Television is our most pervasive representation of a shared "cultural space" within which the allocation of social value is negotiated. This study traces the efforts of one social group, Viewers for Quality Television, in their attempts to contest the distribution of cultural space on television. Data collection included a survey of 1107 members, a series of focus groups, participant observation, and textual analysis. Since the group is composed of television fans, the project also develops a theoretical framework within which to view fandom: what produces fandom, what its role in popular culture is, what practices distinguish fans from each other, and who is likely to be a fan. Using a sociology of culture perspective, fandom is reconceptualized as a spectrum of practices engaged in to develop a sense of personal control or influence over the object of fandom (such as a star or text). Fans may be seen as members of subordinated social groups who try to align themselves with meanings embodied in stars or other texts that best express their own sense of social identity. However, there are widely varying degrees of involvement in fan practices oriented toward this alignment, and this variance is associated with different outcomes. The most important finding is that for these fans, the more involved one is in fan practices, the more one comes to feel one is empowered with a sense of control over the television industry, regardless of whether or not one's efforts to influence the object of fandom have been successful. In addition, how much one enjoys television is positively and significantly associated with degree of involvement in fan practices as well as one's perception of influence. The process of asserting one's social values and "tastes" within the television programming structure is politicized and class-driven. If social values (therefore, tastes) are expressed via social identity, one would expect to see this demonstrated in cultural preferences. The membership of VQT (and of most fan groups) is overwhelmingly female, and inasmuch as this comprises a specific form of social identity for members, not surprisingly the group has a strong implicit taste agenda oriented toward protecting and enlarging representations of women on television.

This study considers the history and cultural specificity of women-owned sex stores in the United States, and the particular model of sexual retailing that has evolved alongside these businesses—what I refer to as the Good Vibrations model, a “tasteful,” educationally based, and quasi-therapeutic approach to selling sex toys designed to appeal “especially but not exclusively” to women. Drawing upon extensive participant observation research, in-depth interviews, and archival materials, I examine how discourses of sexual liberation, education, feminism, and consumer-capitalism coalesce within these retail environments, helping to establish what one proprietor describes as the “alternative sex vending movement.” I trace the emergence of public discourses about female masturbation and orgasm in the early seventies, and explore how these ideas were incorporated into sexual consciousness-raising groups, sex therapy programs and, eventually, women-run vibrator businesses. I analyze the underlying “sex positive” philosophies, representational strategies, and retail norms and practices that define the Good Vibrations model, and consider how ideas about gender, class, and sexual taste are mobilized by various storeowners and staff in an effort to cultivate “respectable” retail environments that stand in contrast to the stereotype of sex stores as inherently base and “sleazy.” I argue that for many women-owned sex toy stores in the US, including Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland, the marketplace doubles as a platform for sex activism and education, which has enabled these businesses to carve out a distinct and profitable niche in the sexual marketplace. By way of contrast, I discuss the impact that anti-vibrator statutes have on sexual speech and retailing in Texas, one of several states in the US where it is illegal to sell sex toys. Despite the growth and commercial success of women's sex businesses over the past thirty years, my research suggests that there is nothing straightforward about practicing sexual politics through the market; indeed, it is a project fraught with challenges and contradictions as storeowners and staff attempt to negotiate the shifting terrain of identity politics on the one hand, and the tensions between feminism, consumer-capitalism, profitability, and social change on the other.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

News provides us with information about our world so we can make decisions about the matters that affect our daily lives—both for our personal and the public good. Television news is a pervasive force in our society, and it is important to study because of the influence it exerts on human action. But news is produced by human beings, and those human beings must make selections and rejections regarding what makes it into a newscast and what doesn’t. In addition, decisions have to be made on how to frame, present, order, word, edit, shape what news items are included. Many forces influence these decisions throughout the complex television news process. Media sociology scholars urge researchers to examine these influences at five levels: the individual, newsroom, organization, extra-organization and societal or cultural levels. This gatekeeping study examined this complex news process at work and revealed the complex set of forces that influence news decisions by news producers at CNN, a global 24-hour news network. By exposing the processes by which the news is made, one can better understand the influences that shape the end product—the news.

