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This chapter deals with the consumer electronics industry: the devices consumers use to receive, record, amplify, and display media information. Without them, electronic media would not exist. Together with content production and distribution systems, media devices form a triangle of media industries. Here, the market concentration of telephone, radio, television, DVD players, camcorders, cable television consumer equipment, satellite receivers, CD players, and MP3 players is analyzed. The media consumer electronics industry in the United States is large and diverse in terms of its products. In 2004, its US volume alone was $63 billion. Some firms appear to be niche players, usually sitting at the high-end of the price scale. As for the low and medium price ranges, the market is dominated by around seven or eight large, efficient firms which enjoy enormous economies of scale and scope. Several large firms have been acquired or operated primarly as a brand. There is little middle ground in the industry.

This chapter focuses on mobile music players and their advantages. It shows how mobile music players such as MP3 players and iPod devices create an image of a person that he or she projects. These technologies are helpful in protecting individuals from not only unpleasant sounds but people as well, although they are helpful in connecting people to their friends. The chapter presents the use of mobile music players by students in creating solutions to online music accessibility by collaborating with their friends and sharing their musical tastes. It states that improvement in wireless music technologies will lead to increased capacity for social connectivity.

This chapter describes how music use often bridges the private and public spaces of young people's everyday lives, and how different technologies are often linked with different uses. It specifically covers the different uses of music media: private and public; intensive and casual; and alternative and populist. The multiple forms of music media available in public and private contexts afford differing degrees of user involvement. The Internet is now a commonplace medium for niche music styles and genres, despite the fact that it is accessible on a ‘mass’ scale. iPod and MP3 players with similarly large memory capacities are often linked with intensive, personal use, although these technologies retain a public use dimension that counteracts the assumption that they are simply the latest developments on the personal stereo prototype. Media technologies do not determine the meanings that users contribute on the music to which they listen.

This chapter examines the role of broadcast radio and television as crucial sources of music for incarcerated people. It challenges the focus on “new” media as the primary means through which music is now consumed in North America, considering current realities of mass incarceration and the fact that US incarceration rates are the highest in the world. Working with the prison narrative of “Patrick,” an organic intellectual and Asian American punk musician, this chapter approaches music listening as a de Certeauian “tactic.” Policies that deny access to the Internet and MP3 players discipline and isolate prisoners; however, prisoners in turn make creative use of residual media and “old” music technologies. For Patrick, radio proved a powerful vehicle of temporary escape, while television music awards shows facilitated participation and community. Ultimately, this chapter argues that such music listening practices offer a chance, however transitory and contingent, for prisoners to assert their own subjectivities and reshape their lived environments.

Specific reading difficulty is the best known, and best studied, form of specific learning difficulty. This is the condition that many refer to as ‘dyslexia’. We will define specific reading difficulty as a significant, unexplained delay in reading in a child of average, or above average, intelligence. A significant delay is usually defined as a reading level more than two standard deviations below the mean for the child’s age (see Chapter 1, p. 5 for the explanation of this term). Specific reading difficulty is, therefore, a form of specific learning difficulty where reading is the particular learning skill affected. Other forms of specific learning difficulty may also be present, particularly spelling, writing, and spoken language difficulties. It should be noted that the diagnosis of specific reading difficulty is based on the degree of delay in reading, rather than on the particular type of errors that the child makes. Much has been made of certain characteristics of children’s reading, such as difficulty in distinguishing ‘b’ from ‘d’, reluctance to read aloud, a monotonous voice when reading, and a tendency to follow the text with the finger when reading. There is nothing diagnostic about these characteristics. They are seen in many children when they first start learning to read (and some are seen in adults when they learn to read a foreign language). The diagnosis of specific reading difficulty should only be made after a comprehensive assessment of intellectual and reading ability, and an exclusion of other causes of poor reading attainment (see Chapter 2). . . . How common is specific reading difficulty? . . . The best evidence for the existence of specific reading difficulty as an entity is given by the results of a study by Professor Michael Rutter and his colleagues, who tested 9–10-year-olds on the Isle of Wight. They first tested the children to determine their intelligence and reading ability. They then studied all the children whose reading was significantly behind that of their peers and found that these could be divided into two groups: those where the delayed reading could be explained by low intelligence and a second group where the children were of normal intelligence and the reading difficulty could not be explained.