Turow, Joseph
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Communication
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Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication
Introduction
Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication. • He is the author of more than 60 articles and 9 books on mass media industries. • His continuing work on the internet, marketing and society has received a great deal of attention from the popular press as well as the research community. • He has written about media in the popular press, including American Demographics magazine and The Los Angeles Times. • His research has received financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Federal Communications Communication, MacArthur Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. • The winner of a number of conference-paper and book awards, he was a Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at LSU and a Potruck Distinguished Lecturer at Penn State. • He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Poetics, and New Media and Society.
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66 results
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 66
Publication Divided We Feel: Partisan Politics Drive American's Emotions Regarding Surveillance of Low-Income Populations(2018-04-01) Turow, Joseph; Akanbi, Ope; Hennessy, Michael; Virgilio, Diami; Draper, NoraPublication Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It(2009-09-01) Turow, Joseph; Bleakley, Amy; King, Jennifer; Hennessy, Michael; Hoofnatle, Chris JayThis nationally representative telephone (wire-line and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and then tailoring advertisements for the users based on those actions. While privacy advocates have lambasted behavioral targeting for tracking and labeling people in ways they do not know or understand, marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible. Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. This survey finds that Americans want openness with marketers. If marketers want to continue to use various forms of behavioral targeting in their interactions with Americans, they must work with policymakers to open up the process so that individuals can learn exactly how their information is being collected and used, and then exercise control over their data. We offer specific proposals in this direction. An overarching one is for marketers to implement a regime of information respect toward the public rather than to treat them as objects from which they can take information in order to optimally persuade them.Publication Internes Can't Take Money(2010-01-01) Turow, JosephPublication AI Marketing as a Trojan Horse(2018-11-29) Turow, JosephPublication Family Boundaries, Commercialism, and the Internet: A Framework for Research(2001-01-01) Turow, JosephThis paper presents an information-boundaries perspective on the family and the Internet with the aim of helping to set the context for child development in the new media environment. Drawing from family studies, sociology, and communication, it lays out a model for viewing the family in relation to the Web. The paper draws research ideas out of the framework that center on four areas: family communication patterns; filters and monitors; information disclosure practices; and the Internet in the larger media context.Publication A Major Transformation(2006-01-01) Turow, JosephWe argue strenuously, strenuously against the naive sentimentalism on the part of companies that insist "We love all our customers and we love all our customers the same." -advertising executive quoted in Advertising Age, March 1995 [These customers] don't spend much money with you now/aren't big spenders in the category with your competitors and, for whatever reason, lack the capacity to increase consumption in your category in the future....If you can avoid recruiting them into your program from the beginning, do so. In many cases, however, until they have joined the program, you have no way of assessing their value....The goal is to starve them out of the program quietly but effectively. -loyalty consultant Richard Barlow, October 2000 When they were written, those comments were meant to be provocative, even controversial. Today, however, the reasoning they represent is conventional among marketers. At their most politically correct, they speak of a "customer-centric approach." In the words of one writer, "all employees of a company, from the CEO on down, must continually ask themselves what would they like if they were a customer of their company." But as the two quotations above suggest, cold winds of change are pushing executives toward tough decisions as to which customers really count and how to talk to them as personally and as customer-centrically as is practicable. Marketers increasingly use computer technologies to generate ever-more carefully defined consumer categories-or niches-that tag consumers as desirable or undesirable for their business. Increasingly, too, they use computer technologies to vary the content and the scheduling of messages they send to people in different niches.Publication Curing Television's Ills: The Portrayal of Health Care(1985-10-01) Turow, Joseph; Coe, LisaContent analysis of TV programming across day- and night-time genres shows drugs and machines as the ubiquitous modes of healing, with doctors diagnosing incorrectly only three percent of the time.Publication Internet Privacy and Institutional Trust: Insights From a National Survey(2007-04-01) Turow, Joseph; Hennessy, MichaelWhat does the US public believe about the credibility of institutional actors when it comes to protecting information privacy online? Drawing on perspectives of environmental risk, this article addresses the question through a nationally representative telephone survey of 1200 adults who go online at home. A key result is that a substantial percentage of internet users believes that major corporate or government institutions will both help them to protect information privacy and take that privacy away by disclosing information to other parties without permission. This finding and others raise questions about the dynamics of risk-perception and institutional trust on the web.Publication Advising and Ordering: Daytime, Prime Time(1974-03-21) Turow, JosephThe patterns of advice-giving and receiving and order-giving and receiving among television's dramatic characters provide an efficient and economical way in which to study the relationships between knowledge, activity, and sex of characters seen on the home screen. In addition, the study of these patterns allows comparison of the dramatic world of daytime TV - addressed primarily to women - with that of prime time. This article is a summary of some of the findings from a study on the advising and ordering patterns of men and women in soap operas and evening dramas.Publication The Impact of Differing Orientations of Librarians on the Process of Children's Book Selection: A Case Study of Library Tensions(1978-07-01) Turow, JosephThis paper represents an attempt to apply current organizational theory to the understanding of a large juvenile library system's selection goals and guidelines. Writings on goal conflict within organizations suggest that the two groups characteristically involved in a large library's book selection process, the coordinators and branch librarians, would display differing orientations toward the process which would result in conflicting objectives and organizational tensions. A case study using nonparticipant observation, interviews, and a questionnaire survey was carried out to examine this hypothesis. The findings challenge the traditional view of forces guiding book selection in a children's library