Communication scholarship on black journalists has mostly focused on their lack of empowerment and the constraints that prevent them from engaging as full partners in the journalism industry, which has been shown to be ambivalent about the role of race in professional work. Racial discourse studies assert that blacks have little say in their representation by the media, where African Americans and other minority groups are treated as the negative “them” rather than the positive mainstream “us.” This dissertation examines journalism and racial discourse from a little-explored perspective in both fields: that of elite black columnists, who have the platform and autonomy to discuss news in general and race in particular from an African-American point of view. This dissertation examined the work of 11 African-American columnists who have won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary or write for one of the country’s highest-circulation publications. After textual analyses of more than 3,000 of their columns and in-depth, elite interviews with five columnists, this study found that elite black columnists wrote extensively and strategically about race at a level previously unrecognized in academia. The study found that the columnists heavily relied on biography and history in constructing a black narrative, which is not usually associated with journalistic work but helped them make sense of the black experience and to explain it to their mostly white readership. The research also identified six related frames the columnists used to provide context to news coverage about black America. Three frames explained the “problem people” image of black America: the devaluation of black life, misrepresentation, and destructive racial discourse. Three were correctives to that image: the raising of critical racial consciousness (while unmasking whiteness), black responsibility and black pride, and reverence for the Constitution and American ideals. The findings showed that elite black columnists were actively engaged in what could be called an antiracist racial project: to not only counter inequality and misrepresentation but also to battle the forces within discourse that feed the “us” vs. “them” ideology. / text

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e-Research in the Life Sciences examines the use of online tools in the life sciences and finds that their use has significant impact, namely the formation of a Scientific/Intellectual Movement (SIM) (Frickel & Gross, 2005) complemented by a Computerisation Movement (CM) (Kling & Iacono, 1994) which is mobilising global electronic resources to form visible colleges of life science researchers, who are enrolling others and successfully promoting their open science goals via mainstream scientific literature. Those within this movement are also using these online tools to change their work practices, producing scientific knowledge in a highly networked and distributed group which has less regard for traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries. This thesis, by combining ideas about SIMs and CMs, fills a gap in research that is typically confined to treating new tools as a part of scientific communication or in specialist areas like distributed collaboration but not in terms of broader changes in science. Case studies have been conducted for three types of online tools: the scientific social networking tool FriendFeed, open laboratory notebooks, and science blogs. Data have been collected from semi-structured interviews, and the online writings of research participants. The case studies of exemplary use by scientists of the web form a baseline for future studies in the area. Boundaries between formal and informal scholarly communication are now blurred. At the formal level, which peer-reviewed print journals continue, many academic publishers now also have online open access, frequently in advance of print publication. At the informal level, what used to be confined to water-cooler chat and the conference circuit is now also discussed on mailing lists, forums and blogs (Borgman, 2007). As these online tools generate new practices they have potential to affect future academic assessment and dissemination practices.

