As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV's Medical Dramas

Explores how fictional television can shape public images about the state of our healthcare system and policy options for improving the delivery of care

Digital inequalities in the aisles: the quantified individual

Joseph Turow, Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores the increasingly important role of data collection and the quantification of the individual in one of our favourite activities – shopping. This post follows a special workshop convened by the Media Policy Project on ‘Automation, Prediction and Digital Inequalities’

On the Privacy Practices of Just Plain Sites

In addition to visiting high profile sites such as Facebook and Google, web users often visit more modest sites, such as those operated by bloggers, or by local organizations such as schools. Such sites, which we call "Just Plain Sites" (JPSs) are likely to inadvertently represent greater privacy risks than high profile sites by virtue of being unable to afford privacy expertise. To assess the prevalence of the privacy risks to which JPSs may inadvertently be exposing their visitors, we analyzed a number of easily observed privacy practices of such sites. We found that many JPSs collect a great deal of information from their visitors, share a great deal of information about their visitors with third parties, permit a great deal of tracking of their visitors, and use deprecated or unsafe security practices. Our goal in this work is not to scold JPS operators, but to raise awareness of these facts among both JPS operators and visitors, possibly encouraging the operators of such sites to take greater care in their implementations, and visitors to take greater care in how, when, and what they share.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 5 authors, and a partridge in a pear tre

Segmenting, Signalling and Tailoring: Probing the Dark Side of Target Marketing

Book description: Intense commercialism has been a perennial hallmark of the mass media ever since its inception and throughout the twentieth century the techniques and strategies of the dominant players in the world of media and advertising have become increasingly sophisticated, with the development of multinational media corporations and electronic media opportunities. Developments have been so rapid that scholars are only now beginning to come to terms with the full impact of media commercialization as a global phenomenon cutting across traditional cultural, economic, and social boundaries. Critical Studies in Media Commercialism brings together an impressive collection of essays that explore the growing complexity, range, and reach of media commercialism in today\u27s world. From the corporate conglomeration of today\u27s media giants to the effects of advertising on politics, society, and the individual, this collection provides a comprehensive and insightful critique of both the impact and the limits of media commercialism in the modern world

Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case

This chapter discusses the issue of physicians\u27 authority as seen in the film Dr. Kildare\u27s Strange Case (1940). The film centers on intern Jimmy Kildare (Lew Ayres), who learns the medical ropes in Blair Memorial Hospital, guided by Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore). The “strange case” of this film\u27s title begins when Gillespie assigns Kildare to work with Dr. Gregory Lane, a surgeon whose professional self-confidence has been crushed by a string of failed surgeries and resulting patient deaths. The chapter focuses on a scene where Lane confronts a patient with a skull fracture who refuses surgery; he ignores the patient\u27s wishes and goes on to perform the operation. The scene opens a space to discuss what a doctor\u27s authority is and how it has changed over the decades. Comparing past and present can generate a useful discussion about the contemporary nature of a doctor\u27s power in relation to his or her patients and the ethical boundaries of that power

Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS

This article maps the terrain of contemporary UK medical television, paying particular attention to Call the Midwife as its centrepiece, and situating it in contextual relation to the current crisis in the NHS. It provides a historical overview of UK and US medical television, illustrating how medical television today has been shaped by noteworthy antecedents. It argues that crisis rhetoric surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 has been accompanied by a renaissance in medical television. And that issues, strands and clusters have emerged in forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity, especially around the value of affective labour, the cultural politics of nostalgia and the neoliberalisation of healthcare

Watching nightlife: affective labor, social media and surveillance

This article examines the affective labor of nightlife photographers within the surveillance economy of social media. I examine nightlife photographers as “below the line” cultural laborers who employ their identities and communicative capacities to create and circulate images of nightlife online. These images stimulate interaction that can be watched, tracked, and responded to by the databases of social media. The study draws on interviews with nightlife photographers to examine how they account for the creative and promotional aspects of their labor. I argue that the analytical capacities of social media databases, and the modes of promotion they facilitate, depend in the first instance on the affective labor of cultural intermediaries like nightlife photographers