Even though it’s frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as “chewing gum for the mind” really disappeared. -/- Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful (...) analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes. (shrink)

Media reflect and affect social understandings, beliefs, and values on many topics, including the lives of autistic and disabled people. Media analysis has garnered attention in the field of disability studies, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and for promoting social justice for – autistic people, who remain underrepresented on scripted television. Additionally, existing portrayals often rely on stereotyped representations of disabled individuals as objects of pity, objects of inspiration, or (...) villains. Television may also serve as a primary source of public knowledge about disabled people and the concept of disability. It is therefore essential that such portrayals avoid stigma and stereotyping. We take a disability studies lens to critically analyze and compare representations of diverse people, who may sometimes be conflated in the popular imaginary, across television series about autistic characters, those with cerebral palsy, and a character with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. We employ an intersectional analytic framework to problematize representations of autistic and disabled people, using television, feminist, and critical disability studies literatures. We analyze how the formal structure of television storytelling can either enable or disable its characters, as well as how portrayals of disability that display a sensitivity to concerns raised by critical disability discourse do not necessarily display the same sensitivity when they intersect with marginalized experiences of gender, sexuality, race, and class. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between the Miss America pageant and reality makeover television shows. We argue that televised performances of gender have shifted focus from the intensely scripted, out-of-touch Miss America to reality makeover shows that normalize cosmetic surgery as a means to become the ‘ideal’ woman. While both spectacles offer their viewers performances of femininity, these performances need to be understood as emerging from the cultural and political conditions in which they are produced. This difference in presentation (...) of the subjects of beauty pageants and makeover programmes speaks respectively to the changing role of media in the normalization of performances of femininity, as well as to the affiliation of many young women with post-feminist politics in the United States. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him? Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a ‘real’ or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is (...) unusual among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the ‘scope’ of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved. We develop an analysis within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002), whereby CR is treated as a lexical item with syntactic and semantic content and reduplicative phonology. We then sketch an alternative analysis, based on current assumptions within the Minimalist Program, which involves movement into a focus-like position with both the head and the tail of the resulting chain spelled out. (shrink)

As cable television channel bloomed and grew in Taiwan, more and more teenagers watched a wide variety of foreign TV programmers through hundreds of channels. The impact of this media trend among Taiwanese youth stresses the importance of research to assess whether local college students learn from foreign television programming. In this research, which supports the theoretical discussion in this paper, the nature of these learnings was analyzed as well. In general, this study aims to explore the relevant (...) literature and examine whether college students engage in critical thinking when viewing foreign television programs. This research used a popular Korean series shown in Taiwan to examine various perspectives and views related to the issue. Based from the gathered findings, college students appear to pay more critical attention to the program script, character, rhythm, plot and cultural differences. In relation to aesthetic, ideology and cultural identity issues, less response on the educational impact of the program was obtained from the participants. This confirms the claim that Taiwanese youth view television as an entertainment medium rather than an educational one. For this reason, the role of media education, specifically the integration of visual literacy and critical thinking, is highly significant to generate less passive television viewers. (shrink)

American auteur Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams's genius for creating densely plotted scripts has won him broad commercial and critical success in TV shows such as Felicity, Emmy-nominated Alias, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Lost, and the critically acclaimed Fringe. In addition, his direction in films such as Cloverfield, Super 8, and the new Mission Impossible and Star Trek films has left fans eagerly awaiting his revival of the Star Wars franchise. As a writer, director, producer, and composer, Abrams seamlessly (...) combines geek appeal with blockbuster intuition, leaving a distinctive stamp on all of his work and establishing him as one of Tinsel Town's most influential visionaries. In The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams, editors Patricia L. Brace and Robert Arp assemble the first collection of essays to highlight the philosophical insights of the Hollywood giant's successful career. The filmmaker addresses a diverse range of themes in his onscreen pursuits, including such issues as personal identity in an increasingly impersonal digitized world, the morality of terrorism, bioethics, friendship, family obligation, and free will. Utilizing Abrams's scope of work as a touchstone, this comprehensive volume is a guide for fans as well as students of film, media, and culture. The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams is a significant contribution to popular culture scholarship, drawing attention to the mind behind some of the most provocative television and movie plots of our day. (shrink)

