Argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone--their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Applying new developments in cultural anthropology and folklore to media studies, offers a series of empirically based audience studies of phenomena that include media scandals, fan culture, representations of race and ethnicity, tabloid journalism, and runaway media hoaxes. [publisher web site].