ABSTRACT

Television plays a major role in the lives of most of the world's children and adolescents (Van Evra 2004). Children and teens in the U.S., for example, typically spend three hours a day watching television (Ad & Marketing News 2011). When U.S. television programming began in 1948 and numbers of home televisions mushroomed through the early 1950s (Mittell 2009), neither commercial nor academic researchers “undertook, while there was still opportunity to do so, a systematic study, over a period of time, of the social changes which television brought in its wake” (Bogart 1958, 333). Half a century later in 2004, as television was reaching some of the world's more remote communities, our team witnessed the introduction of television programming to a rural West Indian community. We had conducted ethnography there for several years before television arrived and continued research on and after television's arrival.