Killing Us Softly 3

13.1 Studying Recreation and Leisure

1. Leisure is time that can be spent doing whatever you want, or just relaxing.

2. Recreation is any activity that is satisfying or amusing, or that is experienced as refreshing for body, mind, and spirit. What makes something a recreational activity is whether it is enjoyable, liberating, or transformative.

3. The sociology of recreation and leisure is a fairly contemporary field of study, because technological advances have created more time for hobbies and pastimes. Some activities that are recreational now—such as gardening, knitting, or fishing—used to be obligatory. Also, technology has given rise to many common pastimes such as going to the movies, playing video games, and surfing the internet.

4. Three related developments have changed the ways we engage in leisure activities.

1. Sennett argues that there has been a decline in public life as technology, such as television, the internet, video games, DVD players, and iPods, have made the private home a more attractive site for leisure.

2. Recreational activities have been commodified, so that people purchase leisure in the form of goods and services. Shopping has become a recreational activity in that many people engage in purchasing as an end in itself.

3. Recreation has become more formal and organized. Even activities such as walks in the woods have become organized into hiking clubs.

13.2 Leisure: The Opposite of Work?

1. In a capitalist society, time spent in the paid labor force is viewed as productive time, whereas time not spent in the paid labor force is viewed as free time. However, free time is not the same as leisure time, because much labor is unpaid. Rojek argues that the time used in fulfilling obligations and doing unpaid labor is not leisure time, because leisure, by its very definition, involves a choice about how to spend one's time.

2. Leisure, like most things, is affected by class status. Working-class people do different things with their leisure time than wealthy elites. Rojek makes the point that the wealthy do not necessarily have more leisure time; instead, their work sometimes closely resembles play. After all, networking at a country club over golf or cocktails is considered work, but a different type of work from  landscaping  the country club or mowing its grass.

13.3 The Structure of the Media Industries

1. Spectatorship has become a vital part of leisure time. The media are major social institutions that hold increasing power and importance in the Information Age.

2. The media are intertwined with the democratic system of government and are seen both as a tool for social change and an instrument of the state.

3. Huge corporations acquire media companies through the process of conglomeration. A typical media conglomerate might include book and magazine publishing, radio and television broadcasting, a cable television network, a movie studio, a record company, websites, and a theme park. Most successful media companies are quickly bought by larger conglomerates. Two or more companies can also merge to create a bigger media giant. Apple and the iPod are given as an example of a fundamental shift in the way the media industries work in that the physical goods that are sold facilitate the services that are sold.

4. Some blogs, zines, and bands can be viewed as part of an underground movement in the media whose members are able to overcome the constraints of traditional, mass-marketed media to reach a small audience.

5. The Federal Communications Committee is responsible for regulating what the media produces. Obscene material is illegal; however, the line between what is considered indecent versus what is considered obscene is fairly  blurry . Television, movies, and video games are all subject to a rating system that suggests appropriate ages for consumption.

13.4 High and Popular Culture

1. Popular culture, usually contrasted with high culture, refers to forms of cultural expression associated with the masses, consumer goods, and commercial products.

2. High culture involves forms of cultural expression usually associated with the elite or dominant classes.

3. Taste publics are groups of people who share similar artistic, literary, media, recreational, and intellectual interests,

4. Taste cultures are areas of culture that share similar aesthetics and standards of taste.

5. Polysemy refers to how any culture product is subject to multiple interpretations and hence has many possible meanings.

13.5 Theories of Media Consumption

1. The magic-bullet theory assumes that audience members of all sorts are passive recipients of media content. Any meaning they consumed was transmitted, unaltered, from the media themselves straight into their minds.

2. The uses and gratifications theory argues that audiences are active interpreters who bring their own interpretations of media content.

3. Reinforcement theory is a theory that suggests that audiences seeks messages in the media that reinforce the their existing attitudes and beliefs and are thus not influenced by challenging or contradictory information.

4. Agenda-setting theory is a theory that the mass media can set the public agenda by selecting certain news stories and excluding others, thus influencing what audiences think about.

5. Two-step flow model theory suggests that audiences get information through opinion leaders who influence their attitudes and beliefs, rather than through direct firsthand sources.

6. Active audiences is a term used to characterize audience members as active participants in "reading" or constructing the meaning of the media they consume.

7. Interpretive strategies are the ideas and frameworks that audience members bring to beat on a particular media text to understand its meaning.

8. The encoding/decoding model assumes that specific ideological messages are loaded into cultural products, and also acknowledges that individuals respond to those messages in a variety of ways. This theory argues that responding to cultural texts is a way of redistributing power. The more active an audience is, the less control the producers have over the messages that are communicated.

9. Textual poaching describes the way that audience members manipulate an original cultural product to  create  a new one. A common way for fans to exert some control over the media they consume.

13.6 Recreation, Leisure, and Relationships

1. Recreational choices can lead to unique  bonds  with others. Role-model relationships occur when prominent members of a recreational subculture are examples for the rest of the community.

2. With growing emphasis on individual forms of leisure, community responsibilities may start to flag. Communitarianism attempts to rebuild a sense of group values that benefit all rather than only the individual.

3. Lifestyle enclaves focused on shared interests can contribute to the common good in the same ways that family, church, and neighborhoods once did.

4. Collectors and hobbyists are drawn together through conventions, internet communities, and organized meetings.

5. Third places are public places outside home and work where people gather to talk and hang out. Oldenburg argues that these places are essential aspects of community life, because they provide opportunities to connect with others in ways that relieve alienation and anomie.

6. Travel and tourism are leisure industries that have economic and cultural effects on the world. They affect individual relationships as well as foreign policy and economic relations.