Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

For Children, TV Commercials Are a Catalyst to Materialism

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
tv-kid-commercial

Concerned that your kids are becoming overly materialistic? Suspicious that their acquisitiveness has something to do with the steady stream of television commercials they see on a daily basis? Newly published research suggests your fears are well-grounded. A study of 8- to 11-year-olds from the Netherlands finds exposure to television advertising has “a positive causal effect on materialism.” Researchers led by Suzanna Opree of the University of Amsterdam identify an insidious equation: Ads exacerbate kids’ desire for material things, and this desire gradually leads them to equate ... Read More

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In a Violent Media World, YouTube is an Oasis

February 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A still from Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat, which, at last count, had been viewed nearly 30 million times since it was uploaded in 2007

Concerned that your kids are getting exposed to dangerous amounts of violent imagery on television and in video games? You might want to encourage them to enjoy a very hip source of entertainment in which violent content is refreshingly rare: YouTube. A study recently published in the Journal of Communication finds the popular internet video site is a far more peaceful place than, say, prime-time television. What’s more, the violence that is on the site “is generally less glamorized and less trivialized” than it is in television and movies. “The unregulated ‘Wild West’ of ... Read More

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“House of Cards” is Built on Big Data

February 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
houseofcards

Netflix's new hit political drama isn't just good TV, Salon's Andrew Leonard explains - it's a harbinger of a whole new way of creating filmed entertainment. Basically, Netflix analyzed and cross-referenced the minutely-tracked watching preferences of millions of customers to generate a formula for a hit. "Netflix doesn’t know merely what we’re watching, but when, where and with what kind of device," writes Leonard. "It keeps a record of every time we pause the action — or rewind, or fast-forward — and how many of us abandon a show entirely after watching for a few minutes." Armed ... Read More

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The TVs Are Coming! Station ID Cards From 1951

September 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
WBZ-TV in Boston, channel 4

Think TVs are expensive today? In early 1947 a high-end 24-inch television set would set you back $2,500 (about $24,000 adjusted for inflation). And unless you lived in New York, there really wasn't much to watch, with just eight TV stations operating in the United States and three of those only seen in New York City. But over just a few short years the television industry would see tremendous growth, with TV prices slowly coming down and dozens of stations rapidly opening up shop across the country. By early 1951 there were 107 TV stations operating in the United States which had the ... Read More

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Maven of Meth

September 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Donna Nelson

Bad news, entrepreneurial fans of Breaking Bad, the hit AMC series about a middle-aged chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin: you cannot actually learn to cook crystal meth by watching the show. “They deliberately put in faulty steps. They’ll start with one method of synthesizing methamphetamine but then switch to another,” says Donna Nelson, professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s like watching a video of someone starting out on a trip to Dallas and ending up in Chicago.” The abundant “meth” that appears on-screen is actually cotton-candy-flavored sugar ... Read More

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The Safe Race

August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Mindy Kaling and costars

MINDY KALING is well positioned to become the next all-American girl—that funny, slightly neurotic, fundamentally lovable television personality who personifies the single woman of her era. Her comedic skills were honed during her years as a writer and actor on The Office, where she played the chatty, bubbly Kelly Kapoor. This fall, as the star of the Fox sitcom The Mindy Project, she will assume a proven persona: a single professional whose life is complicated by bad dates and wacky colleagues. While it remains to be seen whether Kaling can freshen this formula, her take on this comedic ... Read More

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The Therapeutic Value of Watching Reruns

August 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Do you chide yourself for wasting time in front of the television, watching Law and Order reruns? Good news: It turns out that, without realizing it, you may have been doing something genuinely valuable. You’ve been replenishing your depleted self-control. That’s the conclusion of a new study by psychologist Jaye Derrick of the University of Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions. She reports immersion in a “familiar fictional world” can help us recover the all-important ability to resist temptation. Staring at Seinfeld, it turns out, can be part of your self-help ... Read More

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Female Olympians Sidetracked from Prime Time TV

July 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Summer Olympics Beijing 2008

When it comes to gender-neutral coverage, NBC’s prime-time Olympics telecast is no medalist. That’s the conclusion of two newly published studies looking at the American television network’s prime-time coverage of the most recent summer and winter Olympics. One reported female athletes were marginalized during the 2010 winter Olympics, receiving only 37.8 percent of prime-time coverage. The other found they did significantly better during the 2008 summer Olympics, receiving 46.3 percent of air time during the broadcast network’s evening programming. However, that figure was ... Read More

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Misinformation in TV Drama Can Gain Credibility

October 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Our beliefs about the world are shaped by many factors. The courses we took in college. The lessons we learned from our families. And, of course, the prime-time courtroom drama we watched a couple of weeks back. Newly published research suggests nuggets of misinformation embedded in a fictional television program can seep into our brains and lodge there as perceived facts. What’s more, this troubling dynamic seems to occur even when our initial response is skepticism. That’s the conclusion of a study published in the journal Human Communication Research. It asserts that, ... Read More

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Baby’s Must-See TV Does Not Increase Vocabulary

October 18, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1997, the BBC launched Teletubbies, a controversial education program aimed specifically at children under the age of 4. In a bid to win over its presumed audience, the show affixed its main characters with the body proportions, behavior and language of infants. It became a critical and commercial success, despite occasional silliness surrounding one Teletubby character and another: the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The First World spends generously on infant media. Four years after the Teletubbies debut, The Walt Disney Co. bought the Baby Einstein Company, founded by a former teacher in Georgia, ... Read More

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