The article presents a methodological update on the lexical profile of informal spoken English with the emphasis on movies, television programs, and soap operas. The study analyzed Mark Davies’s mega-corpora with data containing approximately 625 million words and employed Paul Nation’s comprehensive and up-to-date British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlists. Data from the analyses showed that viewers would need a vocabulary knowledge at 3,000 and 5,000 words frequency levels to understand 95 and 98% of the words in (...) scripted dialogs, respectively. Soap operas were found to be less lexically demanding compared to TV programs and movies. Findings are expected to fill in the methodological gaps between vocabulary assessment and vocabulary profiling research. (shrink)

This article shows how journalists deploy membership categorization in managing conversational drama among ordinary individuals in live television discussion. The scripted agenda for the discussion is analyzed as an interactional project, being prosecuted by the hosting journalists. The case in focus is a Finnish discussion program broadcast six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001. Five guests are invited to the studio and introduced to the audience. The membership categories that are activated at the beginning (...) of each entrance are consequential to the way the interactional activities unfold in the rest of the discussion, leading from experiential entitlement to accountability and accusation. Introductory identifications are utilized in the question formulation to push moral accounts from the category members and to build an institutionally proper identity for the journalists. The collaboration in realizing the moral casting vividly illustrates the cultural power of the categorization device in action. (shrink)

The focus of this article is the conversational management of blaming and accountability. In particular, we explore how involved speakers routinely allocate and avoid blame in everyday talk. In considering such a problematic notion of social interaction, we analyse the BBC interview between Princess Diana and Martin Bashir that was aired on British national television on 20 November 1995. In the analysis, we consider how different discursive strategies are employed by speakers in ways that work up credible and authentic (...) accounts. More specifically, we argue that Diana attributes blame to external `others' within a negotiated context of routine description of past events. Categories such as `the media', `the royal household' and `Charles' are constructed and made relevant throughout the interview and the analytic interest is what is accomplished rhetorically for both Diana and Bashir. Of further interest is the overall script design of the interview and how devices such as script formulation, stake management, footing shifts and progressive narrative function in the negotiation of blame. We conclude that `doing blaming' is attended to and managed locally by participants in conversation and this `doing' can be accomplished in a number of ways. (shrink)

This essay will analyze a single script, the television commercial that advertises the Fiat 500L in the United States, released in 2013. This commercial has stimulated wide debate both in Italy and the United States. It was generally well received by the press, even if it did attract some criticism on the part of those who simply read it as the latest version of a series of stereotypes of Italian mores. Without neglecting the functional dynamic of advertising, this analysis (...) will focus in particular on the decisive role played by Italianness and the Italian language. (shrink)

This article offers a critical discourse analysis of the Israeli television series In Treatment. The series unfolds the therapy sessions of a 40-year-old single female attorney with her therapist. The main objective of the study was to identify the scripted tactics or narrative strategies that establish and maintain singlehood. The findings indicate that the therapeutic discourse plays a central role in the construction and interpretation of single women’s subjectivities, prompting a narrative that encourages the ‘discarding’ of singlehood as well (...) as therapeutic work slanted towards a more familial and maternally oriented subjectivity. This narrative unfolds through two dominant scripted tactics: the symbolic annihilation of singlehood and the construction of feminine identity hierarchies. Moreover, it is also prompted by the discursive alliance between the therapeutic discourse and the postfeminist discourse. Consequently, long-term singlehood is portrayed as an unnatural and pathological life script characterized by its lack and deficiency. Furthermore, as opposed to childless singlehood, single motherhood by choice emerges as a preferred and desirable life option. The category of single motherhood is endowed with new forms of legitimacy, reinforcing new-old patriarchal and postfeminist conceptions of women’s reproductive potential and what is considered to be women’s primary life purpose. (shrink)

De manière continue depuis les débuts de la télévision, on observe que les femmes sont minoritaires dans les séries et plus jeunes que les hommes. L’écart d’âge joue un rôle considérable dans les rapports de genre asymétriques et inégaux, notamment dans les couples hétérosexuels. Les comédiennes de plus de 50 ans sont très rares, les personnages qu’elles incarnent proposent des scripts sexuels nouveaux et des représentations originales de la féminité et de la masculinité. Les concepts de masculinité et de (...) féminité hégémoniques éclairent ces fictions télévisées, dans lesquelles l’aspect « excessif » des rapports de genre représentés est une dimension importante. (shrink)

To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and (...) context-sensitive knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action. The script approach presented here builds on recent accounts of social cognition but points out important differences and possible advantages it has over them: for example, the script approach focuses even more strongly on context and identity. (shrink)

