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Chapter 6’s discussion of the outcomes of information-based governance strategies begins with a comparison of three initiatives that evaluate electronics products – ENERGY STAR, EPEAT, and TCO. It introduces different conceptions of effectiveness, and emphasizes that different actors may have different definitions and perceptions of effectiveness. The chapter discusses a range of hypotheses and evidence related to the effects of information on consumers, businesses, government agencies, advocacy organizations, and researchers. While some evidence shows that a few existing programs have indeed created tangible social and environmental benefits, the database of 245 cases reveals that the vast majority of information-based governance strategies have failed to provide such information about their effectiveness to the public. The chapter ends with a discussion of promising and problematic practices for tracking the environmental outcomes and benefits of information-based governance strategies.

Chapter 4 begins part two of the book, which analyzes the words of Black women who are behind and speaking back to their screens, and postulates about what happens when postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity are not available as strategies for success. Chapter 4 focuses on how the young women constructed their community through identifying against strategic ambiguity. This chapter begins by defining the contours of this women-of-color, feminist audience study. Joseph introduces the members of the study to the readers, and takes them through some of their critiques including how they identify against televisual images, how they refute tokenism, and how they enact racialized resistance by “hate-watching.”

Chapter 5 is the second of the two audience reception chapters in the books, which continues documenting a group of young women flow of commentary before, during, and after watching a full season of their favorite television program, America’s Next Top Model. These young women claimed agency in the face of what they interpreted to be racist and sexist media representations, and they subsequently produced counter-narratives to strategic ambiguity. This chapter looks at how the young women flouted the corporate notion of the management of difference in their viewing community by flouting respectability politics, calling out colorism, rejecting code-switching, and, overall, rejecting postrace.

In this chapter, Lynn Spiegel and Max Dawson show how American television remained the central medium not just for entertainment, but for discussion of gender roles, race relations, family life and other major moral and social issues of the day. They examine the new emphasis on taste and lifestyle in network programming, as well as the continuing under-representation of Latino and other ethnic groups on prime-time shows. They also examine the rise of reality television, the development of a new scheduling policy based on the ‘social arrhythmia’ of the 24-hour information economy, and the rising importance of time-shifting by the end of the period. Finally, they argue that viewers now form a part of television audiences that transcend the old boundaries of the nation-state – even though worldwide audiences continue to interpret programmes in the light of their own local contexts and national concerns.

This chapter argues the sitcom is an especially important genre for thinking about television audiences because comedy is a form of communication that relies on audience response for its effect. The chapter examines sitcom tropes such as the laugh track, to examine how the audience is signalled within the genre. It also explores audience reactions via complaints, and examines what such complaints tell us about audience expectations for the genre. This is also linked to issues of broadcasting regulations. The chapter draws on primary research with comedy audiences carried out for this book.

This chapter considers how we can understand the term 'audience' and critically outlines some of the ways in which the audience has been approached, theorised and researched. It argues that the history of audience research is characterised by a division between powerful media and powerful viewers; that is, between understanding the media as capable of influencing and therefore affecting viewers and understanding viewers as capable of influencing and therefore affecting the media. This chapter also includes new developments in audience research.

This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.

Chapter 1 maps out the contours of the Cold War regulatory context in Hong Kong and examines how Hong Kong’s censorship machinery “screened” the colonial government’s responses to the Cold War within local, colonial, and global contexts. The colonial government’s film censorship machinery comprises not only of printed regulations banning objectionable material, but also a set of activities, practices and discourses that reflected the agendas and assumptions of Hong Kong’s colonial government about audience demographics and characteristics. This chapter argues that censorship was part the discursive strategies mobilized by the colonial state and negotiated by filmmakers, film distributors, audience members, and Cold War watchers, all of whom contributed to the postwar Hong Kong community screening process. To demonstrate that censorship was never unidirectional in terms of imposition, surveillance, or discipline, but was constantly being challenged and negotiated by all stakeholders, this chapter ends with an extended discussion of the September 1965 press battle over British Hong Kong’s censorship legislation. Indeed, British Hong Kong had to exercise a policy of accommodation and neutrality, while creating the illusion of an apolitical community in order for its censorship legislations to function during a period of global decolonization.

Continuing a television studies analysis of Perry, Artel Great argues in Chapter Eight that from both a critical and an industrial perspective, the sitcom Tyler Perry’s House of Payne(TBS, 2006-2012) represents acomplex but no less problematic contribution to the history of Black televisual authorship. Precisely because there has been a pronounced dearth of Black representation on television, Great demonstrates that the politics of thirst best characterize how Black audiences engage the few existing images of televisual blackness. Despite several unprecedented industrial achievements (such as surpassing The Jeffersons[CBS, 1975-1985] as the longest running Black sitcom), when considered within the context of the history and formal structure of the Black sitcom, House of Payne digresses as itrejuvenates the narrative conventions and visual cues of uncritical Black minstrelsy. Rife with missed opportunities for teaching complex lessons about Black subjectivity, esteem, and interiority, Perry’s sitcom succeeded, then, mostly because of the continued omission of blackness on television.

