ready reference is in decline, but the need for broad-based research support will continue for the foreseeable future. As librarians adapt to the evolving research environment, libraries are experimenting with alternative models of reference services. Far-reaching calls to adopt one model or abandon another, such as the traditional reference desk, are off target given that each library must adapt to its own local situation and determine how best to serve its constituents.     

Collision or Coexistence? Copyright Law in the Digital Environment

SUMMARY

Digital technology and global economic trends present fundamental challenges to copyright law in the twenty-first century. On a practical level, librarians need to understand the particulars of current laws in order to make responsible decisions and to utilize to the fullest extent the possibilities that copyright law affords them in their missions. This article will identify the major copyright issues associated with library digital activities, and will discuss copyright protection in the digital environment of material originating in the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian nations. It covers use of Slavic and East European material in the U.S. in various contexts, including Internet activity, preservation and replacement, interlibrary loan, electronic reserves, classroom and educational use, text encoding, digitization of print and microform materials, and creation of digital content and databases.     

The Stubborn Pervasiveness of Television News in the Digital Age and the Field’s Attention to the Medium, 2010–2014

A secondary analysis of 2010–2014 World Values Survey (WVS) data (N = 81,229) is performed across 56 countries to assess frequency of exposure to television news versus the Internet and mobile phone as information sources. A large majority of the comparisons (105/112; 93.75%) reveal television to be used more frequently than Internet or mobile phones (p < 1.0E-09). A content analysis of works published in 9 communication journals from 2010 to 2014 indicates a precipitous decline in the attention political communication scholars are giving to television. Meanwhile, there is substantial growth in the focus on new media.     

“Can We Get There from Here?” Negotiating the Washouts,Cave-Ins,Dead Ends,and Other Hazards on the Road to Research on Africa

SUMMARY

This introduction to Africana reference describes the populations of researchers, the kinds of questions they ask, and how librarians–both specialist and generalist–may respond. It explores issues in “known-item” searches, including name authority and access to material in collected works and series. Choices made by authors, publishers, indexers, librarians, and researchers themselves have an impact on topic searches. Terminology for African languages, ethnic groups, place names, and topics cause problems for novice researchers, but library policy decisions can also impede access. Errors of all kinds–minor or major–can block access to information. The speed of electronic desktop publishing seems to have encouraged reduced care with proofreading, indexing, and verification of quotations and citations. The need for accurate information about Africa is great, but the market for publications and electronic resources focused on Africa is relatively small. This low market share can result in less coverage of Africa in indexes and reference tools. Despite the difficulties encountered in researching Africa, researchers and the librarians who assist them benefit from the tools, services, and initiatives of specialist Africana librarians and from a number of commercially produced resources.     

Should Men Work Outside and Women Stay Home? Revisiting the Cultivation of Gender-Role Attitudes in Japan

Despite recent societal changes, the stereotyped images of men as providers and women as homemakers are prevalent on Japanese television. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between television viewing and attitudes toward the traditional gender-role notion that men work outside and women take care of the family and home. Data from the Japanese General Social Surveys from 2000 to 2008 indicate that television viewing is positively related to traditional gender-role attitudes. Data also reveal mainstreaming patterns by sex, age, education, and political orientation. Further, the observed cultivation and mainstreaming patterns were not contingent upon time. Implications are discussed in terms of the role of television in the realization of a gender-equal society in Japan.