As clinical-psychological scientists and practitioners increasingly work with diverse populations of traumatized people, it becomes increasingly important to attend to cultural models that influence the ways in which people understand and describe their responses to trauma. This paper focuses on potential uses of the concept of cultural script in this domain. Originally described by cognitive psychologists in the 1980s, scripts refer to specific behavioral and experiential sequences of elements such as thoughts, memories, attention patterns, bodily sensations, sleep abnormalities, emotions (...) and affective expressions, motivation, coping attempts and ritualized behaviors that are relevant to posttraumatic adjustment. We differentiate between experiences of traumatic stress that are scripted (e.g., cultural explanations are available) versus unscripted. Further characteristics such as script tracks, the effect of script interruptions, and contextual fit of scripts with other cultural models are also described. We consider examples of traumatic stress associated with war and organized, sexualized violence from ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ world regions. The concluding part of this review describes a number of possibilities for methodological approaches to assessment of cultural scripts. Capturing central elements of the script(s) of trauma would aid psychological researchers and clinicians in understanding the experiences of trauma in cultural context, which could ultimately lead to better clinical service opportunities worldwide. (shrink)

Modern scripts for dying in hospice or by euthanasia are inapplicable to the dwindling of long old age, often experienced as social ‘death before death’. The article critiques the rhetoric of ‘death before death’ used of Alzheimer’s patients, and draws attention to an alternative valuation of death of self in the Christian tradition.

To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and (...) context-sensitive knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action. The script approach presented here builds on recent accounts of social cognition but points out important differences and possible advantages it has over them: e.g., the script approach focuses even more strongly on context and identity. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction - the Small Screen and Morality - Morality on Television - Sociology and the Moral OrderTelevisuality: Style and the Small ScreenThe Phenomenology of Television - Society and the Small Screen - Mediating Morality- Television and the Imaginary - Conclusion.

We analyse the role of a theatrical script and its relation to the literary work and the theatrical performance. We put forward an Argument from Modality, which demonstrates structural and functional differences between literary works and theatrical scripts. Next, we answer some potential challenges to our argument. We demonstrate that the failure to realize the far-reaching consequences of a clear distinction between the literary work and the theatrical script is a source of confusion in the debate on the relata (...) of the relation of interpretation. In particular, we show that the relation of interpretation does not hold directly between the literary work and the theatrical performance. It is mediated by the script. The script interprets the literary work by filling in its places of indeterminacy and adjusting it for stage purposes. Moreover, the script, which is a set of instructions, is executed rather than interpreted in a theatrical performance. (shrink)

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face-to-face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this article we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to (...) give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The article examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say — at some future time — to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech, they appear to be delivered not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the third party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design, script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximizing the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three-part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarize, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences. (shrink)

The interventionist turn in science and technology studies increasingly involves researchers with practices of technology development and thus entails the need for appropriate methodologies. Based in software engineering, this article introduces the deconstructive technique of “mind scripting” as a method for analyzing processes of the co-materialization of gender and technology and as a tool to support cooperative, reflective work practices. Anchored in critical design approaches, “mind scripting” is a means for development teams to disclose discourses implicitly guiding work practices in (...) order to make negotiable the underlying value systems. After discussing its foundation in deconstructivist feminist theory, the author illustrates how the method is applied by drawing on selected empirical results. Generating insights into the reproduction of hegemonic social discourses in development processes, “mind scripting” enables the rethinking of established ways of doing. (shrink)

Western societies are confronted with a growing number of overweight and obese children. Past studies have pointed to excessive television viewing as one of the causes of this phenomenon. The aim of the current study was to examine the influence of parental mediation and modeling on TV use and obesity among pre-school children. A survey conducted among 608 parents of two-and-a-half to six year olds shows that obese children watch significantly more television, show more affinity towards television (...) and more often have a TV set in their bedroom than normal weight and overweight children. For girls, parental restrictions on television viewing are negatively associated with their BMI. For boys, no similar relationship can be found. This study suggests that taking into account possible differences in television viewing behavior between pre-school boys and girls and paying attention to a wide range of television viewing variables can be fruitful for further research. (shrink)

The book contains essays in honor of Victor Raskin. The contributions are all directly related to some of the major areas of work in which Raskin's scholarship has spanned for decades. The obvious connecting idea is the encyclopedic script-based foundation of lexical meaning, which informs his pioneering work in semantics in the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of the book collects articles directly concerned with script-based semantics, which examine both the theoretical and methodological premises of the idea and its (...) applications. Script-based semantics is the foundation of both Raskin's ground-breaking work in humor research (addressed by the articles in part 2) and in Ontological semantics (addressed in part 3), the most recent development of script-based semantics. The fourth part is dedicated to a less-known, but equally important, strand of Raskin's research, the applications of linguistics to other fields, including writing, lexicography, and professional applications (e,g., tourism). Overall, the book provides and up-to-date, in-depth discussion of an influential strand of the discussion on semantics and its most recent developments and influence on other seemingly unrelated fields, such as Cognitive Linguistics. (shrink)

