I wonder if this is true because of the at home audience of the show. I would assume that most viewers are women who have the ability to stay home during the day and watch a daytime television show. This indicates that they likely have the resources to "work on themselves" and make different choices and try new things. The audience is likely not, say, a single, uneducated mother who is working to support her children at one of the jobs that she can get without a degree.

This notion (not just on this particular topic) likely harmed the show and the discussions that could be had on it. I would assume that this meant that only people from marginalized groups who were willing to play this game, and not more radical ones who would really defend themselves as being different and not wanting to fit into 'the norm' would go on the show.

There is something interesting about this inclusion in this article.. It seems as if the authors also can't put themselves in the shoes of the mother, who likely is not proud of what she had to do, but had to get her husband to work so that they could bring in money to live. I understand where they're coming from, but I think that this is unnecessary and sort of goes against the whole point and piles on the already attacked mother.

This seems like the show was using the allusion of being understanding and pushing boundaries to simply parrot the popular belief back to the public while patting themselves on the back for addressing the topic.

It's interesting that the studio audience (I'd assume) has the ability to travel to (likely) another city in the middle of a weekday to attend this taping. It seems as if they have the freedom of either not having children to look after or the financial ability/support system to have other look after them while they go to the studio. This shows how this setup does not work in terms of creating an empathetic space for people to share their stories, as the audience can't put themselves in the shoes of a family where there is one car and a parent who works nights.

This lines up with the popularization of the idea that TV was no longer aimed towards the public good, but was now focused solely on profits and edging out competitors.

This likely led to the consolidation of different aspects of the creation, broadcasting, and retransmitting of television programs that we see exacerbated in the 1980s.

It's clear that even though it was a threat to broadcast networks, people and other providers were always excited have more options.

This shows that people were excited to be able to use this technology themselves, and how things like public access television would take off.

This is similar to the hegemony of the broadcast networks in American television, and the worries over a change to the national cultural identity if the networks were threatened.

It's interesting that the result of this deregulation was the formation of just a few companies that have do much power. It doesn't really make sense that those in power would not have seen this coming, which does support the idea that this was a heavily political move that was aiming to enrich a few companies.

These ideas seemed to have paved the way for how we discuss a lot of media today. Within the 2010s, the decade after this was written, America really started to pay attention to representation in media, with cultural moments like #OscarsSoWhite.

Looking at this from 2024, it is probably best that this happened this long before the internet took over. If people weren't used to getting this level of choice from television at this time, it may not have been able to compete with the boundless internet once widespread use began in the late 90s and 2000s.

It's hard to argue against the fact that fewer options brought people together, as they were all watching the same thing. But it is also important to question whether this is good for everyone. It seems to me that people who were excluded from seeing themselves represented on broadcast TV would become even more left out of the mainstream if that's what everyone was paying attention to and connecting over, and if that's where national cultural trends were set.

Growing up I didn't really understand the difference between broadcast networks and other channels. They had original programming and were known by a few letters, which seemed like any other channel. But looking back I realize that we had access to broadcast networks before we got satellite TV when I was 10 or so, which is what makes them both different and important- we could access them with just the rabbit ears on top of the TV. So now I do understand why the threat to them was so important to people.

It's interesting (and sad) that after decades of this working; of people being able to make a living off of their contributions to the television industry, the shift to streaming was able to throw it all off balance.

It is interesting how different this is today, with so many sequels and franchises happening. It seems like a variance in quality plagues a lot of these, because so many are produced as individual products rather than film length pieces of a larger series.

The fact that they were all new to television, I would guess, made it easy for them to lean on each other and collaborate, as there was no TV veteran to really tell them all how things were supposed to be done.

I wonder if this also has to do with the fact that her character is named after her. I think that this may have made audiences feel like they were really watching her on the screen rather than a character. And since she is the main character and the titular character, it would be easy to see why audiences would put so much of the shows weight on her shoulders.

One of my favorite shows, Community, fired their showrunner for the fourth season. Though he came back for seasons five and six, season four is regarded by many as the worst. It is obvious that without this singular vision the show just did not feel like itself.

This seems like the birth of the greeting card, where the thought of sending anything is as good as sending a personalized message.

I think that we have adopted this into most of our communication, even today. I feel like even with things like email and texts where there is no limit to how much we can write, we rarely see the amount of detail that we can see in old letters that people would write to one another.

This makes me think about how until relatively recently in human history, the concept of breaking time down into something as small as seconds would have been meaningless and nearly impossible to accurately track.

Though I'd assume these boys all come from lower classes, it would be interesting to see the sort of hierarchy between them all. I'd guess that some, like these telegraph boys, get more respect than others.

It's crazy to think that no matter where you lived child labor was normalized to such an extent. I am from rural western PA, where young boys used to work in the coal mines, steel mills, and in lumber to support their families.

This is good to know, and goes against my thoughts about 'unskilled' (especially child) labor back then.

Technologies still (and likely always will) rely on workers keeping them running in some way. There are always systems that need to be maintained and updated.

This seems like very valuable knowledge that these boys can use long after they leave these jobs. Even people who do similar jobs today rely on technology to navigate the cities that they work in.