Household
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- “Television, the drug of a nation, feeding ignorance and breeding radiation.” --The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1992
Television is a widely used telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance.
Since it first became commercially available from the late 1940s, the television set has become a common household communications device in homes and institutions, particularly in the first world, as a source of entertainment and news. Since the 1970s, video recordings on VCR tapes and later, digital playback systems such as DVDs, have enabled the television to be used to view recorded movies and other programs.
In the 1950s television replaces radio as the dominant mass medium in industrialized countries, it nearly immediately becomes the scapegoat of the dumbing down - like so many new media before it - of our culture. By the late 1980s, 98% of all homes in the U.S. had at least one TV set. On average, Americans watch four hours of television per day. An estimated two-thirds of Americans got most of their news about the world from TV.
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- broadcasting - music video - film - cult television - electronic media - living room - reality television - TV horror hosts - VCR - video game - visual culture - Youtube.com
Television series
- Civilisation (1969) - Sir Kenneth Clark
Films about television
- Videodrome (1983) - David Cronenberg
Pessimistic views of television
- Neil Postman
Optimistic views of television
- Camille Paglia
Television Culture (1990) - John Fiske
Videodrome
Quote: "The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears in the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." --Videodrome (1983)
Cultural pessimism and television
Three films that thematically deal with the dumbing down of man by television.
- Network (Dunaway comes while thinking of her TV ratings)
- Being there (videot, videocy)
- Fahrenheit 451 (books are forbidden, television omnipresent)
Inspired by Bread and Circuses (1983) - Patrick Brantlinger
In his book Bread and Circuses, Patrick Brantlinger analyzes the idea of "bread and circuses" as a narcotic for the masses throughout history. Though he never mentions Richard Dawkin's theory of memetics, the book is the history of a meme, a collection of related ideas replicating through history. Brantlinger defines as "negative classicism" the idea that Rome was decadent and that our society is sliding downhill to a Roman-style decadence. "The shade of Rome," says Brantlinger, "looms up to suggest the fate of societies that fail to elevate their masses to something better than welfare checks and mass entertainments." --http://www.spectacle.org/496/dream.html [Jun 2006]
See also: television - cultural pessimism - Patrick Brantlinger Television culture
Semiotic democracy
Semiotic democracy is a phrase first coined by John Fiske, a media studies professor, in his seminal media studies book Television Culture.
See also: visual culture - media theory - television - culture - semiotics
Television in Film
Being There (1979) Broadcast News (1987) Ed TV (1999), A Face In the Crowd (1957), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Medium Cool (1969), Network (1976), Pleasantville (1998), Quiz Show (1994), To Die For (1995), The Truman Show (1998)
Films about television
- Deathwatch / La Mort en direct (1980) - Bertrand Tavernier
- The Cable Guy (1996) - Ben Stiller
- Network (1976) - Sidney Lumet
- Secret Cinema (1968) - Paul Bartel
See also
