From Booklist
A medium in which Dawson's Creek is displacing the "aging" Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place has little room for older Americans. Mass communications professor Riggs studies the other side of the television screen: "creative ways in which older Americans are using television today." Her book gathers several ethnographic studies: on older women's reaction to Murder, She Wrote; on the vital place of C-SPAN, PBS, and other nontraditional fiction and nonfiction TV among the upper-class residents of a midwestern retirement community; on involvement in public-access television by older Milwaukee African Americans; and on ways minority and immigrant elders interacted with TV. Americans, Riggs notes, "have linked television viewing among the aged with deadly passivity, hinting that elders who spend hours each day with the tube have ceded over their lives." In fact, she argues, elders from different classes, genders, races, and social circumstances choose the shows they watch deliberately and thoughtfully and as a key element in their interaction with the world around them. Mary Carroll
Review
"In this ground-breaking, timely, and eminently readable book, readable book, Karen Riggs challenges the prevailing stereotype of older Americans as passive consumers of television. Drawing on a rich body of ethnographic research in diverse communities and writing with a refreshing candor, Riggs persuasively shows how these older Americans make meaning of media ranging from C-SPAN and public-access cable television to mainstream television series." -- Kathleen Woodward, author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
