com 248 4.30.13 presentation

For Thursday:Review Exam Study Guide

Come to class ready to talk about Exam #3

I will return Exam #2

If you feel you do not need an in-class review, you do not have to come to class.

If, however, you do feel like you need review, come to class with specific questions

“Quality” Television

“From the Frankfurt School theorists’ concerns about the linkage between commercialized mass culture and fascism to the more recent arguments of such thinkers as Neil Postman, commercial culture, mass media, and the public’s investment in them have been seen as detrimental to children’s development, to critical inquiry, to artistic expression, and to the very health of democracy” (15).

“Quality” Television

“This infantalization and feminization is applied not only to the actual children and women to whom it most obviously refers, but also to the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed and under-employed, all those that do not fit the model of sophisticated taste and robust productivity expected of contemporary western cultural and social privilege” (16).

Mass culture (“low” culture) and audience

“Quality” Television

Taste

Television NOT better over time

Focus of popular, industrial, scholarly elite

Legitimation as exercise/preservation of privilege

Pierre Bourdieu

“Taste” is a marker of class

“Taste” reproduces identity through common points of reference

“Taste” erects and maintains boundaries

“Quality” Television

Elites

The upper class

Utilize “taste” to affirm superiority over lower classes (the “mass” in “mass culture”)

These categories are also gendered

“Quality” and hierarchy