Kevin Glynn - Böcker

During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the “tabloidization” of the nation’s media took hold. In Tabloid Culture Kevin Glynn draws on diverse theoretical sources and an unprecedented range of electronic and print media in order to analyze important aspects and key debates that have emerged around this phenomenon.Glynn begins by situating these media shifts within the context of Reaganism, which gave rise to distinctive ideological currents in society and led the socially and economically disenfranchised to access new forms of information via the exploding television industry. He then tackles specific daytime talk shows and tabloid newscasts such as Jerry Springer and A Current Affair, reality-TV programs such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted, and two different supermarket tabloids’ coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Tabloid Culture is the first book to treat these diverse yet related media forms and events in tandem. Rejecting the elitist dismissal of sensationalist media, Glynn instead traces the cultural currents and countercurrents running through their forms and products. Locating both reactionary and oppositional meanings in these texts, he demonstrates how these particular media genres draw on and contribute to important cultural struggles over the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, “normality,” “truth,” and “reality.” The study ends by discussing how the growing use of the Internet provides an entirely new realm in which such material can circulate, distort, inform, and flourish.This innovative and provocative study of contemporary mainstream media culture in the United States will be valuable to those interested in both print and television media, the cultural-political influence of the Reagan era, and American culture in general.

Although there are human geographers who have previously written on matters of media and communication, and those in media and communication studies who have previously written on geographical issues, this is the first book-length dialogue in which experienced theorists and researchers from these different fields address each other directly and engage in conversation across traditional academic boundaries. The result is a compelling discussion, with the authors setting out statements of their positions before responding to the arguments made by others.One significant aspect of this discussion is a spirited debate about the sort of interdisciplinary area that might emerge as a focus for future work. Does the already-established idea of communication geography offer the best way forward? If so, what would applied or critical forms of communication geography be concerned to do? Could communication geography benefit from the sorts of conjunctural analysis that have been developed in contemporary cultural studies? Might a further way forward be to imagine an interdisciplinary field of everyday-life studies, which would draw critically on non-representational theories of practice and movement?Readers of Communications/Media/Geographies are invited to join the debate, thinking through such questions for themselves, and the themes that are explored in this book (for example, of space, place, meaning, power, and ethics) will be of interest not only to academics in human geography and in media and communication studies, but also to a wider range of scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

Although there are human geographers who have previously written on matters of media and communication, and those in media and communication studies who have previously written on geographical issues, this is the first book-length dialogue in which experienced theorists and researchers from these different fields address each other directly and engage in conversation across traditional academic boundaries. The result is a compelling discussion, with the authors setting out statements of their positions before responding to the arguments made by others.One significant aspect of this discussion is a spirited debate about the sort of interdisciplinary area that might emerge as a focus for future work. Does the already-established idea of communication geography offer the best way forward? If so, what would applied or critical forms of communication geography be concerned to do? Could communication geography benefit from the sorts of conjunctural analysis that have been developed in contemporary cultural studies? Might a further way forward be to imagine an interdisciplinary field of everyday-life studies, which would draw critically on non-representational theories of practice and movement?Readers of Communications/Media/Geographies are invited to join the debate, thinking through such questions for themselves, and the themes that are explored in this book (for example, of space, place, meaning, power, and ethics) will be of interest not only to academics in human geography and in media and communication studies, but also to a wider range of scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

Breathing is a continuous battle between our need for oxygen and forces in nature that attack our lungs. Three hundred thousand Americans will die of respiratory diseases this year. Gasping for Air is the dramatic story of how infections, toxins, carcinogens, and air pollution strike against one of our basic body functions. The book also describes how we come into the struggle with diseases like asthma, cystic fibrosis, and sleep apnea, which make us vulnerable to assaults on breathing from without and within. We have powerful weapons to defend breathing. Medical science, public health, engineering, and business, all play important roles in the effort to support breathing. Yet, Gasping for Air also reminds readers how breathing support has been at the eye of the storm in many ethical dilemmas of modern healthcare. Here, Kevin Glynn, an experienced pulmonologist and lifelong asthma sufferer tells stories about the third most common cause of premature deaths in the developed world, describes lethal forces in Nature (infections, genetic predispositions) and from human activities (dusty occupations, tobacco smoking, chemical toxins, drug overdoses) that threaten to suffocate us, and offers sage advice for how to prevent and address those threats and the damage they cause.

Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders and how those stories reemerge as transmediated events.    The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third, and fourth (Indigenous people’s) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian postdemocracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate megaconglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world but also of many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.

Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders and how those stories reemerge as transmediated events.    The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third, and fourth (Indigenous people’s) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian postdemocracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate megaconglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world but also of many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.

This book explores the mediated struggles for autonomy, land rights and social justice in a context of growing authoritarianism and persistent coloniality in Nicaragua. To do so, it draws on in-depth fieldwork, analysis of media texts, and decolonial and other cultural theories. There are two main threats to the authoritarian rule of the Nicaraguan government led by Daniel Ortega: the first is the Managua-based NGO and civil society sector led largely by educated dissident Sandinistas, and the second is the escalating struggle for autonomy and land rights being fought by Nicaragua’s indigenous and Afro-descended inhabitants on the country’s Caribbean coast. In order to confront these threats and, it seems, secure indefinite political tenure, the government engages in a set of centralizing and anti-democratic political strategies characterized by secrecy, institutional power grabs, highly suspect electoral practices, clientelistic anti-poverty programmes, and the control through purchase or co-optation of much of the nation's media. The social movements that threaten Ortega’s rule are however operating through dispersed and topological modalities of power and the creative use of emergent spaces for the circulation of counter-discourses and counter-narratives within a rapidly transforming media environment. The primary response to these mediated tactics is a politics of silence and a refusal to acknowledge or respond to the political claims made by social movements. In the current conjuncture, the authors identify a struggle for hegemony whose strategies and tactics include the citizenship-stripping activities of the state and the citizenship-claiming activities of black, indigenous and dissident actors and activists. This struggle plays out in part through the mediated circulation and counter-circulation of discourses and the infrastructural dynamics of media convergence.