Talking With Television Leonardo Reviews 10 ottobre

Talking With Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-Reflexivity

by Helen Wood
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago
256 pp. Trade, $65.00, paper, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-252-03391-9; ISBN: 978-0-252-07602-2.

Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi
Professor of Economics Università Europea di Roma
Rome, Italy

giuseppe.pennisi@gmail.com



Now in the Department of Media, Film and Journalism of De Montfort University at Leicester, Helen Wood has previously lectured in Media Studies and Sociology at the Universities of Manchester, Birmingham, University College Worcester, Wolver Hampton and Glasgow. She is a well-known specialist in media studies as well as in feminist studies, because she studies television and printed press with a strong and sharp, gender eyes. She is interested in methodological innovation to capture television (and convergent media) relationships with the public as well as social change, and audience studies. Although she is basically a sociologist and a media scholar, she has good flair for economics in general and for information economics, in particular. Her bibliography includes a long list of professional articles and a co-edited book, Talking with Television , is the first book she entirely authors by herself. The book is to be seen an important step in a work in progress, a new AHRC funded project: ' A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989 ' that she is undertaking with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley (Warwick University).

This biographical and professional sketch is, in my view, an essential preliminary to understand a book intended, at the same time, as a research for scholars and as a publication for a more general (even political) readership. The research explores the relationship between women's talk in TV, talk about TV and, more dynamically, talk with TV. It is based on behavioral methodology (thus, a series of interviews, role playing quasi-lab experiments and all the tools in the behavioral specialist's kit) as well as on media theory. More specifically, Helen Wood attempts to build a bridge between what she calls "old media theory" and what she names "new media theory". Her main contribution is that, contrary to the general perception whereby interactivity is a feature of "new media" (Internet, DVB-T and alike), since their early beginning televisual styles, particularly talk-based TV, have always sought to encourage a participatory relationship with viewers at home. In short, "a TV community" or "a TV village" would have always been an important aspect of television (and an essential aspects of talk shows) since the very beginning: if alone in your flat, you view, for the nth time Gone with the Wind in TV, you do not feel lonely because you know that millions of the men and women are, at that very moment, sharing your same experience and, may be, your same feelings.

This approach is often asserted by professional TV journalists and presented as a significant difference from printed press: When you read your newspaper, normally you are and sense to be, on your own, while when you view TV you feel to be part of a community - even of a world community if you deal with a World Wide Program (e.g. the inaugural session of the Olympic Games).

Helen Wood's contribution would be to provide an empirical demonstration. Is that so? Her journey is, no doubt, fascinating but her sample and her case studies are biased by her feminist approach. She deals only with Day Time Talk Shows, especially with Morning Talk Shows, particularly addressed to a women's audience. They are often housewives alone in the house after their men have left for work and their children for school. Often they end up talking with television like their grandmothers would have talked to a photographs album and their ancestors (if wealthy and aristocrats) to the statues in their gardens.