Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
LEGITIMATING TELEVISION: MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND CULTURAL STATUS By Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine New York: Routledge, 2012, 232 pp.Traditional hierarchies of taste and cultural value have broken down over the course of the twentieth century, allowing movies to become cinema, comic books to become graphic novels, video games to become artgames, and the idiot box to become Quality But this familiar notion doesn't quite capture the complex social, political, economic, and historical processes that drive the elevation of popular cultural forms, or the many ways in which distinction, cultural hierarchy, and distributions of material and symbolic capital are inscribed in these processes. In the past decade or so, there has been a proliferation of academic work that tackles precisely this complexity, and Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine's Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status is a notable recent example. In this short but comprehensive volume, the authors set out to critically account for the high cultural status achieved by certain kinds of TV shows, and the apparent legitimation of the television medium.Newman and Levine's goal is to document and denaturalize the logic of this process, and reveal the underlying social and political implications of television's shifting status. Their argument is that some kinds of television have achieved legitimacy only through the exclusion and denigration of other kinds of television. This process has reinforced rather than challenged established social and cultural hierarchies of class and gender. Soap operas and reality TV, as well as most older shows, continue to be scoffed at as feminized mass culture while contemporary, masculinized primetime or premium cable dramas like The Sopranos are elevated to the status of art. Crucial to Newman and Levine's analysis is that in the era of media convergence, this problematic distinction extends not only to different genres of television programming, but also to different modes of engaging with television. They argue that video-on-demand (VOD), digital video recorders (DVR), DVD box sets, streaming, and illegal downloading (generally associated with elite, young, tech-savvy, middleand upper-middle-class viewers) are seen to be objectively better than watching broadcast TV with commercials (which, they argue, is generally associated with a lower-class or luddite audience who know any better). Deal or No Deal and The Big Bang Theory on the networks for the masses, Mad Men and Arrested Development on Netflix for the classes. For those invested in television as an art form, this newfound respect and status is a long-awaited victory, but Newman and Levine point out that these distinctions are precisely those that denigrated television for so long in the first place, associating it with the bad qualities of passivity, feminine domesticity, and juvenile, crassly commercial (even dangerous) mass entertainment. The medium itself has become something base and limiting that needs to be transcended, as evidenced by the slogan It's not TV, it's HBO and the familiar TV-downloader's refrain of I don't have TV. The idea, then, that all cultural distinctions have collapsed into an omnivorous and egalitarian free-for-all belies an ongoing reaffirmation of the ideological status quo.Each chapter of the book works as a self-contained analysis of a particular dimension of television's legitimation, contributing to and expanding this core argument (a modularity that makes it useful for teaching). Newman and Levine trace the history of the current so-called Golden Age of television, finding its roots in 1970s Quality Television, 1990s programs like Hvin Peaks that combined cult fandom with mass appeal, and the rise of premium cable channels like HBO. A particularly strong chapter examines the construction of the showrunner (an individual acting as producer and lead writer, and often the series creator) as television auteur. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it