the fact that he’s Black, the fact that he’s a winning athlete,the fact that he’s carrying the British flag,

Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse” is a way ofsumming up what I think I’ve been trying to say to you. As far as meaning isconcerned, you need discourse, i.e., the frameworks of understanding andinterpretation to make meaningful sense of it.

Cultures consist of the maps of meaning, theframeworks of intelligibility, the things which allow us to make sense of a worldwhich exists, but is ambiguous as to its meaning until we’ve made sense of it.

I’m going to talk about the notion of representation, which is a verycommon concept in cultural studies and in media studies kinds of work, but Iwanted to explore the idea a little bit.

Marshall McLuhan once said hewasn’t sure who discovered water, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the fish. Inother words

Hall argues for a new view that gives the concept of representation a muchmore active and creative role in relation to the way people think about the worldand their place within it.

The term, “The Politics of the Image” refers tothis contestation and struggle over what is represented in the media. T

You, too, can be a Black street hood, but this class is for dark-skinned Blacksonly. Light-skinned or yellow Blacks don’t make good crooks. It’s Hollywood’sfirst Black Acting School; it teaches you everything

Additionally, soaps themselves are highly dependent on their own mode of internal referencing of previous story information, creating an aesthetic value of redundancy and repetition.

The 2000s have been a remarkable decade of transformation in American television

Last summer, I was invited as a keynote presenter for a conference on serial form at the University of Zurich – I blogged previously about the conference and my presentation.

his broadcast TV form of narration proposes itself to a particular kindof viewer, a viewer relaxing at home. It makes certain assumptions, moreor less unwarranted, about this viewer, and proposes a particular kind ofposition of viewing for that viewer.

Suspense then becomes a serialaffair: the heroes and villains become entangled in a series of differentsituations, each of which involves escape, chase, shoot-out, et

Broadcast TV’s fictional segments tend to explore states and incidents inreal time, avoiding the abbreviation that is characteristic of cinema.

Like the news bulletin series, the broadcast TVnarrative (fiction and non-fiction) is open-ended, providing a continuousupdate, a perpetual return to the present.

Non-fiction films have always had a precarious place in thecommercial cinema, and nowadays they are practically non-existent.

Commercial entertainment cinema is overwhelmingly a narrative fictionmedium. Non-fiction films have always had a precarious place in thecommercial cinema, and nowadays they are practically non-existent.

Comforting though that may be, it is a media constructionof science; it is television.

The cultural images that CSI and its spin-offs circulate about the police and about scienceare bolstered by the long-term popularity of the crime genre and by the esteem ofscience

CSI is one of the ten most popular programs among African-American viewers(Hunt, 2005).

Murderwas prominent in CSI’s current season and in the two spin-off series. Murder serves as anemotional hook in the crime genre: it entails the loss of a life, which in itself is important,and it symbolizes a threat to the social order (see Wilson, 2000)

Similarly, the crime genre circulates shifting representations of race. Years ago, thegenre often was racist: black characters, for example, were colorful ‘extras’ or menacingfigures, but, in either case, were portrayed as ‘the other’ and juxtaposed against the usu-ally white protagonist

The series foregrounds scienceand yet many in its audience lack a science background.

. It debuted to 17.3 million television viewers and was ranked eighth onNielsen’s weekly top 10 television programs (Armstrong, 10 October 2000).

Since it first aired in 2000, CSI has consistently been among the top-rated televisionprograms in the United States.

The 1970s TV viewer was arelatively anonymous part of a one-way ideological sys-tem functioning largely at a macro level, but the 2010ssocial media user is constantly registered, addressed,and compelled to participate as a series of discrete anddistributed data points

As John Corner (1999, 60) noted,flow had become unmoored from its origins and wastoo often used by scholars as a broader synecdoche forTV’s semiotic excess, in second- or thirdhand ways thatcould not “sustain the weight of theory which has oftenbeen placed upon it.

ostensibly

Scholars trainedin literary and/or film theory incorporated Williams’sconcept into their studies of television as an ongoingsemiotic system that reinforces dominant ideologieswhile inoculating audiences with glimpses of “resis-tant” perspectives (see Altman 1986; Browne 1984; Feuer1983; Modleski 1983).

In all these ways, and in their essential combination, this is theflow of meanings and values of a specific culture.

As in the earlier analysis ((ii), (a)) the lack of demon-strated connection between items is evident.

(with flower on hat) This Thursday is White FlowerDay at Macy’s. It’s one of the biggest one-day salesof the year, at all Macy’s. (Waves) Don’t miss it.Announcer 2 (Medium) In international news today, the verygood news coming out of the Republic of Chinabecause a man who had been there for an awfullong time is finally out.

What seems to me interesting in this characteristic evening newssequence is that while a number of important matters areincluded, the connections between them are as it were delib-erately not made.

The problems of sequence and flow are already apparent

The specific content is in some cases worth special notice.There is a significant frequency of military material (much of itretrospective) and of costume-drama in BBC and Anglia pro-gramming. Anglia and (to a lesser extent) BBC 1 carry importantamounts of American material. The BBC 2 mix is more cultural(and international) in its range, as is KQED, but BBC 2 is alsoquite closely attuned to specific English middle-class interests.Channel 7, as has been noted, has a limited range of largelypre-made programming

First, there is the flow (which is at thisstage still, from one point of view, only sequence) within aparticular evening’s programmes. For this we can use the generalnotation which has become conventional as ‘programming’ or‘listing’

It is then not surprisingthat so many of these opening moments are violent or bizarre:the interest aroused must be strong enough to initiate theexpectation of (interrupted but sustainable) sequence. Thus aquality of the external sequence becomes a mode of definitionof an internal method

I believe I registered some incidentsas happening in the wrong film, and some characters in thecommercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came toseem – for all the occasional bizarre disparities – a singleirresponsible flow of images and feelings.

