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

Staging Peace: Televised Ceremonies of Reconciliation

The visit of Egypt\u27s President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem was the model for Dayan and Katz\u27s conceptualization of the genre of media events, as live programs which have the power to transform history. Fifteen years later, a series of televised reconciliation ceremonies, which marked the stages of the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors (the Palestinians and the Jordanians), are used to re-examine the model. We demonstrate (1) how the effectiveness of these ceremonies depends on the type of contract among the three participants-leaders, broadcasters and public-each of whom displays different kinds of reservations, and (2) how the aura of the ceremonies draws on the prior status of the participants (Hussein), but also confers status (Arafat)

Once Upon a Time, in Dallas

American television programmes manage to cross cultural and linguistic frontiers with great ease. This phenomenon is so taken for granted that hardly any systematic research has been done to explain the reasons why these programmes are successful or, even more fundamentally, whether and how such quintessentially American products are understood. The often heard assertion that this phenomenon is part of a process of cultural imperialism presumes, first, that there is an American message in the content or the form; second, that this message is somehow perceived by viewers; and, third, that it is perceived in the same way by viewers in different cultures

The mediated innovation model: a framework for researching media influence in language change

Linguistic innovations that arise contemporaneously in highly distant locations, such as quotative be like, have been termed ‘global linguistic variants’. This is not necessarily to suggest fully global usage, but to invoke more general themes of globalisation vis-à-vis space and time. This research area has grown steadily in the last twenty years, and by asserting a role for mass media, researchers have departed intrepidly from sociolinguistic convention. Yet they have largely relied on quite conventional sociolinguistic methodologies, only inferring media influence post hoc. This methodological conservatism has been overcome recently, but uncertainty remains about the overall shape of the new epistemological landscape. In this paper, I review existing research on global variants, and propose an epistemological model for researching media influence in language change: the mediated innovation model. I also analyse the way arguments are constructed in existing research, including the use of rhetorical devices to plug empirical gaps – a worthy sociolinguistic topic in its own right

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