Full Description
Although the idea of class is again becoming politically and culturally charged, the relationship between media and class remains understudied. This diverse collection draws together prominent and emerging media scholars to offer readers a much-needed orientation within the wider categories of media, class, and politics in Britain, America, and beyond. Case studies address media representations and media participation in a variety of platforms, with attention to contemporary culture: from celetoids to selfies, Downton Abbey to Duck Dynasty, and royals to reality TV. These scholarly but accessible accounts draw on both theory and empirical research to demonstrate how different media navigate and negotiate, caricature and essentialize, or contain and regulate class.
Contents
Introduction: Studying Media and Class
June Deery and Andrea Press
CLASS REPRESENTATION AS ENTERTAINMENT
The Media's Failure to Represent the Working Class: Explanations from Media Production and Beyond
David Hesmondhalgh
Class and Gender through Seven Decades of American Television Sitcoms
Richard Butsch
TV Screening: The Entertainment Value of Poverty and Wealth
June Deery
Sex, Class, and Trash: Money, Status and Classed "Dreams" in Classical Hollywood Cinema
Andrea Press and Marjorie Rosen
DOCUMENTING CLASS
Performing Class and Taste through the Documentary Lens
John Corner
How the Other Half Lives: The Will to Document from Poverty to Precarity
Laurie Ouellette
MEDIA LEISURE/ LABOR
The Working Class, Ordinary Celebrity, and Illegitimate Cultural Work
Helen Wood, Jilly Boyce Kay and Mark Banks
Idols of Self-Production: Selfies, Career Success and Social Class
Anita Biressi
Rich TV, Poor TV: Work, leisure and the construction of 'deserved inequality' in contemporary Britain
Jo Littler and Milly Williamson
DIGITAL CULTURES
When Left Theory "leaves behind the dream of a Revolution": Class and the Software Economy
Robert Wilkie
Class in "The Class": Conservative, Competitive, and (Dis)connected
Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green
For Themselves and for Their Communities: Alternative Mediations of Digital Natives
Vicki Mayer and Aline Maia
Big Data is Too Small: Research Implications of Class Inequality for Online Data Collection
Jen Schradie