The best-known controversy in film criticism of recent years has been over the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. Pauline Kael first raised the issue in a flamboyant piece in The New Yorker in 1971. Contrary to what Orson Welles would like us to believe, Kael charged, the script for the film was actually not his work but almost wholly the work of an all-but-forgotten figure, one of Hollywood's veteran screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz. . . . The first two drafts (...) of the Citizen Kane script were written by Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman in seclusion in the desert at Victorville, California, during March, April, and May 1940. Officially, Houseman was there as an editor. But part of his job was to ride herd on Mankiewicz, whose drinking habits were legendary and whose screenwriting credentials unfortunately did not include a reputation for seeing things through. Detailed accounts of the Victorville interlude have been given by Houseman in his autobiography and by Kael in "Raising Kane." There was constant interchange between Victorville and Hollywood, with Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress. Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO noted for her skills at breaking this kind of material down into script continuity form, who was readying it for the stenographic and various production departments.1 · 1. John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir , pp. 445-61. "Raising Kane," pp. 29-39. Amalia Kent had impressed Welles with her work on the problematic first-person script for his unproduced Heart of Darkness film, and she worked directly with him on various script supervision capacities on other of his RKO projects, including The Magnificent Ambersons and the unproduced Smiler with the Knife. She also continued as the script supervisor throughout the shooting of Citizen Kane and prepared the cutting reports for the film's editor, Robert Wise. Kael gives the impression that Rita Alexander, Herman Mankiewicz's private secretary, was performing all these specialized studio functions herself. Robert L. Carringer is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Ernst Lubitsch. His forthcoming edition of The Jazz Singer will begin the Warner Brothers script series. "Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, and Some Conventions of American Narrative," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1975 issue. (shrink)

We introduce the question whether there are specific kinds of writing modalities and practices that facilitated the development of modern science and mathematics. We point out the importance and uniqueness of symbolic writing, which allowed early modern thinkers to formulate a new kind of questions about mathematical structure, rather than to merely exploit this structure for solving particular problems. In a very similar vein, the novel focus on abstract structural relations allowed for creative conceptual extensions in natural philosophy during the (...) scientific revolution. These preliminary reflections are meant to set the stage for the following contributions in this volume. (shrink)

Different languages present a variety of ways of talking about emotional experience. Very commonly, feelings are described through the use of ¿body image constructions¿ in which they are associated with processes in, or states of, specific body parts. The emotions and the body parts that are thought to be their locus and the kind of activity associated with these body parts vary cross-culturally. This study focuses on the meaning of three ¿body image constructions¿ used to describe feelings similar to, but (...) also different from, English ¿jealousy¿, ¿envy¿, and ¿covetousness¿ in the West African language Ewe. It is demonstrated that a ¿moving body¿, a pychologised eye, and red eyes are scripted for these feelings. It is argued that the expressions are not figurative and that their semantics provide good clues to understanding the cultural construction of emotions both emotions and the body. (shrink)

L’émission Loft Story représente l’apogée de la néo-télévision. Elle a instauré un contrat de communication avec le public qui a mêlé la plupart des éléments caractéristiques de la télévision contemporaine. Participation du public au programme, symbolisée par la présence à l’écran de personnes anonymes issues de la société civile et par une interactivité poussée exprimée par les votes. Imbrication difficile à décrypter pour le téléspectateur entre réalité et fiction. Dimension ludique du programme et vécu en direct qui entretiennent le double (...) phénomène d’identification et de distanciation. Mise en scène de la dimension relationnelle de la vie privée. Écho de la culturelle adolescente, surtout dans son aspect interrelationnel. Utilisation du média comme acteur de la vie sociale, et notamment comme agent de promotion professionnelle.The show Loft Story represents the most extreme form of « neotelevision ». The communication contract it proposes to its audience brings together most of the elements that characterize modern television. 1) Public participation in the programme . 2) Unability for viewers to clearly sort out what pertains to reality and what belongs to fiction. 3) Playful dimension of a live broadcast that simultaneously triggers identificatory and distancing processes. 4) Focus on the private realm and on its relational dimension. 5) Particular attention paid to adolescent cultures, especially in their interrelational aspects. 6) Transformation of the medium into a social actor in its own right, specially as an agent of professional promotion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ability to regulate emotions is essential for psychological well-being. Therefore, it is particularly important to investigate the specific dynamics of emotion regulation. In a new appr...

