Sydney Tonight versus In Melbourne Tonight: Television, Taste and Identity

2008 ◽  
Vol 128 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Susan Bye
Keyword(s):  

In this discussion, I focus on the varying fortunes of Sydney Tonight and In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) in order to explore the very local nature of television in Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s. As part of this process, I document the way that the success of IMT and the perceived failure of Sydney Tonight became the basis for a sustained discussion in both the Sydney and Melbourne print media about the respective discernment of each city's viewers. Buttressed by continuing public anxieties about the sophistication of the developing Australian television culture, the rejection of inferior locally produced programs became understood as a marker of discrimination and maturity.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-270
Author(s):  
Amy Sargeant

The article addresses debates around the introduction of commercial television in Britain, conducted in Parliament, lobby groups, the advertising trade press and broader cultural commentary. It notes that the boundaries between these interest groups were porous. The article refers to sample advertisements produced by agencies in anticipation of the 1955 launch of ITV in London and other regions thereafter, setting advertisers' initial caution against the bullishness subsequently checked by the 1962 report of the Pilkington Committee. ‘Americanisation’ is identified as a recurrent theme of anxiety, and advertising as a symptom of it, prompting complaints on both sides of the Atlantic. Many of the production strategies anticipated experimentally in the 1950s are with us still, as are concerns regarding differentiation of advertisements from programme content, advertisements' target audiences and commodities advertised on television. For legislators and advertisers alike, print media provided a model for imitation more often than did cinema. Competition between old and new platforms for advertisements – then as now – is identified as an opportunity for mutual advantage rather than displacement.


HortScience ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 558c-558
Author(s):  
Jennifer B. Neujahr ◽  
Karen L.B. Gast

Consumer behavior research seems to play an big role in determining the wants and needs of an industry. This research helps to shape the way we market to the consumers and helps make marketing strategies more effective. In the 1950s grocery stores began to sell horticulture products in order to alleviate the growers' surplus. Supermarkets now have seem to found their niche in this market due to the fact that they can influence their consumers to buy their flowers right along with their bread, and get all of their shopping done at once. This new type of sale, commonly referred to as the impulse sale, can relate directly to how well the store is merchandised and maintained. A study was conducted at a local supermarket, to determine the following: good locations for impulse sales items, special conditions affecting impulse sales items, and what types of things could affect demand for impulse items. It was discovered that certain locations make better sales than other locations. Locations that were front and center and allowed easy access to seeing the mixed flower bouquet without having to touch it yielded the best results. The variables used to show a change in demand showed little to some variability and has raised some questions which may be used to conduct future research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-606
Author(s):  
Clarissa Carden

This article considers the discourses of responsibility and blame emerging from newspaper reportage of a crisis in the remote Indigenous community of Aurukun in Northern Queensland, Australia. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the sociology of racism and add to the existing body of scholarship on the ways in which deracialised media discourse can nevertheless be racist. The month of May 2016 saw violence perpetrated by young people against the teachers and principal of the community’s only school. Teachers were evacuated to the regional city of Cairns on 10 May due to violence in the community and fears for their safety. They returned on 18 May, only to be evacuated again on 25 May. These events form the focus of the reportage analysed in this article. The way in which three primary groups of players – parents, teachers and police – are portrayed in mainstream print media is analysed in order to ascertain how responsibility and blame are apportioned in relation to these events.


Author(s):  
Juanne Clarke

Heart disease is a major cause of death, disease and disability in the developed world for both men and women. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that women are under-diagnosed both because they fail to visit the doctor with relevant symptoms and because doctors tend to dismiss the seriousness of women's symptoms of heart disease. This study examines the way that popular mass print media present the possible links between gender and heart disease. The findings suggest that the ‘usual candidates’ for heart disease are considered to be high achieving and active men for whom the ‘heart attack’ is sometimes seen as a ‘badge of honour’ and a symbol of their success. In contrast, women are less often seen as likely to succumb, but they are portrayed as if they are and ought to be worried about their husbands. Women's own bodies are described as so problematic as to be perhaps useless to diagnose, because they are so difficult to understand and treat.


1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-10
Author(s):  
Rosalind Cottrell

When I was growing up in the 1950s in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the urban Delta, the closest I came to an anthropologist was the man who dug the dump site near our home looking for old scrap iron to sell. Certainly there was no expectation for me to become an anthropologist from my grandmother, the matriarch of our family. However, she had moved to the city after the death of her husband with expectations of a better life for her four girls. Stressing education as "the way out," she told stories about her slave uncle who recognized the value of education and learned to read from two young girls he drove to school. In turn, he taught this daily lesson to his family around the fire each night. The many evenings sitting on our front porch, and on the front porch of neighbors, watching and listening to grandma's stories and the stories of others, set a foundation for anthropology in my life and led to my becoming a medical anthropologist.


2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (S8) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hotze Lont

Financial self-help organizations can be found in many parts of the world, and the cities of Java are among the areas where they are particularly widespread. Since about the 1950s, interest in these institutions among anthropologists and development sociologists has increased considerably. Analyses of financial self-help organizations have most often focused on their economic or their social function; few scholars have pointed to their function as providers of security and identified self-help organizations as typical forms of local social security institutions. The main shortcoming of most of these studies is that they base their conclusions solely on an analysis of the financial arrangements provided by these self-help organizations, neglecting the accommodating practices that people undertake in order to fit the provisions of self-help organizations to their own household needs. This essay explores the observation that financial self-help organizations do not simply provide security through the different kinds of insurance mechanisms they might contain, but that, particularly through the way in which people use them and participate in them, these institutions become meaningful for coping with insecurity. It examines the question of whether participation in financial self-help organizations contributes to the ability of households to cope with adversities and deficiencies in a concrete social context. Research aiming to answer this question was conducted in Bujung, an urban ward on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.


Author(s):  
Maysaa Husam Jaber

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.


Author(s):  
Nick Admussen

This chapter examines, rejects, and revises the traditional history of the genre of prose poetry. Through a reading of Agamben, it demonstrates that during the May Fourth period, writers called a wide variety of work by the name prose poetry, including lineated free verse, lyric essays, and even fiction. By contrast, the writers of the 1950s wrote generically coherent work, and in the 1980s those same writers produced the focused, meaningful genre definitions that we use today. Because contemporary prose poetry has its roots in the obedient socialist poetry of the 1950s, it is not an inherently subversive form; its acts of refusal often serve to humanize or personalize the dictates of state socialism. The end of the chapter finds that the greatest stylistic influence on early prose poetry were Bing Xin’s translations of Rabindranath Tagore, and the way she made his transcendental music into vernacular prose.


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