This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation's technological achievements.

The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic late twentieth century transformation in the everyday lives of the Buryats, a Mongolian people who live in Siberian Russia. The book challenges the common perception that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state. The author examines the central question of "being a Buryat" and "being a successful Buryat" in the socio-political structures of the Tsarist Russian Empire, later during Socialism and in present-day Russia. The Buryats and especially the intellectual elite of the Buryats are treated as a group which - due to their historical and cultural roots and capability (determined also historically) became an integral and efficient part of the Russian administrative and cultural life.By 1991, the Buryats were overrepresented in nearly every profession in their autonomous republic despite the fact that they made up only around 25 percent of its population..

This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation's technological achievements.