Scripts and deception are alternative means, both imperfect, to the goal of simulating an environment that cannot be created readily. Under scripts, participants pretend they are in that environment, while deception convinces participants they are in that environment although they are not. With repeated trials, they ought to be unnecessary. But they are not, which poses challenges to behavioral sciences.

Cet article retrace une étape essentielle dans l'histoire de la télévision européenne de service public : la transformation des représentations de son public - d'un public avide de savoir, à la fois de droite et de gauche, elle est passée à un public populaire qui vient en nombre chercher le loisir immédiat, une nouvelle forme de la «populace» d'Ancien Régime. Ce changement a précédé la mesure d'audience qui l'incarne et le confirme aujourd'hui. Le passage d'un public à l'autre pose un (...) défi à la pensée de la culture populaire, emprisonnée l'élitisme traditionnel, le néo-élitisme «de gauche» qui s'avance masqué , un néo-populisme qui donne le primat au texte et un déni du public populaire traité comme une fiction . Contre une pensée globale du populaire qui traite ensemble « le » public populaire et « la » télévision, il faut dépasser les hiérarchies culturelles implicitement ou explicitement à l'oeuvre dans les paradigmes dominants.This article recalls a major episode in the history of European public service television: the transformation of the representations of the public - from a "popular" audience, eager to be educated which came both from the right and the left, which still had a revolutionary people in view, the public became a popular audience eagerly seeking disreputable leisure in throngs: a return of the Ancient Regime's rabble. This episode constitues a challenge for theories of popular culture, all too often imprisonned traditional elitism, neo-elitism which claims than a non manipulated popular audience would have a "better taste", a neo-elitism, a neo-populism which rehabilitates the popular audience by dissolving it into the texts , and finally a denial of popular audiences treated as a "fiction" . Against a global view of television and its audience, it is necessary to go beyond the cultural hierarchies implicitly or explicitly at work in the dominant paradigms. (shrink)

Mass media have been accused of cultivating anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies. Most studies on this topic, however, have not made a distinction between the types of television program (information vs. entertainment) or television station (public vs. commercial). Adopting a comparative approach, we use data from the six waves of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002–2012, n = 162,987) to assess the relationship between individual and aggregate level patterns of television consumption and anti-immigrant sentiments in European societies. (...) Individual television viewing time is positively associated with anti-immigrant sentiments, while frequent exposure to news and information programs is associated with lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiments. At the aggregate level we observe a positive effect of the total viewing time in society on anti-immigrant sentiments. In the conclusion we offer some suggestions on how this effect could be explained. (shrink)

: Computer-mediated environments provide an arena for learning to argue. We investigate to what extent student dyads’ online argumentation can be facilitated with collaboration scripts that prompt learners to prepare individually, create conflict, and encourage productive collaboration and argumentation. A process analysis of the chats of the dyads showed that the scripted treatment group used significantly more words and broadened and deepened their discussions significantly more than the unscripted group. Qualitative analysis indicates that scripted learners engaged in more critical (...) and objective argumentation than non-scripted learners. (shrink)

This article aims to reflect the efforts of the Ethnic Greek Minority that resides mainly in southern Albania, in the villages of Dropoli in Gjirokastra town, to have its own television programs in the Greek language. Further to the editions of the printed media and the radio broadcasts in the Greek language that were dedicated to the Greek Minority, there arouse the need for television programs in the Greek language which would be another dimension in reflecting the worries, (...) the problems, the traditions and the culture of the Greek Minority in Albania. Although the airtime of the programs in the Greek language, their frequency and the period in which they were broadcasted were short term, there remains undisputed their value in terms of the contribution to the social, political, economic and cultural life of the Greek Minority residing in Albania. The study of the Ethnic Greek Minority media in Albania is an unstudied field, so, in this article we aim to fill this gap somehow by providing a modest contribution, which may serve to many future researchers who will conduct studies of such topics. (shrink)

Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three‐fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non‐grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are even less knowledgeable about public affairs than most (...) people are. (shrink)

