Stephen Kline

Newly updated for the digital era, this classic textbook provides a comprehensive historical study of advertising and its function within contemporary society by tracing advertising's influence throughout different media and cultural periods, from early magazines through to social media. With several new chapters on the rise of the Internet, mobile, and social media, this fourth edition offers new insights into the role of Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube as both media and advertising companies, as well as examining the role of brand culture in the 21st century.

Newly updated for the digital era, this classic textbook provides a comprehensive historical study of advertising and its function within contemporary society by tracing advertising's influence throughout different media and cultural periods, from early magazines through to social media. With several new chapters on the rise of the Internet, mobile, and social media, this fourth edition offers new insights into the role of Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube as both media and advertising companies, as well as examining the role of brand culture in the 21st century.

This book examines the public controversies surrounding lifestyle risks in the consumer society. Comparing news coverage of the 'globesity' pandemic in Britain and the USA, it illustrates the way moral panic brought children's food marketing to the centre of the policy debates about consumer lifestyles.

This book examines the public controversies surrounding lifestyle risks in the consumer society. Comparing news coverage of the 'globesity' pandemic in Britain and the USA, it illustrates the way moral panic brought children's food marketing to the centre of the policy debates about consumer lifestyles.

A uniquely critical study of video gaming that blends perspectives from political economy, cultural studies, and communications theory.

This timely and innovative book provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play culture and toys from the teddy bear to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media-books, comics, film and television-and that of the specialty stores such as Toys 'R' Us, revealing how the opportunity to reach large audiences of children was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. In a powerful re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of mass media, and in particular television, Out of the Garden asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategists, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.