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The author of this book, as a qualitative audience researcher, observes that a typical situation in a nursery school might usually exhibit how popular television shows plays a major part in conflicts, various aspects of interpersonal communications, and in the exchange of assorted symbols of cultural capital. While qualitative research cannot directly approve or reject a teacher’s common notion that television promotes violent behaviour among children, qualitative research may be able to provide an explanation that would consider several different contextual factors in such situations of violence while also identifying television’s other uses as a topic and form of communications in varied social settings. While ethnographic audience research reveals that media has now become an essential part of everyday life, we can say that interpersonal relationships and media consumption may be interrelated.

This chapter discusses how music media are used and become influential in various everyday contexts. Contrary to the majority of studies into youth subcultures, it details the extent to which domestic, family experiences are reported by respondents to have influenced their music consumer choices. Having outlined these media uses and influences, the implications of a paradoxical trend for growing public uses of music media that wield their strongest influence in the privacy of young people's domestic lives are assessed. The growing public presence of non-terrestrial music television channels and the Internet across young people's everyday educational, work and leisure contexts seems to be stimulated by a desire to consume mediated technologies that might be excluded from domestic settings at the will of parents. The discussion then turns to the extent to which media consumer literacy is able to be productive and even innovative in the formation of music tastes and practices, regardless of ostensibly omnipotent global media influences. The final section of the chapter considers the importance of everyday life narratives to youth music practitioners' immediate but also embedded identities and presentations of themselves and significant (familial) others.

This introductory chapter underlines the importance and originality of the book as a contribution to our understanding of the fate of Weimar democracy. It reflects on the connection between media consumption and electoral behaviour, and challenges previously held assumptions about the role of the press in the political process. It provides a discussion of the difficulties of using newspapers as a historical source, and of the methodological problem of assessing something as complex as media effects. It summarizes key historical debates on the rise of Nazism, and places them in the context of media theory.

This chapter discusses the production of public queer cultures as sites of media consumption. The recent development of a global media hub in Singapore has enabled the emergence of a queer public culture despite the illegality of homosexuality. State-funded gay films, subsidized theater plays, Internet portals, and nightclubs are part of the new spaces and practices that have been direct beneficiaries of this policy initiative. In a city-state such as Singapore, cultural citizenship is contested through the way sexuality functions as a technology for the creative economy. While the government has mobilized sexuality as a policy tool to promote cultural liberalization, gays and lesbians have also seized on these practices to claim their right to produce and participate in public culture. The chapter thus evaluates how lesbians “do” citizenship and fashion modes of expression through their media consumption that allow them to fit in, use, and twist the governmental framing of media environments.

This chapter discusses the specific role the media plays in constructing race and determining the parameters of “civil” racial discourse. Contesting the racist practices of racial civility, Yamashita depicts the alternative practices of media consumption in which the less powerful—the homeless, people of color, immigrants--resist the demands of the more powerful.

This chapter tracks both the processes of change as they have unfolded in the home and the implications of socio-technical change across a wide range of domestic media technologies, as they flow through the home and ripple out through home life. This chapter situates this longer global history within more recent and local contexts that initiated our research agenda. This historical account presents previous scholarship on the domestication of media technologies, as well as mapping the shifting and accumulating hardware devices, software systems, and infrastructural layers of technology shaping contemporary digital domesticity. The domestic sphere is seen not only as a significant context for technology consumption but as a significant, multifaceted site for making meaning of technologies and for postmarket innovation in technology application.

This chapter deals with the “manufactured iSlave,” beginning with the story of a Chinese teenager who sold his kidney to buy an iPhone and an iPad. It compares fanatic consumption of digital media with voluntary servitude, organ trafficking, and the consumption of slave-produced sugar that led to what anthropologist Sidney Mintz terms as “desocialized eating.” This is then followed by a broader discussion on digital labor in its various immaterial and individualized forms of exploitation that amount to enslavement, especially for those who have developed addiction to Appconn gadgets and services. iSlaves are also manufactured along the temporal dimension as they lose control over their time while chasing the latest trend in digital media. Overall, the chapter assesses the outlook of manufacturing and manufactured iSlaves as being rather bleak.

This chapter presents an alternative view of transnational media consumption, studying two Egyptian performance communities that relate differently to both global and national trends. The first is the Cairene community of Muhammad 'Ali street, which largely exists outside the influence of global culture markets and has experienced both the state's favor and disfavor. The second community is Upper Egyptian, which is marginal within Egypt, and is precisely the kind of phenomenon that is favored in metropolitan “world beat” music which aims to present itself as an alternative to leading metropolitan trends.