Announcing JMB 2.1; Media/Mundania

Dear Friends:

Journal of Mundane Behavior is proud to announce the launch of our second volume and first special issue, Media/Mundania. Consisting of articles on a wide variety of specific topics in cross-national contexts, the theme of this issue is the relationship between the media and everyday life.

We hope you enjoy this issue.  Kindly distribute this announcement freely and sorry for duplication.

Cheers,
Scott Schaffer, Managing Editor
Myron Orleans, Issue Editor
Journal of Mundane Behavior
http://mundanebehavior.org/
Sociology Department, CSUF

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Table of Contents for Media/Mundania
(JMB 2.1):

Gerard J DeGroot, 'When Nothing Happened': History, Historians and the Mundane.
We might think that while the present is mundane, the past was filled with drama and excitement.  DeGroot shows us that these perceptions are distorted by historiography and media imagery, particularly documentaries.  Actually, the past was as ordinary and boring as the present.

J. Alison Bryant and Jennings Bryant, Living with an Invisible Family Medium.
Television is so much a part of American family life that it is an unnoticed virtual participant.  The Bryants dissect the everyday interaction of families and television and present research that reveals how television affects our daily living patterns.

Andrea McCourt & Jacki Fitzpatrick, The Role of Personal Characteristics and Romantic Characteristics in Parasocial Relationships:  A Pilot Study.
McCourt and Fitzpatrick explore the qualities of our personal lives that draw viewers to particular kinds of media depictions.  What aspects of our lives attract us to specific programs and encourage us to form relationships with television characters?

Ronald Pies, Psychiatry in the Media: The Vampire, The Fisher King, and The Zaddik.
Our understandings of the function of psychiatry are affected by our exposure to particular images in the media.  Pies shows us how the challenges of his work as a psychiatrist are compounded by three commonly portrayed archetypes.

Tatyana Kotzeva, Private Fantasies, Public Policies: Watching Latin-American Telenovelas in Bulgaria.
Bulgarian women treat Latin-American soap operas as instructional texts for implementing privatized forms of everyday life conduct in their emergent social order.  Kotzeva discusses how these program generate new codes of femininity for the entranced viewers.

James MacFarlane Williams, Mundanity in the Lyrics of the Beatles.
The genius of the Beatles for Williams is that they could create music and lyrics about the mundane that enable us to both live in and transcend our ordinary lives.

Kinga Talarowska-Kacprzak, Media and the Construction of the Ganguro Trend in Japan.
The power of media to promote lifestyles associated with a fashion trend is explored by Talarowska-Kacprzak in relation to the mundane activities of Japanese youth.  She demonstrates how the media is captured by its own product as the fashion and its social fallout shape programming and content.

Roland Seim, Fascinating Censorship: Mundane Behavior in the Treatment of Banned Material.
Seim reveals how efforts in Germany to censor media attract audiences by the very act of restriction. Censorship may stimulate activity that counters the tedium of mundanity.

Chris Atton, The Mundane and its Reproduction in Alternative Media.
While alternative media may appear to contradict the definitions of ordinary life, Atton explores the ways in which these media operate within and through everydayness. Atton's essay signifies the meaning of this very journal of the mundane and serves as our media manifesto. 

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