Cet article vise à éclairer le rôle de la télévision et d’Internet dans la campagne de 2010 qui a abouti à l’élection de Dilma Rousseff à la présidence du Brésil. Ce faisant, il s’agit de considérer, d’une part, l’analyse d’un expert en communication politique sur l’influence des réseaux sociaux et des médias traditionnels dans les élections remportées par la candidate du Parti des Travailleurs ; d’autre part, de discuter les positions de Dominique Wolton sur le journalisme, Internet, l’information, l’opinion et (...) la communication, en correspondance avec différents points de vue intellectuels à propos d’un événement politique majeur.This article aims at shedding light on the role of television and Internet during de 2010 campaign, up to the election of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. While taking into consideration a political communication expert’s analysis about the influence of social networks and traditional medias in the election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores candidate, it discusses the ideas of Dominique Wolton on journalism, Internet, information, opinion and communication, at the intersection with various intellectuals thoughts in regards to a major political event. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between both overall television viewing and romantic youth drama viewing, as well as of females’ concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations on the one hand, and body image dissatisfaction on the other. Participants were 411 adolescent girls who completed self-report measures on body dissatisfaction, television viewing, and concerns about appearance expectations. Our results indicated that there was both a direct and indirect relationship between romantic youth drama viewing and body satisfaction. Girls who spent more (...) time watching romantic youth drama displayed lower levels of body satisfaction. In addition, romantic youth drama viewing had a significant positive impact on concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations, which had an indirect effect on body satisfaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Script RoseJoseph S. CatalanoLearning to read words, musical notes or numbers is a process by which we attach sounds, pictures and meanings to marks. Looked at in this way, the English script “rose” is a sign of a sound, a picture or a meaning. But when we read fluently is the word “rose” a sign? I think not; and I shall try to make a case that, to (...) the properly disposed reader, the script “rose” (hereafter written rose) is a rose.ITo have the perspective I require on reading, a quasi-Davidsonian distinction between causes and reasons may be useful. Early training in matching marks with sounds and pictures, surface irritations of light on the eye, stimulation and fixing of our entire neurological complex are all part of the causal network of our ability to read. But none of these causes are the reasons for our ability to be absorbed in reading a text.Of course, a distinction between causes and reasons does not, of itself, explain how the written page can be a world in which we find things such as roses. In order to see how the script rose got to be a rose, it is useful to suspend the usual questions that we ask about written language. Thus, we must not concern ourselves about the ambiguity that might arise because the word rose can be taken to mean a flower, a hue or a person, nor about what happens when we translate from one language to another, nor about the distinction between a sign, whether natural or artificial, and what is signified, nor whether written language [End Page 85] corresponds to something other than itself, nor the question of the meaning of meaning.IIWe created better than we knew, when we invented writing. We intended to represent the spoken word; but we made roses, dreams and lives exist as marks on a page. If this seems mysterious, it is a mystery that is present in every artifact, and what I seek is a perspective on written language precisely as an artifact.Of course, scripts are artifacts, but what I am after is the workmanship. The workmanship is both obvious and hidden. It is there for us to see; it is what we read. But we do not see it as forged over a long period of time just to serve its function as marks that are readable.In general, certain aspects of written language are similar to ordinary artifacts, others are not so. The difference is more obvious than the similarity: Scripts differ from ordinary artifacts, because we first approach them as signs of sounds, pictures or meanings: A child does not learn about sitting by looking at a chair as a sign of a chair; for example, the child does not squat on the floor, when it sees a chair. More importantly, the craftsmanship that gave us written language, especially alphabetic writing, was directed toward forging “arbitrary” marks, and a chair is certainly not an arbitrary representation of something to sit upon. In Quiddities, in the section “A” for “Alphabet,” W. V. Quine neatly summarizes the remarkable feat of discovering meaningless marks to represent sounds.... the full power of writing awaited the convergence of writing with speech, and this reached its early stages five thousand years ago. Depictions of visible objects came to be pressed into phonetic duty on the rebus principle, as if in English we were to write melancholy by depicting a melon and a collie. This expedient was rendered more flexible and powerful, if less picturesque, by devoting the phonetic representations to brief sounds—single consonants or syllables. The sound was represented by a hieroglyph depicting something whose name merely began with that sound. The rebus principle thus gave way to an acrophonic one.It was a notable step of abstraction. Finding a melon and collie in melancholy is a matter of punning with familiar words; extracting a meaningless me-, on the other hand, and meaningless lan-, and so on, calls for appreciating fugitive sounds that are not words and name nothing.(pp. 1–2)[End Page 86]Quine is right to follow the traditional claim that writing... (shrink)