Chapter 9 explains the numerous roles that reporting plays in learning and points out that communication is the essence of reporting. Teachers are made aware of the different audiences of reporting and the importance of different reporting strategies. To support teachers in reporting practices, some reporting principles are mentioned, and various methods of reporting are illustrated with examples.

This chapter focuses on aspects of reception of North Indian classical music by North Indian audiences. In particular, it examines how ethnographic enquiries conducted among listeners can help shed light on the processes of meaning construction in music and complement the more common investigation of musicians’ perspectives. Hindustani classical music tends to be described as an old and complex tradition and is believed to arouse profound emotions, which can be associated with spirituality and/or religious feelings. In this chapter I investigate how these ideas map onto the experience of listening to a specific raga. I present the outcome of a study based on ethnographic work carried out among Bengali concertgoers and music lovers, and I discuss how audience members, in verbal articulations of such experiences, embody sounds as patterns of movement, while at the same time drawing upon common discursive tropes and referring to local cultural practices.

Social control includes all the negative actions taken or the words spoken in reaction to behaviour audiences consider wrongful, which attempt to terminate or reduce the enactment of deviant behaviour. Such reactions include the actions of agents of formal social control—duly constituted representatives of organizations, including the state, empowered to exercise it—and informal social control, which is made up of ordinary persons, informal parties interacting with one another. Some actions may violate formally promulgated rules of an institution—smoking or drinking alcohol in Washington Square Park, for instance—that may be acceptable elsewhere. Other actions are not infractions of formal institutional rules, but may be regarded as offensive by informal audiences. Hence, they will attract different types of social control, that is, formal versus informal. Settings will vary with respect to how “loose” (lax) or “tight” (rigid) they are, that is, how much leeway exists as regards certain kinds of behaviour parties in them expect from actors. A school of researchers who study social control, including Michel Foucault and Stanley Cohen (“controlologists”), have imparted an orientation to the phenomenon which the author believes is unproductive for understanding behaviour in the park. Deviance and social control are joined at the hip: one is necessary for the other, and vice versa.

Although investors in the early national period originally hoped to build a sporting culture that granted them both profit and prestige, the demand for profit-seeking created by the economic culture of the post-Revolutionary years ultimately forced them to decide whether to maximize revenue by appealing to the largest possible audience or craft prestige for themselves by making sure that venues and content emphasized exclusivity and celebrated the elite. The social history of attending sporting events in the early national period reveals how demands from nonelite audiences pushed investors and professionals to prioritize profit over prestige. It then concludes by detailing how white men united to limit the confrontation that resulted from broader accessibility by erecting gender and racial barriers to full participation, and how politicians then borrowed from sport to construct a white male republic rooted in the pursuit of manhood and profit. In sum, then, this chapter highlights how elites and investors responded to popular opposition to exclusive elitism by conceding their desire for social and cultural authority and focusing on deference earned through wealth and white male brotherhood.

The final chapter explores the experience of participating in mass sporting culture. It begins by introducing the notion of “cultural mobility,” a concept which describes how white men took advantage of both the accessibility created in the early national period as well as the re-introduction of standardized genteel and rough sporting spaces to challenge class stereotypes by moving easily between claims of genteel and raw masculine superiority. Political parties then drew from the cultural mobility at sporting events to appeal to the white male electorate through a new “mass politics” that continued to borrow heavily from sporting culture to emphasize democratic experiences despite widening disparities of wealth and hardening class lines. In the end, then, white men negotiated a sporting culture that rejected elitism but excluded others while crafting a reverence for wealth and a sense of equal opportunity. Because of sporting culture’s political salience in the white male republic, understanding this negotiation helps us understand not just the nature of sport but the nature and limits of democracy and power in the early nineteenth century.

The Epilogue surveys continuities and changes in sporting culture since 1860. While recognizing the increasing inclusion of white women and African Americans over the course of the twentieth century, recent attendance statistics indicate the continued centrality of white male audiences. In addition, recent psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies suggest that the motives behind male audience participation have remained shockingly similar to the status-based concerns over masculinity that motivated men in early America. Given the importance of manhood, the remaining privilege of whiteness, and the return of the so-called “sportification” of politics over the last twenty years, the epilogue concludes by suggesting how sporting culture contributed to the rise of Donald Trump.

What did the cinema mean to people in wartime Britain? How did the community make use of the cinema and what did they expect it to do for them? These questions form the basis of the final chapter of the book. Looking at the cinema’s position as a source of entertainment, and emotional facilitator (especially in the ways in which cinemagoers made use of popular melodramas and documentary-realist feature films) and as a collective experience, the chapter argues that there is no single way of conceptualising the cinema in this period. Rather, there were competing or complementary narratives that altered in response to the needs of the individual patron and the changing fortunes of the war. Using ‘escapism’ as a framework through which to discuss cinemagoing in wartime, the chapter asks if the cinema operated in such terms, and, indeed, whether or not patrons and audiences wanted it to.