Patterns of Involvement in Television Fiction: A Comparative Analysis

This article analyses discussions of an episode of Dallas by focus groups of different ethnic origins in Israel and the United States. It identifies four rhetorical mechanisms by which viewers may \u27involve\u27 themselves in or \u27distance\u27 themselves from the story: referential v. critical framings; real v .play keyings; collective\u27 or universal v. personal referents; and normative v. value-free evaluations. Use of these mechanisms varied across the groups, and when the cultures were arrayed along a multidimensional involvement scale overseas viewers appeared to be more involved in the programme than Americans. Possible roles for involvement in the process of viewer susceptibility to programme messages are then discussed

Where have all the mothers gone?: soap opera's replaying of the Oedipal story

Despite recent arguments for the empowering, resistent or feminist content of the soap opera for women viewers, we argue that the dominant tendency is for the American daytime soap opera to represent a traditional conception of women's psychological development. We explore parallels between the soap opera and both fairy tales and therapy. Fairy tales and soaps use analogous permutations of characters and themes to socialize women to the oedipal paradigm. Therapy and soaps both articulate relations of (male) dominance and (female) dependence through the situation of contact and their thematic framing. We develop the connections between soap narratives and the commonly accepted, psychoanalytically informed view of women's psyche through the detailed analysis of a recurrent narrative element in soaps—that of the “bad”; and/or missing mother of young women heroines (in contrast with the mothering of sons) in The Young and The Restless. Our conclusions emphasize the repressive over the liberating aspects of the soap opera

European soap operas : the diversification of a genre

Analysis of the most popular locally-made soap operas in each of five European countries reveals that the soap opera is not simply an imported American genre. The study of British, Scandinavian and European soaps, based on an ‘ethnographic’ approach to the social networks in the world of the soaps, shows that these countries have developed three distinctive sub-types of the genre: the Community soap, the Dynastic soap, and the Dyadic soap. For each of these sub-types, we analyze the gender and class context for narrative events as portrayed within the soaps. While the kinship structure in both the Dynastic (or Patriarchal) and the Community soaps constitutes a hegemonic, taken for granted framework for the programs, the Community soaps tend to be produced in the spirit of public service broadcasting and so are more likely to problematise gender issues in their conscious attempt to transmit social messages. The Dyadic form, which appears to be taking over in the 1990s harps on the modern and post-modern despair of too much freedom and too little trust. It operates in a destabilized environment, in which families have more or less disappeared, romantic dyads cannot be sustained, and women’s quest for enduring ties takes the form of seeking primordial, biological, ‘genuine', blood ties

Notes on the struggle to define involvement in television viewing

Summary: This article offers a way of categorising viewers' involvement in Television by type of response, with particular reference to popular soap operas. It postulates four types of viewer engagement, each capable of further elaboration and of co-existing within the same person. The author also explores the ambivalence of viewer engagement and the relative effectiveness of its positive and negative aspects.Liebes Tamar. Notes on the struggle to define involvement in television viewing. In: Réseaux. The French journal of communication, volume 4, n°1, 1996. pp. 35-46

The structure of family and romantic ties in the soap opera: an ethnographic approach

The authors offer a new approach for the study of soap opera, aimed at discovering the social boundaries within which a particular culture negotiates its primordial relationships. The interaction between culture, power, genre, and gender is revealed by tracing the complex kinship structures of family and romance among soap opera characters and by observing how this structure is activated by the narrative. The advantages of this ethnographic method are examined within the framework of three parallel research traditions of audiences and texts: (a) quantitative analysis of social stratification (and the corresponding gratifications) and the wielding of power (content analysis), (b) analysis of meaning and process in the decoding by viewers (reception) and in narratives (literary analysis), and (c) ties and contexts in the ethnography of viewers and of characters

Live Television's Disaster Marathon of September 11 and its Subversive Potential

Television's coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attack's visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attack's effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which television's coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.Television, Media Events, Disasters, Disaster Marathon, Terrorism, September 11,