Robert Kubey

The Use and Experience of the New Video Media Among Children and Young Adolescents

The media habits and experiences of 483 subjects whose ages ranged from 9 to 15 years were studied via the Experience Sampling Method. Respondents carried electronic paging devices and reported on their activities and subjective experiences when signaled. General descriptive findings on the use and experience of three forms of new video entertainment, music videos, video games, and videocassettes, are reported. For boys, these new video media were associated with higher reports of arousal and more positive affective states than was the case for the activities of television viewing, reading, and listening to popular music. Relative to boys, girls reported lower affect and arousal, especially during video games and music videos.

Television as Escape: Subjective Experience Before an Evening of Heavy Viewing

Television viewers’ subjective experiences before a heavy and light night of television viewing were studied via the Experience Sampling Method. Respondents were supplied with radio controlled paging devices and signalled to report their mood and cognitive states at random times over the course of a week. Subjects reported significantly lower moods before a heavy night of television viewing than before a light night. It was concluded that dysphoric states are one predictor of heavier television use.

Emotional response as a cause of interpersonal news diffusion: The case of the space shuttle tragedy

Studies of diffusion after major unanticipated news events have rarely examined what happens emotionally to people after they receive the news and how diffusion patterns interact with emotional reaction. Findings from this exploratory study of 105 college‐age respondents indicate that the need to cope with unsettling news helps drive both media use and interpersonal communication and that the rapid diffusion of such news is driven, in part, by the need to cope.

Media Literacy and the Teaching of Civics and Social Studies at the Dawn of the 21st Century

This article discusses the critical importance of media education to the teaching of civics and social studies and examines approaches to civics via media literacy. Useful Web site resources are also given. This article argues that in a representative democracy, people must be educated in all forms of contemporary mediated expression and well beyond the print media. The state of media education in the United States, relative to other countries, and the growing presence of core curricular frameworks in the 50 states that call on teachers to help their students become more media literate are also discussed.

Demographic diversity on cable: Have the new cable channels made a difference in the representation of gender, race, and age?

This research examines the issue of diversity and cable television from a content analysis of 1,035 randomly chosen moments from four channel sources: network, cable, independent and public television. The research focuses on whether the growth in channels has changed the representative diversity of those who appear on TV in terms of race, gender and age. The study demonstrates that there has been relatively little movement towards more accurate proportional representations of historically underrepresented demographic groups across the 32 channel offerings of one typical cable system.

Audience Activity and Passivity: An Historical Taxonomy

The primary theoretical research perspectives that have informed the field of mass communication over the past 70 years are examined with regard to what each perspective has explicitly stated or implied about whether audiences and audience members are active or passive. We see these audience conceptualizations as central to longstanding debates on the power of the media. The article describes each perspective, offers an historical, intellectual genealogy, and attempts to categorize each, in terms of its views on audience activity and passivity. The authors suggest that the interaction of opposing philosophical and methodological traditions can give rise to integration and synthesis that will be productive in future theorizing and research on audiences and the many issues raised by the debate over activity and passivity.

Esthetic preference for rectangles of vertical and horizontal orientation

Esthetic preference for vertical and horizontal rectangles was tested. The study was stimulated by renewed interest in television screen aspect ratios. Previous work by Schiffman (1966, 1969, 1978) on rectangle orientation had resulted in contradictory findings. In the present study, pairs of slides of identical solid-colored rectangles that varied only in horizontal or vertical orientation were embedded in a larger protocol of similar slide pairs and presented to 183 male and female undergraduate volunteers. Other slide stimuli were also presented and tested for preference and self-reports of relaxation upon viewing. The findings demonstrate no evidence of any predisposition toward a preference for one orientation over the other.