The economic viability of television is more easily proven than are the medium's capacities for cultural attainment.
This goes back to the age old question of "is art valuable?" Especially in a capitalist society, I think art is disregarded very often, but maybe that's starting to change in recent days?
Narrowcasting is more suitable for preaching to the converted than for the kind of street-corner appeal apro-pos to over-the-air transmission.
This makes me think of targeted advertising. Narrowcasting allows corporations to target their advertisements toward an audience that they know will be more likely to buy their product.
In effect, Walt identified the program with the park in order to create an inhabitable text, one that would never be complete for a television-viewing family until they had taken full advantage of the postwar boom in automobile travel and tourism to make a pilgrimage to the park itself.
This really hasn't happened since Disneyland, no one else has tried something of this scale, which speaks to Disney's keen eye for the entertainment industry, and maybe to his slight insanity for even trying.
We are trying to carve our own network character, to create new audiences
This is in stark contrast to what happens today, I think. A lot of TV stations are trying to copy the success of others, and a lot of television programs seem to have similar premises and themes -- I think of police dramas and mockumentary comedies.
"The real strength and vitality of television," he claimed, "is in your regular week-in and week-out programs. The strength of motion pictures was always the habit of going to motion pictures on a regular basis, and that habit was, in part, taken away from motion pictures by television
Something similar is happening today with streaming and network television. The appeal of watching whatever you want whenever you want takes away the appeal of network television.
Walt and Roy Disney entered the 1950s with a plan to transform the Disney studio from an independent producer of feature films and cartoon short-subjects into a diversified leisure and entertainment corporatio
This must have been one of the first instances of a true multimedia corporation. The risk of trying to create something that hadn't been done must have been scary, but clearly it paid off, a testament to Disney's vision and ability.
"watching television", rather than that we have watched "the news" or "a play" or "the football" "on television" ', and that (b) 'many of us find television very hard to switch off
This was my biggest issue with the Williams readings. He seemed to assume that every TV consumer was watching TV for the entire day, when in reality people often turn it on as background noise, or just tune in for specific programs, or get up to do other things while commercials run.
In 1937 as many as 109 public viewing rooms were known in London.
It's interesting how our way of sharing television with others has evolved from actually having to go out somewhere and watch it in a room of potential strangers, to being able to sit down with friends and watch something from home. I think TV followed a similar path to cinema in that sense, going from theaters to DVDs, but it's also interesting that the theater has lasted the test of time but TV viewing rooms haven't.
TP1Pvision, as an idea, was involved with many of these developments.
I think this is why we struggled to define television. How is it different from film? Does the simple act of viewing something on a smaller screen make it television? If I show a slideshow on a monitor, have those photographs somehow transformed into a television program? It's interesting to think about and something I'm sure will come up time and again.
levision is again, in effect. a technological accident. but its significance lies in its uses
I think I agree most with this sentiment. In a sense, all mediums for art are an accident -- the Lumiere brothers weren't trying to direct The Godfather, but their invention allowed it to happen. And I think that is how art is formed, by working within your limitations to create the best work that you can.
There is mutual transfer between their formulas and those of separate programmes. The encapsulated information of the news item is transferred to the mode of recommending a cat food
I had never even considered that commercials could be chosen or specifically created to be viewed after certain programs, but it makes sense that companies would cater to a certain audience, and even potentially capture a new audience, by continuing the stream of thought from the program to the commercial.
In American television, after two or three minutes, this is succeeded by commercials. The technique has an early precedent in the dumbshows which preceded plays or scenes in early Elizabethan theatre. But there what followed the dumbshow was the play or the scene. Here what follows is apparently quite unconnected material.
Is this the precursor to the cold open? The tease or cold open seems like an obvious example of flow, or how it can be interrupted when your attention is grasped by a show and then you're immediately shown commercials.
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 seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it's just my being raised watching shows and movies with commercial breaks, but I've never gotten confused about what happened in the trailers or commercials and what happened in the program I was watching.
News programmes, plays, even films that had shown in '\-Wti;:Ul<ll:> 38 SpecifiC Whole performanCeS, tO be interrupted for commercials.
It's interesting how film and television shifted to suit advertising, and how that change is now slowly being reversed with the advent of streaming.
The kind of programming one sees on Saturday . morning is decidedly different from what airs on most stations on Thurs-day evening or Sunday afternoon
This ties back to synagmatic arrangement in the Seiter reading. TV genre can be defined by, amongst other things, where a program lies in a TV schedule. The Seiter reading didn't go into much detail as to how we could define genre in this way, just that it was one way to, but I think this part of this text gives a good definition: that audiences change depending on the time, so certain genres will be aired in certain time slots.
A syntagmatic arrangement of game shows might be based on their sequence in programming-their place on the TV schedule, with morning shows first and evening shows later.
I've never thought that television genre could be defined in this way. I'm still not sure that this can be considered a hard and fast rule though, and I think the concept of a syntagm has changed drastically as streaming has become the main form of TV viewing. What is the streaming equivalent to a TV schedule? How do you syntagmatically arrange streamed shows?
Forwards signals, among other things, conformity, normality; backwards, therefore, signals the opposite: ab-normality, non-conformity.
The binary opposition thing was a little confusing to me, but seeing an example of it made the idea a lot clearer. It's interesting to see how this super broad idea of dichotomy is used so often, and in ways that even the show creators probably didn't realize. They probably just thought, "if we make the anthropomorphic wolf wear his hat backwards he'll look cool and rebellious," but hidden under that simple idea is the dichotomies of nature and culture and conformity and rebellion.
Coniiotati9n Isasecond~order signify-ing syst'emthat-uses flie~fiist sign, (signifier and signified), as its signifier and attaches an add1tiona:rmeaning, another-sign1fied, t~ it.
Why is it necessary to go into this specific of detail when describing, essentially, a metaphor? I can understand how semiotics can be used to describe literal meanings of words, actions, etc., but I don't see why it's necessary to define things that represent other things as a signifier of a sign which has another signified attached to it. If everyone understands what a metaphor is why must we muddle its definition like that?
I will hazard the following list of American television narra-tive's most common traits in the early 1990s
It's interesting to see how many or how few of these have changed over the last 10-20 years. Most notably, I think, is that things no longer have to be cut for time. With Netflix and streaming now there's no need to adhere to a schedule built around advertising. Otherwise though, I think a lot on this list has remained the same today.
Direct address refers to the situation that occurs when some-one on TV-a news anchor, a talk show host, a series host, a reporter -faces the camera lens and appears to speak directly to the audience at home
It's interesting how much more common this is in television than in film. At least in fictional programs, direct narration seems to happen often, like in A Series of Unfortunate Events or House of Cards, as a form of 4th wall-breaking that pulls the viewer into the show and makes them feel like their in it. But in film it's seen (at least in my experience) as taking the viewer out of the cinematic experience, like when Woody Allen freezes time to address the audience in his films.
telling us what we are seeing or what to think about what we are seeing
Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of a visual medium, though? If we need to be told how to feel, I think that's a sign of a bad work of art.