"Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien An
...
g asks why we understand so little about its nature and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is mainly produced - the television institutions. Ang draws on Foucault's theory of power/knowledge to scrutinize television's desperate search for the audience, and to identify differences and similarities in the approaches of American commercial television and European public service television to their audiences. She looks carefully at recent developments in the field of ratings research, in particular the controversial introduction of the `people meter' as an instrument for measuring the television audience. By defining the limits and limitations of these institutional procedures of knowledge production, Ien Ang opens new avenues for understanding television audiences. Her ethnographic perspective on the television audience gives new insights into our television culture, with the audience seen not as an object to be controlled, but as an active social subject, engaging with television in a variety of cultural and creative ways." (Publisher description)
more
"This book records and interprets, in a narrative form, how groups of villagers and fisherfolk in Manila (Philippines), in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu (India) and in the states of Tlaxacala, Oaxaca and Michoacan and in a suburb of Mexico City (all in Mexico) tried to bring about social change through
...
what one may call "people's communication". "People's communication" is a mode of communication which depends for its efficacy on people's energies rather than on technology." (Introduction)
more
"The papers from the seventh conference of the International and Comparative Librarianship Group of the UK Library Association, held in Birmingham in September 1989, which examined the book crisis, shortage of reading materials, and the funding of library services in the countries of the South, with
...
many parts of the less developed world turning into virtually bookless societies." (Hans M. Zell, Publishing, Books & Reading in Sub-Saharan Africa, 3d ed. 2008, nr. 1398)
more