Joshua Meyrowitz

We Liked to Watch: Television as Progenitor of the Surveillance Society

The rise of mass television allowed hundreds of millions of people to closely watch other people and places on a regular basis, anonymously and from afar. Television watching altered the balance of what different types of people knew about each other and relative to each other, blurred the dividing line between public and private behaviors, and weakened the link between physical location and access to social experience. In these ways, television contributed to the reshuffling of previously taken-for-granted reciprocal social roles, including those related to age, gender, and authority. In cultivating its viewers into the normalcy of the acts of watching and of being watched, television experience also stimulated the widespread use of more recent interactive visual media, including the displays of self on social networking sites. Moreover, familiarity with television as a watching machine has fostered the otherwise surprising level of tolerance for increasingly pervasive government, corporate, and populace surveillance.

Visible and invisible candidates: A case study in “competing logics” of campaign coverage

The article presents a case study of the coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign of Democrat Larry Agran. Agrans background and experience made him less than a “major” candidate yet more than a “minor” candidate. Agrans anomalous status, along with his exclusion from most televised campaign debates and his inclusion in some, helped make visible some of the normally implicit journalistic decisions concerning campaign coverage. An analysis of the patterns of coverage and noncoverage of his campaign, interviews with local and national journalists, and discussions with average citizens suggests that there are at least three different ways to think about whether and how a presidential campaign should be covered: national journalistic logic, local journalistic logic, and public logic. These logics vary along a number of dimensions, including perception of news‐gathering resources, what a presidential campaign is all about, whose perception of candidates is most important, how to react to signs that a candi...

Post-Privacy America

In 1953, film director and producer Otto Preminger sought approval from the Production Code Administration (PCA) for the U.S. release of The Moon Is Blue. The film portrayed a young actress in television commercials who resisted the seduction attempts of two men and remained a virgin. Even with such a “moral” ending, however, the movie was denied the PCA’s seal of approval. The Moon Is Blue was deemed inappropriate for display in public movie theaters in the United States. Its sin? The film’s dialogue included the scandalous words “virgin,” “seduce,” “mistress,” and “pregnant.” Otto Preminger and United Artists released the movie anyway, becoming the first major director and studio to snub “The Code” that had controlled the content of motion pictures in the United States for twenty years.

As múltiplas alfabetizações midiáticas

Existem pelo menos tres tipos de alfabetizacoes midiaticas, cada uma delas ligada a uma diferente concepcao do que nos pretendemos dizer com o termo midia. A nocao de que os midia sao condutores que transmitem mensagens aponta para a necessidade da alfabetizacao no conteudo dos midia. A ideia de que os midia sao diferentes linguagens sugere a necessidade de alfabetizacao numa gramatica midiatica, isto e, entender o significado das variaveis de producao dentro de cada meio. A concepcao dos midia como ambientes sugere a necessidade de se perceber a influencia das caracteristicas relativamente fixas de cada meio (alfabetizacao midiatica), tanto nas comunicacoes individuais como nos processos sociais em geral. A alfabetizacao mediatica, em particular, oferece algumas ideias especiais no que se refere as origens, problemas, e possibilidades de um movimento pela alfabetizacao midiatica.

Instructional technology and the bifurcation of the university

Abstract Arguments over instructional technology in the university generally obscure more than they reveal. Hidden are vastly different assumptions about the definition of knowledge; hidden are different notions of the role of the university in an information-oriented society; and hidden is the fact that the difference between supplementary media and comprehensive, planned instruction is not a matter of degree of efficiency but of kind of learning. Looking beneath the controversy, it appears that the stalemate over the implementation of planned instruction has not arisen because instructional technologists and traditional professors are on opposite sides of a barricade, but because they are, in many cases, fighting different battles. Just as traditional teaching methods are inadequate in the face of mass demands for information, so is packaged mass instruction incompatible with the role of the traditional university. This analysis suggests that the issue of planned instruction cannot end in compromise nor remain static, but will result in the bifurcation of the university.

Book of the Month

NO SENSE OF PLACE; THE IMPACT OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA ON SOCIAL BEHAVIOR by Joshua Meyrowitz (New York.: Oxford University Press, 1985---

No sense of place : the impact of electronic media on social behavior

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