Review of 20th century media and the American psyche: A strange love. by Charisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay
Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, Vol 34(4), 2022, 249-251
From my review of the book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love byCharisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay (see record 2020-80753-000).
The book is structured in three media-relational sections, each with three medium-centered chapters covering related technologies, historical developments, and theories from social psychology, interpersonal communication, and other areas. The first section focuses on intimate media, with chapters on theatrical film, recorded music, and consumer-market still cameras as examples of mediated public intimacy. Section Two examines regular media, or those that synchronize common, shared experiences, broadcasting them into users’ everyday lives. The chapters on radio, network television, and cable television each contain useful summaries of relevant scholarship as well as key moments, such as the War of the Worlds broadcast. The final section, reciprocal media, continues the structure of evoking contemporary digital media relations as the framework for discussing earlier media. Magnetic tape, video gaming, and dial-up Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are presented to examine media that respond to users, allowing users to, in turn, affect their media experiences. Concluding with a summary reflection on users’ emotional relationships with media technologies, Corsbie-Massay posits that Americans want honesty, connection, devotion, and flexibility from their media, and calls for further variations on media psychographies. In so doing, she presents a welcome alternative to teleological media history texts that are litanies of names and events, as well as to media theory texts that often drain the joy and humor from media consumption. It is a welcome additional to the media scholar’s instructional toolkit.
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