Here there was something quite differ-ent, since the transitions from film to commercial and from filmA to films B and C were in effect unmarked.

Most of our habitual vocabulary of response and descriptionhas been shaped by the experience of discrete events.

The difference in broadcasting is not only that these events,or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by theoperation of a switch.

, of planned flow, is then perhaps the definingcharacteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technologyand as a cultural form

he basic comic plot uses the young couple'sunion to symbolize the promise of the future, guaranteeing the possibilityof personal change and, with it, social change.

This also caused the industry to redefine the measure of the popularityof a particular genre or program. "Popularity" came to mean high ratingswith the eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old urban dweller, rather than popularity with the older, rural audience that had kept the Paul Henning sitcoms on the air throughout the 1960s. Later, the industry refined its modelaudience once again. During the "Fred Silverman years" of the mid- tolate 1970s, the audience for sitcoms was defined as mindless teenagers;the result was shows like Three's Company, Happy Days, and Laverneand Shirley. In the 1980s, the desirable audience-at least for the NBCnetwork-became the high-consuming "yuppie" audience, thus definingthe popularity of such shows as Cheers and Family Ties.

The survey found that 75 percent of viewers had remote control, andof those, 30 percent said they try to watch two or more shows at once-either occasionally or most of the time. T

Of course, it was not uncommonduring the Hollywood studio era (and it is even more common in contemporary Hollywood films that no longer exhibit the distinct genre boundaries of yore) for new genres to develop out of the recombination of previous genres

The approaches to genre that we have discussed might be summarizedunder three labels-the aesthetic, the ritual, and the ideological approaches

For example, althoughHomer did not refer to his own work as an "epic" poem, both industry andcritics employ the categories of "Western" and "sitcom?'

Heclassified fiction into modes according to the hero's power of action-eithergreater than ours, less than ours, or the same as ours-arriving at suchcategories as myth, romance, epic and tragedy, comedy, and realistic fictionaccording to the hero's relationship to the reader. Frye points out thatover the last fifteen centuries these modes have shifted, so that, for example, the rise of the middle class introduces the law mimetic mode in whichthe hero is one of us (pp. 33-35). As for genres, Frye distinguishes amongdrama, epic, and lyric on the basis of their "radical of presentation" (thatis, acted out, sung, read), viewing the distinction as a rhetorical one withthe genre being determined by the relationship between the poet and hispublic (pp. 246-47)

Aristotle implied, tragedy could then haveits ideal impact on an audience. (In a similar way, although Hollywood filmgenres are constructed from actual films, the genre itself is frequentlyspoken of as an ideal set of traits that inform individual films. Thus, although many individual Westerns do not feature Indians, Indians remaina crucial generic element.)

In a similar way,literature may be divided into comedy, tragedy, and melodrama; Hollywood films into Westerns, musicals, and horror films; television programsinto sitcoms, crime shows, and soap operas

“e style of acting in television is determined by the conditions ofreception; there is simply no place for the florid gesture, the overprojectionof emotion, the exaggeration of voice or grimace or movement, inside theaverage American living room.”

is means thatvulgarity, profanity, the sacrilegious in every form, and immorality of every kind willhave no place in television. All programs must be in good taste, unprejudiced, andimpartial.

the networks emerged from the war with abroad public relations strategy, emphasizing both their patriotic role indeveloping wartime military electronics and the philosophical defence ofcommercial broadcasting.

imultaneously with the first round of the Justice Department’s effortsto divest the Hollywood studios of their theatre ains and outlawestablished distribution practices in 1938, the two broadcast networks faceda period of unseling antitrust and regulatory scrutiny.

Broadcast regulation in the United States has been founded upon twoopposing principles: that the federal licence confers a privilege, not a right,to the broadcaster to operate in “the public interest” using public airwaves,and that the licence establishes and protects the broad de facto propertyrights of private operators of television and radio stations under restrictedoversight of network operations and programme content.

ideological and economic constraints during television’s early growth, hadinfluenced the commercial structures and programme forms of the mediumin America, as well as the relation of U.S. television to the rest of the world.

e first decade of commercial television in the United States set in place themajor economic actors, programme forms, and regulatory structures of thevast American TV industry of the next thirty years.

ave anendless stream of advice to mothers on ways to prevent their ildren frombecoming antisocial and emotionally impaired

On thefew occasions when sets did appear, they were placed either in the basementor in the living room. B

In 1949, Better Homes and Gardens asked, “Where does thereceiver go?” It listed options including the living room, game room, or“some strategic spot where you can see it from the living room, dining roomand kiten.”

In fact, the spatial organization of the home was presentedas a set of scientific laws through whi family relationships could becalculated and controlled

Television was supposed to bring the familytogether but still allow for social and sexual divisions in the home.

Mostsignificantly, like the scene from Rebel without a Cause, the mediadiscourses were organized around ideas of family harmony and discord

instead had learned of the incident through an outsideauthority, the television newscast

“bad reception,”

As the camera lingers on the TV set, Jimconfesses his guilt

Lynn Spigel is associate professor in the Department of Critical Studies, School ofCinema-Television, University of Southern California, and the author of several studiesof television, including Make Room for TV.