It becomes a substitute for a socia immediacy that is being denied to people.
I believe that many people don't seem to realize how relevant this is even today. When this was written, I presume that television was the closest one could come to being "social" in the sense of being able to connect with many others at once. With the advent of social media however; this has completely changed and now it seems television is the outdated one that is not immediate enough for our society.
The world, threateningly devoid of warmth, comes to him like some-thing familiar, as if specially made just for him: t~e contempt he feels for. it is the contempt he feels for himself.
Another thought that I feel is very relevant today. We live in a hyper-mediated world. What one can't experience we can usually watch. With the advent of sites like YouTube this is even more true. We no longer need a network executive telling us what's worth watching. We can choose on our own. But, in exchange for this access, we have started wondering as a whole "why can't I do that" as well as collectively become more unhappy with our own lives, feeling the contempt referenced above even stronger than before.
Such discrepancies permeate all products of the cul-ture industry and recall the deceit of the doubled life.
The fact that the author uses the phrase "doubled life" here is quite the interesting one. For me, this speaks about the "double life" that the actors and actresses must go through. While they live the life of their own, they also "live" the life that is played through on the screen. However, we don't always think about things in terms like this. We don't see people buying toys from different shows that are labeled as their actors, and because of this, the characters that these actors portray are given a second life as well that indeed is made of a lie. In essence, the products indeed call to the fact that the lie is what we are buying into.
ore completely the becomes <ippearance, the more impervi-the appearance ideology.
Full quote: "The more completely the world becomes appearance, the more imperviously the appearance becomes ideology."
This speaks to me of the dangerous situation we have found ourselves in our current world. A parallel I can think of is the music industry. Before the music video, there was no need for a singer to be inherently "beautiful" or "attractive" to make it in the music industry, as long as they had a good voice. However, with the advent of channels such as MTV, a singer must now not only be a talented singer but also attractive as well as marketable. This has caused our society to focus on a "total package" ideology as opposed to being good at one thing.
its true
I am unable to highlight the actual quote. I am trying o use "Just as it is hardly possible to take a step outside of working house without stumbling across some proclamation of culture industry, so too are the various media it utilizes so seamlessly inter-meshed that reflection can no longer catch its breath between them in order to realize that their world is not the world."
Here, I believe the author makes a very valid point. With the medium of television, we are able to live in a world where we don't have to go anywhere or do anything to experience something. We can live vicariously through others, but this comes at the expense of us never getting to experience these things for ourselves. We lose a part of that experience watching it on a screen. Not only that, but we are also constantly bombarded with messages, so it is difficult to pick which one to focus on.
She behaves toward father in an scribably cruel and inhuman way, and her behavior is of course immeJ: ately rationalized as "funny pranks."
This I feel highlights the fact that television has an unbelievable effect on one's thoughts. If someone sees such acts over and over, they will see these as normal actions. Especially if the person in question has no real guiding force in their lives to show them that it is not. This leads to younger generations developing ideals that skew from the previous generation for better or for worse.
But the perversion of truth, the ideological manipulation, is in no way limited merely to the realm of the irresponsibly anodyne or the cynically cunning. The sickness not in wicked individuals but in the system
This seemed a bit confusing at first to me but then after hearing about the Sinclair Broadcast group thing a couple of years ago, this made more sense. This seems to call out that it is the system that is at fault for ideological manipulation but who is in charge of that system? Is it not a group of "wicked individuals" that are at the top?
A very great number them recognize, with aesthetic sensibility if not with theoretical conceptuality, just how rotten their product is and continue producing it of economic
In this, it is interesting to think about how those who are involved in production of TV shows may have to put aside their own thoughts, their own ideas simply because at the end of the day, money must be made. It makes one wonder, what price is someone willing to sell their ideals at in order to make money? It seems for TV production, the price is a paycheck.
The culture industry forgets its moralism JS soon as it has the opportunity to make suggestive jokes about the image of the intellectual that it has fabricated itself
This quote brings to my mind the idea of political correctness. TV and other media will do their best to poke jokes at themselves at the sake of potentially alienating others (see Family Guy as an example) and say that the those audiences just "don't get it" creating this fake sense of intelligence that is needed to enjoy the show or movie.
The narrowcaster seeks not all, but a rightly constituted group: a subculture, a segregated element, a gang, or an affinity center of some sort
To be honest, this makes me think of most cable networks in a whole new way. Many often associate a channel with being a "broadcast" but for some channels such as MTV, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, they are indeed targeting a specific demographic. A specific audience that is indeed "narrow". It puts a whole new perspective on things.
