Author: W. Russell Neuman File Type: pdf Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issuesdrugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the newsor tries to make anything of itCommon Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom. **From Publishers Weekly In this ponderous but informative study, the authors argue that experts who see the public as a passive audience for the media or as uninformed voters ignore the complex ways in which people think about public issues. The authors conducted interviews and surveys regarding five current issues--including drug abuse and the 1987 stock market crash--to determine how people analyze information from newspapers, news magazines and television news programs. From these they conclude that people invoke morality more often than the media do. They found, contrary to accepted wisdom, that television is not the cause of public ignorance rather, people who have lower cognitive skills are more likely to seek news from television. What people learn from the media, the authors suggest, depends on the their skills and education. They conclude that the media should present less salient topics with greater creativity but focus more on providing context and the hard news angle for provocative topics such as the AIDS crisis. Neuman teaches communications at Tufts Just and Crigler are political scientists at Wellesley and USC, respectively. 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Anne Carson File Type: pdf

Author: Darryl P. Domingo File Type: pdf Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did their readers come to enjoy linguistic and textual devices that self-consciously disrupt the reading experience? Darryl P. Domingo answers these questions through an examination of the formative period in the commercialization of leisure in England, and the coincidental coming of age of literary self-consciousness in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760. During this period, commercial entertainers tested out new ways of gratifying a public increasingly eager for amusement, while professional writers explored the rhetorical possibilities of intrusion, obstruction, and interruption through their characteristic use of devices like digression. Such devices adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in culture they unbend the mind and reveal the complex reciprocity between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the age of Swift, Pope, and Fielding.

Author: Chad Kautzer File Type: pdf Pragmatism has been called the chief glory of our countrys intellectual tradition by its supporters and a dogs dinner by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatisms direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatisms history with recent changes in the countrys racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatisms role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America.