HAPPY HOUR SALON: Joy Fuqua and Michele White at the NEW Press Street HQ

Join Room 220 for an evening of discussion between media theorists Joy Fuqua and Michele White at 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 2 at the brand new Press Street Headquarters (3817 St. Claude Ave., at Pauline). Both authors have recently released books via Duke University Press that examine, respectively, the history of hospital televisions and television’s role in “hospitalizing” American households, and some social ramifications of eBay.

Even if critical media studies isn’t your thing, this will be the first event in Press Street/Room 220/Antenna Gallery’s beautiful new home on St. Claude Avenue. We’ve been wandering aimlessly for several months now, conducting programing at a variety of (awesome) locations, but this will be a welcome homecoming. The authors’ talk will take place at around 7 p.m, but we welcome anyone interested in Press Street to stop by and see our new space, have some wine, and socialize with the sophisticates our prestigious organization has historically attracted.

Joy Fuqua’s new book, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and at Home, examines the role early television played in making hospitals feel more like home, and then, through direct-to-consumer prescription advertising, began to “medicalize” the average American household, a trajectory that continues as the Internet has become a clearinghouse for medical “information” that’s refined and redistributed to the contemporary consumer-patient.

Michele White’s new book, Buy it Now: Lessons from eBay, is a critical examination of the web retail/resale behemoth and the ways in which it enforces hegemonic social norms (recommending the “Adults Only” section to anyone who searches for “gay” or “lesbian,” providing with its “Black Americana” section a venue to romanticize slavery and racism, etc.). She then expands her scope to look at other similar sites, like Craigslist, and finds them to be not nearly as progressive as they might purport.