Television's history has at numerous points been punctuated by pronouncements that technological innovations will improve its programming, empower its audiences, and heal the injuries it has inflicted on American society. This enduring faith in the inevitability and imminence of television's technological salvation is the subject of this dissertation. "TV Repair"...
This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of "reality" formats in contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure,...
In the age of what George W. Bush has called a global democratic revolution, the freedom to consume an ever-expanding variety of images and goods in the global marketplace is often equated with the conditions of democratic freedom. With just such rhetorical elisions in mind, this dissertation examines the discursive...