As a result, opposition to television is opposition to the free market and, by easy exten-sion, opposition to freedom itself.
This line is both poetic and infuriating to me. Poetic because the language is quite flowery but it irritates me because it seems (to a certain extent) true. There are many things that people will decry is an affront to our freedom in the US. Television being one of them. To not want to watch television seems downright crazy to most people. Is this what our culture has been relegated to?
McLuhan himself often pointed out that the first content of any new medium is a previous medium.
I agree with this statement here. We often see a new medium (at least when it comes to the media) piggybacking off of a media form that came before it. Even today, many shows are still based off of books which shows this is still very true.
However, before World War I, entertainment broadcasting was an activity to spend money on, not to make money from.
I find this fascinating to think about. Many see television as something to make money on, to use as a tool for exposure. Not many see it as a hobby anymore. I have to wonder if YouTube and Twitch are the current day equivalents to this ideology.
It. is against this background that we have to look at the development of broadcasting institutions. at their uses of the media. and at the social problems of the new technical phase which we are about to enter.
This seems to be a timeless statement. There appears to have always been struggles with how television should progress. Now, with the advent of social media, a whole different set of challenges have arisen. What is a good length for an episode? How sensational does the news story have to be? Society is always going to have problems but it seems the issue of how television should handle it will always exist.
Television then went through some of the same phases as radio.
Why is it radio and television followed similar paths? Looking at going from the printed word to radio, there was drastic changes involved. I have to wonder if the reason for this is because people seemed to find broadcast and television the "natural progression" for radio.
Thus, if seen only in hindsight. broadcasting can be diagnosed as a new and powerful form of social integration and control.
This brings up a very interesting thought. How much of what is broadcast to us is meant to influence our thoughts, control what we do? We often imagine the television controlling us as something from science fiction but looking at what we see, what news is presented, the shows selected, it is a very subtle was that the networks and by extension whomever controls the network controls what they want us to see. We do exhibit some sense of control over what we watch, but then instead of listening to one person's ideals, we are presented with another's.
Yet in each of these stages it depended for parts of its realisation on inventions made with other ends primarily in view.
Pointing this out I feel is a very important thing to do. Many people I've spoken with don't really think about television as a culmination of events or inventions but just that it came into existence. For television to happen, it had to be thought of and then brought into existence slowly. In this sense, it feels like television has (at least at its creation) been "ahead of its time" in a sense.
Most of the traffic in programming, concepts, ideas, styles, etc. is one-way, though: from the USA, and to some extent the UK, to the rest of the world.
I don't completely agree with this idea. If we look at television from all over the world, there are few programs that do not have some sort of at least US/UK influence whether it be story driven or from a more technical stance. With the quick and easy access the world has to each other's broadcasts, we see overlap starting to occur though. How many iterations of American Idol (you can change the name to what country you are viewing) are there in the world? On the contrary, looking at The Good Doctor, this show originated in South Korea but has spawned a successful series here in the States. Where we have influenced the world, the world is starting to influence us right back now leading to a more two-way street as globalization becomes more prominent.
Broadcasting services were to be financed by quite low, politically defined licence fees, even if some . Television, Broadcasting, Flow: Key Metaphors in TV Theory 25 countries also allowed public service corporations to carry some advertising for additional income.
I have to wonder if the difference between license fees and the advertiser-based model have any real true effects. By being forced to pay for a specific television station (such as BBC in the UK), does it make them feel more apt to watch? Something like a "return on investment" idea whereas in the United States, we seem to be more apt to discard our channels since we don't directly pay for specific channels but more the broadcasting itself. We pay in other forms (such as FCC fees on our cable bills), so we don't feel a strong tie to any one channel.
The rationale behind broadcasting was in other words the industrial interest in marketing commodities. Audiences were addressed primarily as consumers, as individuals interested in improving their everyday lives by purchasing certain things with whatever money they had.
I think this model of television production is interesting to look at. When you think about it, the form of entertainment is never the real purpose of what you see. A show is meant to draw your eye to the commercials, a single on the radio is meant to sell an album, the articles in a news paper again are to draw your eye to the advertisements. No matter what media form we seem to engage in, this still rings true, even more so today as any show will have any number of sponsors, all vying to get your attention and your extra money.
public viewing of television seems to have been the way in which most of the early BBC audiences actually experi-" enced the medium.
