"The Factory in the Living Room: How Television Exploits Its Audience"
Distinguished Faculty Lecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst
March 8, 2007
Description:
This lecture discusses how media critics tend to focus on how powerful messages in movies, programs and advertising affect the public. Professor Jhally contends, however, they miss something else. He explores the issue from a different angle: how the profit-driven commercial media organize themselves like the rest of industrial capitalism - to extract value from their workforce. When people sit in their homes watching commercial media, he says, their time is organized and sold in the same way that the activities of factory workers are controlled and organized. But in the living-room factory, there are no child labor laws.