The contemporary media landscape invites us to experience a belonging to various distant places, mourn the victims of faraway disasters, expose ourselves to foreign cultures and engage in political issues in places far from our local context of living. In other words, we are invited to become citizens of the world – cosmopolitans. But are we? And if so, how is such cosmopolitanism expressed in a given society, under what social conditions, and in relation to what media practices? Contemporary social theory depicts a global or cosmopolitan mode of orienting in the world as paradigmatic of social life in global modernity. To date, little is known about the structural realities of such orientations. Against this backdrop, the aim of the present study is to understand the potentially “cosmopolitan” character of peoples’ outlooks and practices, and the societal conditions in which they can be identified. On the one hand, the aim of the study is to contribute to the largely theoretical accounts of the “cosmopolitan” character of social life in present times, andon the other, to understand the specific role of various media practices in the process generally described as “cosmopolitanization”. Results yielded by a national survey deployed in Sweden (n = 1 025) show that the distribution of various cosmopolitan dispositions abides by logics of social stratification. In tandem with previous research, cosmopolitanism – when studied “from below” – has a tendency to emerge in more privileged spheres of society. Being “connected” and simply living in a potentially global media landscape does not nullify this pattern. Contrary to significant parts of popular and scholarly conviction, the media is no uniform, all-encompassing environment operating as a force of cosmopolitanization across all social strata. The results of this study point towards a “mediatized cosmopolitanism” that is impossible to disentangle from social context and the power dynamics pertaining to that context. / Det samtida medielandskapet tillåter oss att känna tillhörigheter till en mängd olika platser, sörja offer för katastrofer i fjärran länder, exponera oss för främmande kulturella uttryck och engagera oss i politiska frågor rörande platser långt bortom vårt lokala sammanhang. Vi tycks med andra ord bli inbjuda att bli världsmedborgare – kosmopoliter. Men är vi det? Hur uttrycks i sådana fall kosmopolitismen i ett givet samhälle - under vilka förhållanden och i relation till vilka mediepraktiker? Samtida samhällsvetenskaplig teori framställer ett globalt-, eller kosmopolitiskt förhållningsssätt som paradigmatiskt för det sociala livet i den globala moderniteten. Dock finns inte tillräckligt underlag för att förstå den strukturella verkligheten kring sådana förhållningssätt. Mot den bakgrunden är syftet med föreliggande studie att förstå den potentiellt sett ”kosmopolitiska” karaktären på människors förhållningssätt och praktiker och de förhållanden i vilka sådana orienteringar kommer till uttryck. Således är syftet å ena sidan att bidra empiriskt till teoretiska beskrivningar av vår kosmopolitiska samtid. Å andra sidan söker studien också förstå den specifika rollen av olika mediepraktiker i relation till den process som beskrivits som ”kosmopolitaniseringen”. Resultat från en nationell enkätundersökning i Sverige (n = 1 025) visar på en social stratifiering av kosmopolitiska orienteringar. I linje med tidigare forskning påvisar föreliggande studie att kosmopolitism studerad “underifrån” har en tendens att framförallt komma till uttryck i mer priviligierade samhällssfärer. Att vara “sammanlänkad” och helt enkelt leva i ett potentiellt sett globalt medielandskap motverkar inte den tendensen. I motsats till både populära och akademiska utsagor utgör inte medierna en unison och allomfattande miljö som sätter igång en process av kosmopolitanisering i alla samhällets skikt. Studiens resultat pekar istället mot en ”medialiserad kosmopolitism” som är omöjlig att förstå utan att ta hänsyn till sitt sociala sammanhang och de maktförhållanden som råder i det sammanhanget.

(in English): This thesis studies political pundits in the US who utilise YouTube as their main channel of communication. In particular, it studies a possible impact which political pundits in the non-traditional media might have in polarising the public and this in comparison with political pundits in the traditional media. The goal of this thesis is to better understand what makes the YouTube based political pundits different from their traditional news counterparts and which underlying messages we can find in their news reporting. The work uses the theoretical background of the echo chamber theory to utilise the content analysis methods in three major steps. First, categories are being established for predetermined dimensions using an exploratory content analysis of the biggest three traditional news outlets in the US. Using the established dimensions and categories, a quantitative content analysis is conducted on seven chosen non-tradition news outlets based exclusively on YouTube. To further explore the way by means of which these outlets present their messages, a qualitative content analysis is done on selected stories. It has been found that non-traditional media outlets are in general more inclined to talk about policy than traditional news outlets. It also has been found that YouTube based...

ABSTRACT /ENG/ Sociology of Health Health and media in the social context Until the middle of the twentieth century, modern scientific medicine had an excellent reputation as a universally effective institution. In recent decades, however, this idea has been called into question, because the public has realised that the idealised image of medicine promised more than it could fulfil. The image of medicine over the past 50 years has changed significantly and today it is closely associated with other areas, including the environment, politics and the economy. The thesis is therefore devoted to current issues of health systems, health information and mass media as a mediator of health information. One reason why we will criticise modern medicine is that the Czech Republic can not cover all the costs associated with caring for patients; others will include lobbies in the health sector, and the general difficulty of comparing the country's quality of health care and research to other countries. For the public, the media, playing a major role in the process of the "secularisation" of medicine, has become the main source of information on health and health care. But the media also has another function: to direct our attention to health issues and...