Media and Class: TV, Film, and Digital Culture

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction: Studying Media and Class Popular Consciousness Scholarship on Class The Concept Categorization Class Relations Class in Media Studies Class Focus Class Representation: Variables and Expectations Media Influence Chapter Overview Notes Works Cited Part 1: Class Representation as Entertainment Chapter 2: The Media’s Failure to Represent the Working Class: Explanations from Media Production and Beyond Introduction: The Media’s Failure to Represent Working-Class People Explaining Representational Failure 1: Organisational and Cultural Factors Explaining Representational Failure 2: Systemic and Structural Influences on Production How Sociologies of Class Might Enhance MPA’s Understanding of How Bad Class Representation Happens What Can Be Done? Notes Works Cited Chapter 3: Class and Gender through Seven Decades of American Television Sitcoms Conclusion Notes Works Cited Chapter 4: TV Screening: The Entertainment Value of Poverty and Wealth Comedy Screen Culture Reality TV and the Working Class Red, White, and Blue Comdocs Nouveau Riche Docusoaps Melodrama Conclusion Notes Works Cited Chapter 5: Sex, Class, and Trash: Money, Status, and Classed “Dreams” in Classical Hollywood Cinema Film Noir and Its Vampy, Knowing, Sexualized Heroines Marilyn Monroe: Sex, Class, Trash, and the Otherwordly Qualities of an Innocent Screen Goddess Hitchcock Blondes: Mulvey Missed the Class Act Conclusion Note Works Cited Part II: Documenting Class Chapter 6: Performing Class and Taste through the Documentary Lens Class from Within and Without The “Documentary Eye” and Performative Ethnography The First Programme. Going Local 1: Sunderland Men Women “Roots” Presenting the Results The Second Programme. Going Local 2: Tunbridge Wells The New Middle Class The Old Middle Class Tribes, Journeys, and Values Notes Works Cited Chapter 7: How the Other Half Lives: The Will to Document from Poverty to Precarity Liberal Reform and the Poverty of Sympathy Precarity and the State of Insecurity Works Cited Part 3: Media Leisure/Labor Chapter 8: The Working Class, Ordinary Celebrity, and “Illegitimate” Cultural Work Introduction The Structural Changes That Enable Reality Celebrity Fools, Shirkers, and the Decline of the Working Class Reality Television: “The Work of Being Watched” Revaluing the Work of Ordinary Celebrity Conclusion: Ordinary Celebrity as Ordinary Work? Notes Works Cited Chapter 9: Idols of Self-production: Selfies, Career Success, and Social Class Selfies: The Calling Cards of Neoliberalism Selfies: Your Confidence Calling Card Career Selfies: Positivity, Play, and Passion Conclusion: Idols of Self-production Notes Works Cited Chapter 10: Rich TV, Poor TV: Work, Leisure, and the Construction of “Deserved Inequality” in Contemporary Britain Introduction The Return of “Scroungerphobia” Celebrity and Class in Reality TV Reinventing the Rich: Aristocrats “Learning to Labour” The Contemporary Construction of “Deserved Inequality” Notes Works Cited Part IV: Digital Cultures Chapter 11: When Left Theory “Leaves Behind the Dream of a Revolution”: Class and the Software Economy Erasing Class: The “Life” of Software Assemblages Software and the “Hidden Abode” of Production Works Cited Chapter 12: Class in “The Class”: Conservative, Competitive, and (Dis)connected Conceiving of Class Difference Mediated Imaginaries Educational Aspirations and the Digital Home Mediated Disconnections Conclusions Note Works Cited Chapter 13: For Themselves and for Their Communities: Alternative Mediations of Digital Natives What Is a Digital Native? Favela em Dança Noirlinians Concluding Observations Works Cited Chapter 14: Big Data is Too Small: Research Implications of Class Inequality for Online Data Collection Introduction Big Data and the Scientific Method Digital Production Inequality: What’s Missing? How Is Big Data Too Small? Network Analysis Automated Text Analysis Survey Data Online Ethnography Implications of Small Data Notes Works Cited Contributors Index