Q. What is the most-watched TV format in history, seen by about 100 million people weekly around the world? A. Wheel of Fortune, a game show. Without putdowns or pandering, the author looks at 260 such shows, concluding that culture has triumphed over technology. For despite our capacity to transmit the same content world-wide, McLuhan's global village has not come to pass. Technology has, however, encouraged already-existing "cultural continents" to coalesce. About one-third of the world's game shows have been licensed or adapted from another country, especially from the United States. Conversely, a single program can cross borders unchanged, such as Sabado Gigante, which appeals to Spanish speakers in 18 countries. The first truly global study of TV entertainment, this book includes interviews with producers, contestants, and licensers. With its tables, illustrations and appendices, the text provides details on content and audiences, as well as explanatory overviews.

With a Foreword by Dr. Fishwick's student--Tom Wolfe. This book redefines popular culture in the light of the revolutionary changes brought about by the information revolution and the digital divide. It explores the phenomenal growth and extension of popular culture in the last decade and ties in the vast changes brought about by technology and the Internet. In an era when American television and the Internet reach virtually every corner of the globe, Popular Culture in a New Age shows how the poorly understood and often underestimated area known as popular culture affects all of our lives. Beginning with an evaluation of the millennium celebrations and the enormous error of Y2K madness, Popular Culture in a New Age then moves on to the “New Gold Rush” brought about by technology and takes a hard look at its risks. The book examines a wide variety of pop culture phenomena such as carnivals, celebrities, and the road from nineteenth century humbuggery (P. T. Barnum's term) to today's hype. In Popular Culture in a New Age you'll learn about: the three faces of popular culture: folk, fake, and pop--how they relate and how they differ today's popular icons the empire of Disney World Marshall McLuhan, our era's most profound and shocking electronic thinker African-American popular culture and style Popular Culture in a New Age gives characterization to the postmodern world in a chapter on “postmodern pop,” followed by the shift from civil religion to civil disobedience and the “myth of success.” This insightful book will help you understand the way we eat, think, vote, and respond to our fast-changing world in the era of hype, spin doctors, chat rooms, and jargon.

In an age of digital communications, where radio, satellite, television and computing have come together to allow instant access to information and entertainment from around the globe, it is sometimes easy to overstate the break with the recent past that these developments imply. However, from a historical perspective, it is important to recognise that the national dimensions of communications, including broadcasting, have always been framed within different sets of international political, economic, cultural, and technological relationships. Television, so easily seen as the last technology to succumb to the effects of internationalisation subsequent to the technical and political changes of the late twentieth century, was in fact, from the outset, embedded in international interactions. In recent years, a focus has been placed on the longstanding sets of transnational relationships in place in the years after World War II, when television established itself as the dominant form of mass communication in Europe and America. Recent research has adopted a comparative approach to television history, which has examined the interactions within Europe and between Europe and America from the 1950s onwards. In addition, there has been increasing interest in the idea of television in the Anglophone world, looking at transatlantic interactions from the early phases of the development of the technology, through the growing market for formats in the 1950s and outwards, to connections with Australia and Hong Kong in these years. The essays in this collection contribute to this area by bringing together, in one volume, work which focuses on both national developments in UK and US broadcasting in the 1950s, to allow for reflection on how those systems were developing and being understood within those societies, and raise issues about the ways in which the two systems interacted and can be usefully compared. Some contributions deliberately focus on international issues, while others embed the international dimension within them, and still others offer a critical commentary on developments during the 1950s. The book will appeal primarily to students and researchers in media and communication studies, television studies, radio studies, and history, but will also be of interest to all who have an interest in developments in communication in the post-war period.

Bring the world a little closer with these multicultural books. An excellent way for students to appreciate and learn cultural diversity in an exciting hands-on format. Each book explores the history, language, holidays, festivals, customs, legends, foods, creative arts, lifestyles, and games of the title country. A creative alternative to student research reports and a time-saver for teachers since the activities and resource material are contained in one book.

Technology has shrunk the physical world into a "global village," where we all seem to be connected in an online community worldwide. Yet while we think of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as accessible to all, in reality, these are commercial entities developed primarily by and for the Western world. Considering how new technologies increasingly shape labor, economics, and politics, these tools often reinforce the inequalities of globalization, rarely reflecting the perspectives of those at the bottom of the digital divide. This book asks us to reconsider "whose global village" we are shaping with the digital technology revolution today. Sharing stories of collaboration with Native Americans in California and New Mexico, revolutionaries in Egypt, communities in rural India, and others across the world, Ramesh Srinivasan urges us to reimagine what the Internet, mobile phones, or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspectives of diverse cultures. Such collaboration can pave the way for a people-first approach toward designing and working with new technology worldwide that embraces the realities of communities too often relegated to the margins

Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications—the result is new types of cities and architecture. How do these games alter our perception of real and virtual space? What can the designers of physical and digital worlds learn from one another?