Chapter 8 - Television Realities Flashcards
What does television realism aim to achieve in regards to society?
It aims both to hold up a mirror to society itself and to show the diversity that exists within a society which is assumed to have an overall unity
What does television realism aim to achieve in regards to culture?
It aims to construct a sense of organic and unified culture, partly by exhibiting the complexity and diversity of culture
What does television realism aim to achieve in regards to ideology?
Television realism consists of a negotiation between ideas of unity and difference, familiar and unfamiliar, and thus performs an ideological role in shaping the norms of society
What is a commodity?
A raw material or product whose economic value is established by market price rather than the intrinsic qualities or usefulness of the material or product itself
What is convergence?
The process whereby previously separate media technologies merge
What is identification?
A term deriving from psychoanalysis theorises of cinema, which describes the viewer’s conscious or unconscious wish to take the place of someone or something in a television text
What is metonymy?
The substitution of one thing for another, either because one is part of the other or because one is connected with the other. For example, ‘the Crown’ can be a metonymy for the British state
What can realism in television refer to?
An adequate relationship between what television represents and how it is represented
Why do the factual genres of television have a special relationship with realism?
They seem to represent something that would have happened anyway
How do fictional programmes make use of realist conventions?
In bother representations of place, character and narrative
What is realism?
The aim for representations to reproduce reality faithfully, and the ways in which this is done
