Our reading assignment for tomorrow's class focused on television. The authors begin by discussing how watching TV promotes passive viewing. That when we watch we aren't actively involved like we would if we were reading text of the show. Laugh tracks, welled timed applause and viewer driven scene settings are the root of sitcoms today. The authors note that TV of today has become predictable have no recognizable author are plot oriented and commercially driven. I have to agree with a lot of what the authors of our text wrote about.
TV of today has become predictable. While the punch lines on occasion still make me laugh, most of the plots involve upper middle class people with unrealistic portrayals of social, racial and economic situations most of society lives in. The commercials are long and the content is shallow and non thought provoking as the authors pointed out in the section on the lack of meaningful themes.
I personally do not watch a lot of the normal TV programing and tend to watch more of the Discovery, Science, Food Network and "off channel" educational content. It drives my kids nuts and allows me to spend lots of quality alone time, especially when I'm in control of the remote!
In addition I read "Life According to TV" by Harry F. Walters relating to a Newsweek article from 1982. In the reading the discussion revolved around a study done by Georg Gerbner of Penn's Annenberg School of Communications. Gerbner's study broke down specific demographics of TV viewers by hours watched weekly, age, sex, race, work, and health. At the time of the study and probably seems like even today he was able associate, with good methodology, that the more a person watched TV the more likely the person would display TV influenced misconceptions of the outside world. A very interesting insight into the results of viewing TV.
The second essay I read was on Sex and the City by Dave Rinehart. I, like the author did enjoy the show and the recent movies. I also agree him that the series was capitalistic, classicist and consumerist. The shoe brands, places shopped, the eateries and the lives of the characters all supported the author's claims about the shows. In the section on Commodity Fetishism he was correct that the characters spent whole episodes wanting specific consumer items, or dated only older wealthy men and wanted only material or sexual happiness in their lives. This section really tied into the opening reading regarding character, genre and plot.
Overall, this was a good reading assignment. I thought that the authors gave us a new look at an old subject. A twist that allows us to be more active in our thoughts on TV as a media.
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