Abstract
Written against a backdrop of larger concerns about representations of class, ethnicity, gender, and race in U.S. society, Clara Rodriguez’s book explores the influence of U.S. television content on international audiences as understood through a series of interviews with international undergraduates and foreign-born adults. To answer her questions, Rodriguez reports some of her findings from 71 interviews with foreign-born U.S. college students conducted between 2013 and 2015.
Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University responsible for major contributions to Latino/a studies, follows the group of cultural historians and media scholars who understand that American media is a business. The interviews with college-level international students, as a result, provide an analysis of how the participants feel valued as consumers of American culture and values. Rodriguez uses her interviewees’ responses to make larger connections to the role that television programming plays in projecting American cultural power. Some of her findings are organized by conventional sociological categories like gender, race, and class, although she does not provide much theoretical support or discussion about how those spheres intersect.
As a text, America As Seen on TV suffers greatest from a lack of cohesion. The reader is too often left to make sense of how the fragments of interviews fit together. As a data set, these interviews are useful, even if there are no excerpts that defy conventional understanding and thinking about America’s media power exercised on the rest of the world. Another problem that Gonzalez creates for herself is that she does not provide any context for the television programs mentioned by her interview subjects. Readers unfamiliar with the programs viewed by millennials are left in the dark, trying to determine why certain responses were included.
A related problem comes from Gonzalez’s overreliance on her interview subjects’ responses themselves. The fact that she takes the students’ responses, whether in person or through survey, at face value without interrogating how these students came to make those responses makes using these examples problematic. Why, for example, should we believe what anyone, young college students or otherwise, says about their attitudes and behaviors toward smoking and drinking?
While the previous problems are subjective disagreements with her content, a tougher problem with this text comes from deciding whom this book is for. Those familiar with basic, foundational cultural media studies research will find Rodriguez’s literature review lacking, while those trained in more formalized identity and social structural methods may wonder why she focuses so much on the scholarly attention paid to the primetime soap opera Dallas. That Gonzalez can devote several pages to a discussion of a small handful of studies on a few television shows a generation or two ago shows how essential it is that new studies of new shows in new contexts be written.
The interview responses, while detailed, do not provide particularly insightful or revelatory comments about the role of television in the lives of millennials, domestic or international, that we did not already know or could not reasonably assume. That is, her study confirms what is already known about the reception of American television on international audiences. Her big question of the impact of being a student at a U.S. college does not seem to bring out any qualitatively different knowledge. International audiences consume American content because it is available to them. Young international audiences consume that content for the same reason.
At the end of the book, Rodriguez brings up very briefly the concept of how communication technology, particularly recording technology like DVDs and DVRs, impacts audience memory of advertisements, an important part of American consumer culture and television programming. These aspects of consumptive practices are no longer new in 2018, despite her suggestions in the conclusion. Avoiding a discussion of crucial concepts like time-shifting and on-demand viewing is a serious deficit for a book that tries to shed light on the daily experiences of millennials and foreign nationals.
America, As Seen on TV does not add much to media studies scholarship at an advanced level and will not disrupt how future scholars pose questions of audience engagement. However, it may be useful for undergraduate courses in research methods, particularly for the open and honest introduction that explains Rodriguez’s reason for conducting the study in the first place. Rodriguez’s expertise as a sociologist comes through here and she is systematic in approach and easy and enjoyable to read in analysis. There is nothing disingenuous or suspect about Rodriguez’s study, but neither is there anything here that will fundamentally change how we write or teach about American media’s capabilities to influence the rest of the world.