The Synchronized Society

Time and Control from Broadcasting to the Internet

RANDALL PATNODE

“Patnode asks a deceptively simple question—why were modern media audiences willing to structure their lives around broadcasting schedules? Only now, as the broadcast era recedes, can that question be posed historically. The book offers a striking new synthesis, linking broadcasting history to the longer history of time management in the US. Recent histories have often been audiencecentered; this one reminds us of the imperatives towards rationalization, discipline, and efficiency that also shaped modern broadcasting.”

—David Goodman, co-author of New Deal Radio: The Educational Radio Project

The Synchronized Society traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteeth century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place—usually the home—at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Author Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

RANDALL PATNODE teaches about media, communication, and technology at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

The Counterfeit Coin

Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment

CHRISTOPHER GOETZ

The Counterfeit Coin argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out. This book seeks to undo the monolith of commercial gaming by locating multiplicity and difference within fantasy itself. It introduces and tracks three broad fantasy traditions that dynamically connect apparently distinct strata of a game (story and play), that join games to other media, and that encircle players in pleasurable loops as they follow these connections.

CHRISTOPHER GOETZ is an assistant professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He is one of the founding organizers of the annual Queerness and Games Conference.

206 pp 14 color images 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2550-5 paper $34.95S

978-1-9788-2551-2 cloth $120.00SU

May 2023

Media Studies • Game Studies

Maid for Television Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy

L. S. KIM

Maid for Television examines the intersection of race, class, and gender relations as embodied in a long history of television servants from 1950 to the turn of the millennium. Although they reside at the visual peripheries, these figures are integral to the idealized American family. Author L. S. Kim redirects viewers’ gaze towards the usually overlooked interface between characters, which is drawn through race, class, and gender identities. Maid for Television tells the stories of servants and the families they work for, in so doing it investigates how Americans have dealt with difference through television as a medium and a mediator.

L. S. KIM is an associate professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written about race, class, gender, and genre for The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, The Sage Handbook of Television Studies, Flow TV, Journal of Film and Video, Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture, and Ms. Magazine. She serves on the Ms. Committee of Scholars, and has served on the American Film Institute Awards jury.