This shows how far the idea of television has come as time progressed. Today, there are not many stations that are willing to allow their networks to be broadcast in public. Looking at how all homes who want must have their own subscription to cable, sharing of streaming site passwords is looked down on (Netflix and Hulu have limits on how many screens one account can use at a time). Before, the metaphor of "spreading seeds" seemed to be more apt to use. Now, it seems that television isn't about "spreading seeds" as much as "spreading products".
This is defined as programmes specifically made for and offered to children, at certain special times. Children of course watch many other kinds of pro-gramme, but this separable category is significant.
When looking at "Children's Programming" and regular programming, it seems to me that even in the breakdown later on in the text, that the only real difference is demographic. Why should we separate the "children's programming" from the regular when analyzing the amount of time a certain program is on? Is it only because they are aired at special times? Is it only because they target children? It feels like here, all of this type of programming is lumped together, not accounting for the differences between the shows.
I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem -for all the occasional bizarre disparities -a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
This comment stands out to me. It seems that the author is not used to the "American" way of broadcasting and the show something-commercial-show-commercial-show-commercial is foreign to him. Looking at it from this perspective shows that perhaps our way of broadcasting is in a sense flawed. The real word that caught me here though was "irresponsible". For many, the sudden jarring of show to commercial is natural, expected even. It is highly unlikely that the channel directors at the various stations are being "irresponsible" as much as "doing as they are paid to do". Brands usually put commercials into shows for a reason. The goal being to catch eyes. But, this also shows that American broadcasting is more focused on the advertising aspect than the entertainment aspect most people believe television is to be used for.
extensions of the service have of rationalisation
(The full quote is: "extensions of the service have brought further degrees of rationalisation and specialisation.")
This really stuck out to me because if you look at the state of cable television today, there are very little "general entertainment" stations out there today. Most of what most people call "local" channels fill this need but as you go into the more commercial and pay-to-view channels, you see channels that fill more niches. The problem I see is that because of this, those niches don't challenge people's ideals and thoughts. So it not only creates a sense of specialization but also increases the information bubble of their viewers. While this is good for the channel (the idea of "this channel aligns with my ideals, I'll keep watching" comes into play meaning more money to the channel) it also creates a vacuum of information coming from it which in some cases be dangerous depending on the programming of the channel.
'variety shows' -where the main emphasis is on comedy
I think this puts the "comedy" under a specific category and I am not sure I agree with it. Looking at Modern Family as an example, we see that this isn't quite a variety show as this line would imply. I would consider the sitcom more under the drama umbrella (if an umbrella must be required). This here shows the evolution of television and how what could easily be defined is no longer so easily defined.
They are the mouthpieces for the stations, seeking to form personal, not technological, connections.
I have to disagree with this. I do not see networks as trying to form "personal" connections with their viewers. When this was written, it may have been the case but it seems now, these networks are possibly struggling with being "faceless" entities in that there is no "network connection" between them and their viewer. Anyone can watch any show on NBC at any time using a computer or other internet connected devices. Same with ABC, and certain CBS shows. There is no need to have "channel loyalty" anymore. It seems now, the focus is to have the shows people want to watch in order to keep people tuned in, not making the relationships as in the older days.
when the teller tells the tale, that teller is not bound to follow chronological order; events can be presented in any order the teller finds most effective.
This makes me think of the many shows that use the use of flashbacks or breakaways. While maybe not the "best" example, this reminds me of Family Guy. The show uses many breakaway gags and completely "irrelevant" things in order to tell that week's story. Seth McFarlane does not need to say "a happened so b happened then c happened" in order to get a point across. He can say "a happened (cut away to b happening) and so c happened". The order in which we have things told to us can play just as important of a role as the story itself.
This intangible nar-rating presence need not be thought of as a person, but rather as an agency, that which chooses, orders, presents, and thus tells the narrative before us.
Another important thing to think about when looking at television as a whole. It brings to mind the need to be critical when taking in. This line here shows that there is not always a person but a larger agency calling the shots. They are who is in charge of what we are seeing, hearing. Therefore, it can be implied that our thoughts regarding what we see may not inherently be our own but thoughts constructed for us. Quite scary when you look at it in those terms.
On the evening news, an unembel-lished recital of the latest economic figures is merely informative, but the story of the Congressional battle over passage of a hotly debated bill is just that: a story.
This is interesting when you think about how we receive news. What channels focus on what, what is their target demographic? These things really count when you look at what "features" are placed throughout the broadcast. It isn't always the reciting of the figures people look for but the personalities behind the news, maybe even the glimpse into a seldom seen part of their community.