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Television audiences and transnational nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel.
- Source :
-
Media, Culture & Society . Jul2015, Vol. 37 Issue 5, p784-799. 16p. - Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel 'at home' in a past that is not 'theirs'? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia's spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a 'banal cosmopolitanism' in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers' proximate lifeworlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *NOSTALGIA
*TELEVISION broadcasting
*MASS media
*COMMUNICATION
*GLOBALIZATION
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 01634437
- Volume :
- 37
- Issue :
- 5
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Media, Culture & Society
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 108409984
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715587872