The one thing you can sayabout those events is that there is no one true, fixed meaning about it.
Hall is pointing out that events are always up for interpretation. This matters because it shows that the media can influence how people understand real life events, while shaping public opinions.
Now what this means is in fact the process of representation has entered intothe event itself
Hall is arguing that representation shapes how an event is understood. This shows the power of media and storytelling and how it can change the way people see and respond to events.
representation doesn’t really capture the process at all, because there wasnothing absolutely fixed there in the first place to represent
The idea that media simply just copies reality is being challenged here. It can suggest that our understanding of events is made from representation and not just discovered from facts.
Through his energy, his passion, hismodesty, he convinced me of the value of what he calls the “intellectualvocation,” the notion that ideas matter, that they are worth struggling over
Hall inspires people to take ideas seriously. He shows that thinking about media and society can help us better understand and influence the world around us.
when we are immersed in something, surrounded by it the waywe are by images from the media, we may come to accept them as just part ofthe real and natural world.
We’re constantly surrounded by media images so it’s easy to take them for granted. I think Hall is saying for us to take a step back and think critically about what they show and why.
Stories that utilize these plot devices,for example personal involvement or police family, make the characters seem like ‘realpeople’, which attracts an audience but also reinforces the cultural meanings that areconveyed through the characters
CSI and similar shows make the characters relatable by showing their personal lives or police family connections. This can make the show more engaging and help viewers understand how society views crime and police.
Today, women are featured more in crime dramas, and notions of the ideal cop focus lesson macho displays of strength and more on technical competence, what Messerschmidt(1993) calls techno-masculinity
This explains how crime shows have changed over time. More women appear in these dramas, and characters work together as a team, which highlights changes in ideas and views about gender and work.
Whenblack characters appear, they are more likely to be depicted as members of a legitimateprofession like police officers than as a criminal (Hunt, 2005). However, the nature of therepresentation remains problematic.
This explains that crime dramas have improved their representation of race, showing black characters in professional roles. Their roles can still be seen as limited though because their characters are often set in predominantly white settings which can downplay real racial issues.
Over the past 50 years television crime drama has shiftedfrom story-lines in which private detectives or criminal defense lawyers protected theirinnocent clients, to programs in which police officers apprehend the guilty
This explains how crime dramas now focus on the police as the main heroes rather than on defense lawyers. It highlights that the police are presented as heroes, which can influence how the audience thinks about law enforcement.
Crime dramas are morality plays whichfeature struggles between good and evil, between heroes who stand for moral authorityand villains who challenge that authority (Rafter, 2006)
This explains how the show works. CSI presents good and evil and in a way that viewers feel justice will happen in the end, even though crime and morality that take place in real life are more complicated.
the rise of reality television as a core genre and the pervasive spread of serial narrative across a wide range of fictional formats.
This part stood out to me because it shows how TV in the 2000s wasn’t just about typical scripted shows. Reality tv became very popular, and a lot of shows started having ongoing storylines that kept viewers interested and coming back.
the ways that DVDs and their popularity allow television to be consumed and collected has drastically changed the place of the television series in the cultural landscape as well as altering the narrative possibilities available to creators.
This makes sense because DVDs let people binge shows before streaming existed. I think that it definitely gave more freedom to TV creators in how they told their stories since they could plan longer storylines knowing people could watch it all at their own speed.
After all, the first true use of theopen-ended series format would seem to be the news bulletin, endlesslyupdating events and never synthesising them
This is interesting because it shows how TV and storytelling started with the news. News bulletins keep updating events and don’t have a real ending. I can see how this helped TV later create shows with storylines that continue on over time.
Broadcast TV on the other hand carries large amounts of non-fiction:news, documentaries, announcements, weather forecasts, various kinds ofsegments that are purely televisual in their characteristic forms
TV is really different from movies because it shows a lot of real life content, such as news and documentaries. I think this is why TV can feel like it’s more diverse, since it mixes real life content with fictional stories.
Commercial entertainment cinema is overwhelmingly a narrative fictionmedium
This makes sense because most movies we watch are stories with character and plots. TV, on the other hand, can have documentaries or news, while movies usually just have fictional stories. I wonder if this is why movies feel more complete while TV can feel like a mix of different kinds of content.