READING TELEVISION: IMPACT OF TV ON CULTURE AND SOCIETY

(With Special Reference to ‘The Mode of Television’ by John Fiske & ‘Television’ by Simon During)

Every program or movie on television has multiple layers of meanings as well as socio-political contexts that are decoded by the audience based on their individual ideological codes and competency. Television has the power of changing viewers’ point of view, in a positive as well as negative manner. And both these essays reflect on how this device as well as the content broadcasted on it has evolved and influenced culture in the last few decades. Television is often regarded as a medium that produces and presents content that reflects the contemporary culture of the time.

Television has a unique ability to entertain and produce pleasure and a series of meanings for a variety of people. Media is self neutral; it shows ethical, moral as well as unethical content. Fiske looks at the television as an agent of popular culture and examines its relationship with cultural dimensions and its status as a commodity produced by a cultural industry that is deeply inscribed by capitalism.

According to him, television gives audiences a social experience that gets penetrated inside the popular culture. Audiences react to what they see, following trends blindly.

The way viewers watched television has also changed with the content, including the placement of the set. This has led to the categorization within the content, based on its suitability. Introducing censorship, certificate categorization of shows, and movies; so that only a particular age group is able to engage with it. However, with the internet coming into the picture everything soon became accessible. TV industry tried changing the timing of shows to cater to different audiences, broadcasting fashion shows, or R-rated movies at late hours in different regions based on the cultural faiths and values of their targeted demographic.

Initially, the family consumed the media content together, which encouraged an environment where audience participation was automatically reinforced. But the explicitness on the Television made it awkward for all the members to sit together and watch a show. Individuals also started having preferences as the number of shows increased on Television.

He argues that audiences need to be productive, discriminating, as well as tele-visually literate when consuming content. Being a hot media, Television turns off the viewers’ imagination, desensitizing their perspectives, that they are unable to pinpoint the dangerous messages in their favorite movies and reality shows.

Television has turned into a household good that has a huge influence on culture and society. And its messages can only become meaningful when the audiences start contemplating the semiotic codes hidden in it, and start using it as a cool medium by consciously participating, analyzing the layers of meaning in it. This way each of their contexts will shape the cultural awareness within their community.

Simon During had similar views, but his essay focuses on the technical elements of what led to the widespread popularity of television. How Disney with its content persuaded people to switch to colored sets turning television into a household good.

Simon uses studies of other cultural and media study scholars to emphasize his points. Paul Lazarsfeld in the forties had pointed out in his works how television viewers sort of subconsciously led people to a capitalist society. Society saw a behavioral change in consumers, as they started to dress and act as their favorite stars. Beatlemania and the popularity of Elvis are the biggest examples of how people started getting effected by Television. Today, this consumer industry runs on advertisements, manipulating the audience using cultural elements to make more sales.

Theodor Adorno had also pointed out how media content and selective viewing can be dangerous, and how Television distracts us from focusing on important issues; the audience becomes puppets, who just consume what is being fed to them without interpreting (encoding/decoding) a word. Television also manufactures our fantasies, creating a false sense of satisfaction that allows capitalism to thrive.

Stuart Hall, on the other hand, tried to analyze communication via a four-stage theory involving production, circulation, use, and reproduction and pointed out how each stage is relatively autonomous. In our social existence, messages have a “complex structure of dominance”, due to the co-existence of power relations. There is a visible gap between the meaning of broadcasted content and its reception. Audiences decode and encode meaning based on their ideology and competency.

I think Television is also partly responsible for cultural homogenization of the world. If you really analyze the cultures around the world are under the strong influence of American Culture. People became more similar to each other, which sound like a good thing but in retrospect it’s not. Our own cultural roots are getting slowly getting damaged.

We rely on TV too much for information. We believe in everything that is said there. Forgetting that news is edited and announced so as to make to make certain impression on a viewer and this becomes the cause of the hatred among different societies of world.

We have desensitized ourselves to westerns exploiting our culture, but get mad, when our make mistakes interpreting American Culture.

The most important thing to take away from this first Unit is that:

Television viewers are not merely viewers but also participants, individuals (they are a part of the society) whose socio-cultural views are formed while watching a show, based on how attentively they watch a program, how invested they are.

While television entertains, spreads knowledge and messages, it also distracts and plays a significant role in constructing and manipulating culture; one cannot deny the role of television in creating stereotypes and misrepresenting sections of society, who don’t have the power or access to correct them. Television has created a weird cultural zone, where the audiences are invested in shows as well as celebrities that they have turned into imaginary creatures living in their heads.

Today audience likes a celebrity not for their work be it acting or singing but for their personality.

Media to some degree is a reflection of our everyday life, it also transverses, fuses, and creates perceptions that might seem our own, but are to some degree manufactured and transferred to us via television sets. It is up to the viewers to educate themselves to detect these meanings and codes and watch television not just as a viewer, but also critique and interpreter.