Growing Up With Television (PDF)

Why talk with young people about TV? This is the question from which JoEllen Fisherkeller begins her insightful examination into the uses and power of TV in youth cultures. Fisherkeller studies the experiences of adolescents watching TV and talking about TV at home, at school, and with their peers. They discuss their hopes for the future as well as the challenges they currently face, and reveal how television plays a role in their everyday life. These young individuals, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, literally grow up with television, as the author follows them from middle school to high school and then on to college. As the most significant cultural symbol in the US, television is a powerful educational and socializing force. Fisherkeller examines how youth are attracted to TV programs and persona that help them work through personal and social dilemmas. TV stories teach them about conflicts of gender, race and class that parallel the lessons they learn from real life and the system of television show them how image creation is a real means of "making it" in an image-conscious society. Growing Up with Television is a groundbreaking book that should speak to a multitude of disciplines on the educative and societal power of a medium that pervades and defines contemporary experience.