Science on American television : a history / Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

LaFollette, Marcel Chotkowski, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science television programs--History.

Science television programs.

Television in science education--History.

Television in science education.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (317 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science. And, indeed, television soon offered a breathtaking banquet of scientific images and ideas-both factual and fictional. Mr. Wizard performed experiments with milk bottles. Viewers watched live coverage of solar eclipses and atomic bomb blasts. Television cameras followed astronauts to the moon, Carl Sagan through the Cosmos, and Jane Goodall into the jungle. Via electrons and embryos, blood testing and blasting caps, fictional Frankensteins and chatty Nobel laureates, television opened windows onto the world of science. But what promised to be a wonderful way of presenting science to huge audiences turned out to be a disappointment, argues historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette in Science on American Television. LaFollette narrates the history of science on television, from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century, to demonstrate how disagreements between scientists and television executives inhibited the medium's potential to engage in meaningful science education. In addition to examining the content of shows, she also explores audience and advertiser responses, the role of news in engaging the public in science, and the making of scientific celebrities. Lively and provocative, Science on American Television establishes a new approach to grappling with the popularization of science in the television age, when the medium's ubiquity and influence shaped how science was presented and the scientific community had increasingly less control over what appeared on the air.

Contents:

Inventions and dreams

Experimenting with illusion

Elementary education, basic economics

Dramatizing science

Taking the audience's pulse

Saving planet earth: fictions and facts

Adjusting the lens: documentaries

Monsters and diamonds: the price of exclusive access

In splendid isolation: the public's television

Defining what's new(s) about science

Entrepreneurial popularization

Warning: children in the audience

Rarae aves: television's female scientists

The Smithsonian's world: exclusivity and power

All science, all the time.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9781283833721

1283833727

9780226922010

0226922014

OCLC:

820011113