Joseph Turow

Determinants of Parental Guidance of Children's Television Viewing for a Special Subgroup: Mass Media Scholars.

This study examines the level and nature of parental guidance regarding revision exercised by mass media scholars. It also focuses On relationship of that guidance to beliefs the scholars here about the effects of television, to characteristics of the scholarship, and to basic demographic information.

Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age:

This study melds “contextualist” and “resource dependence” perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture.

Family Boundaries, Commercialism, and the Internet: A Framework for Research

This paper presents an information-boundaries perspective on the family and the Internet with the aim of helping to set the context for child development in the new media environment. Drawing from family studies, sociology, and communication, it lays out a model for viewing the family in relation to the Web. The paper draws research ideas out of the framework that center on four areas: family communication patterns; filters and monitors; information disclosure practices; and the Internet in the larger media context.

Internet privacy and institutional trust insights from a national survey

What does the US public believe about the credibility of institutional actors when it comes to protecting information privacy online? Drawing on perspectives of environmental risk, this article addresses the question through a nationally representative telephone survey of 1200 adults who go online at home. A key result is that a substantial percentage of internet users believes that major corporate or government institutions will both help them to protect information privacy and take that privacy away by disclosing information to other parties without permission. This finding and others raise questions about the dynamics of risk-perception and institutional trust on the web.

Cultural sutures : medicine and media

Medicine and the media exist in a unique symbiosis. Increasingly, health-care consumers turn to media sources—from news reports to Web sites to tv shows—for information about diseases, treatments, pharmacology, and important health issues. And just as the media scour the medical terrain for news stories and plot lines, those in the health-care industry use the media to publicize legitimate stories and advance particular agendas. The essays in Cultural Sutures delineate this deeply collaborative process by scrutinizing a broad range of interconnections between medicine and the media in print journalism, advertisements, fiction films, television shows, documentaries, and computer technology. In this volume, scholars of cinema studies, philosophy, English, sociology, health-care education, women’s studies, bioethics, and other fields demonstrate how the world of medicine engages and permeates the media that surround us. Whether examining the press coverage of the Jack Kevorkian–euthanasia controversy; pondering questions about accessibility, accountability, and professionalism raised by such films as Awakenings, The Doctor, and Lorenzo’s Oil; analyzing the depiction of doctors, patients, and medicine on E.R. and Chicago Hope; or considering the ways in which digital technologies have redefined the medical body, these essays are consistently illuminating and provocative. Contributors. Arthur Caplan, Tod Chambers, Stephanie Clark-Brown, Marc R. Cohen, Kelly A. Cole, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Joy V. Fuqua, Sander L. Gilman, Norbert Goldfield, Joel Howell, Therese Jones, Timothy Lenoir, Gregory Makoul, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Faith McLellan, Jonathan M. Metzl, Christie Milliken, Martin F. Norden, Kirsten Ostherr, Limor Peer, Audrey Shafer, Joseph Turow, Greg VandeKieft, Otto F. Wahl

The Organizational Underpinnings of Contemporary Media Conglomerates

Synergy and related strategies have become major building blocks of the global mass media system as it moves into the 21st century. This article examines the architecture of that system, with emphasis on the United States. It describes the way that executives are responding to key changes that have affected the U.S. media system and others during the past couple of decades. Their activities are raising important challenges for members of the public as well as for their competitors.

Making data mining a natural part of life: Physical retailing, customer surveillance and the 21st century social imaginary:

This article examines corporate struggles to reorganize retail environments around the data capturing and processing affordances of digital media. We argue that ongoing transformations in digital retailing reflect and extend the rise of social discrimination around what might be called ‘the quantified individual’. By quantified individual, we mean the hyperfocus on the qualities of the individual person rather than on even the communities or segments relating to people. Drawing on the writings of Charles Taylor, Antonio Gramsci, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, we use the ongoing corporate refashioning of the general meaning of ‘loyalty’ via the discourses and technologies of retailing as an important example of how a new social imaginary takes form and instantiates social discrimination as normal. For consumers, mobile apps and social-media profiles become venues for performing loyalty and accumulating rewards. For retailers and marketers, digitalized storefronts become like factories for generating data about where individuals go, what they buy and how firms define them. The process is transforming the architecture of physical and digital retailing, and the relationship between the two, in ways that make the selling environment increasingly dynamic and mutable for the individual prospect. We argue that shorn from their 20th century role in the democratization of pricing, stores will become centers of discrimination-related stress as dueling shopper and retailer technologies reach sometimes diverging conclusions about how to encourage loyalty, whom to reward for loyalty, and how.

Industry Conceptions of Audience in the Digital Space

Developments in the production of news, entertainment and advertising on the Web, mobile and other digital media have led academics as well as industry practitioners to advance new conceptions of audience power within the media context. We will critique these conceptions and suggest a research agenda that expects different, though converging constructions of audience among production, distribution, exhibition and financing areas of a digital media industry. We will argue that the most consequential audience construction takes place at the financing and distribution nodes, and we will suggest social implications as well as implications for academic thinking about audiences.

The Challenge of Inference in Interinstitutional Research on Mass Communication

Interinstitutional research in mass communication carries with it a chain of complex, interrelated problems regarding tactics, sampling, data reliability, and notions of causality. This article confronts a number of these difficulties and suggests ways to deal with them. In addition, it draws on notions of storytelling and cognitive aesthetics to broaden the criteria for judging research. The aim is to encourage scholarship that is ambitious in thought and act and at the same time self-reflective and open about the most daunting dilemmas that confront researchers in this important research area.

Standpoint: On reconceptualizing ‘mass communication’

Academic concern about the contemporary relevance of the term “mass communication” is misplaced. Properly refined, the concept can be a useful guide through a thicket of profound changes in the relationship between media industries and society.