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Helen Wood, Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern SeIfReflexivity. University of Illinois Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-252-07602-2.
At first sight it appears that Helen Wood is making a contribution to the already heavily populated arena of feminist critique of television talk shows. However, Wood establishes very quickly that her research is not simply about TV talk shows and female audiences: she is first and foremost offering an account of, and argument for, an alternative methodology that may have wider applications within media and cultural studies. Taking the viewing practices of a group of white, working class women from the Midlands as her subject, Wood does indeed explore the relationship between daytime talk television programmes and their women audiences, but this is a vehicle through which she presents a working model of a methodology that enables the exploration of 'the dynamic entry of television talk into the socio-communicative sphere of everyday life' (p.4).
While there are a number of well known works that deal both with talk television and audiences (Carpignano et al, 1989; Gamson, 1998; Joyner-Priest, 1995; Livingstone and Lunt, 1994; Shattuc, 1997)1, Wood's approach differs in that she develops a methodology that allows for the exploration of the dynamic between viewer and television text during the live moments of watching. These moments of interaction produce what she calls 'texts-inaction' and central to this is the para-social relationship which is explored in depth in the book. The para-social relationship refers to the sense of intimacy experienced by viewers that emerges within the communicative sphere of the talk show in which television personalities share their lives with 'you' as 'you' are invited to call in, appear on the show, or write in. As Wood points out, para-social identification is frequently ridiculed, seen as a fake sociality experienced by viewers unable to draw a distinction between the 'real' world and artifice. However, in Talking with Television Wood forcefully argues that the para-social interaction with television should be taken seriously as 'lived communication and part of social experience' (p.204).
As she states in her Introduction, 'talking back' to the television - whereby viewers interact verbally with a talk TV presenter - might be seen as symptomatic of some...