Week 10: TV studies

Question 1

TV discourses

Answer 1

Rather than the psychological impacts of TV, this lecture seeks to examine:
What does TV produce?
How do these products function?
How does these products relate to the social text of everyday and public life?
How are its products invented and then managed – to deliver information and entertainment?

Question 2

TV discourses

Answer 2

The psychological impacts of TV continue to be a concern
However, cultural and media studies has evolved to examine the more active aspects of TV, as opposed to focusing on its passive aspects only
Useful terms:
Text
Genre
Audience
Nation
Culture
Policy
Industry
Postmodernity

Question 3

TV and predictions for the future

Answer 3

‘Television and the Australian Adolescent’, by Campbell
Published in 1962
Cited concerns of Sydney households in the 50s (about 8 years after the TV had made its appearance in US and UK households)

Question 4

TV and predictions for the future

Answer 4

TV was seen as a monster (this was in 1956)
Young couples would prefer viewing to courting
Children will misunderstand history
Health issues – bad eyesight, curved spines, little vocabulary
Reduction of the concept of family

Question 5

TV and predictions for the future

Answer 5

On the other hand:
Straying husbands would be enticed to come home
Children would explore the richness of life
Families would share common goals and interests once again

Question 6

Text

Answer 6

Text – anything that opens itself to analysis, examination and interpretation
TV – text refers to the program output of TV stations (product)
Taking the active approach – audiences are seen as active readers of texts, ie: TV products
Audiences negotiate and interpret meanings
Audiences are not relegated to passively being interpreted and moulded by TV
Significantly, audiences process according to sign-systems that are defined by history, culture and context giving rise to different interpretations

Question 7

Text

Answer 7

Sign – symbol for what what something means (think of a road sign)
Semiotics – area of how signs work (how road signs are used and interpreted)
Meanings can be transmitted horizontally or vertically.

Question 8

Text

Answer 8

Semiotics (how signs and symbols work) is significant to TV:
it is produced to be immediately accessible
is part of our everyday life
cuts across age, gender, class, ethnicity and region
Umberto Eco:
Coupling signs, syntagms
‘Mixed’ codes involving image, seme and signs
Eg: film imagery – red for anger, lambs for innocence, lotuses for purity

Question 9

Text

Answer 9

Breaking down the TV text however is complicated, as it comprises of:
Actors and actresses performing
Radio waves
Visuals
Economics
Space and time

Question 10

Texts

Answer 10

S-M-S
TV is understood and a process of producers sending messages to audiences
TV is conceptualised via:
Relationship between viewers and writers
How such relationships that generate meanings, operate within institutions

Question 11

Texts

Answer 11

If S-M-S is seen as continuous and cyclical (no beginning, no end) this means that all three S, M and S are intertwined:
They define each other
They inform each other
No one is of more primary importance compared to the other two

Question 12

Texts

Answer 12

Eric Michaels’: interplay of program, genre and audience
8 types of texts:
Conceived text
Production text (script)
Produced text (post-script production processes)
Transmitted text (post advertising or pay-per-view, which transforms the text further)
Received text (transmission from TV to audiences which involves acts such as adjusting TV reception, putting a DVD into a player)
Perceived text (how we make sense of texts) 
Social text (negotiated outcome of audiences’ shared commonalities)
Public text (when public opinion transfers back into the producing private)

Question 13

Flow

Answer 13

Used in TV advertising
Used to maximise ‘hammock’ effect
Interconnecting genres (showing two crime shows in a row)
Interconnecting audiences (two two crime shows may cater for different age groups)

Question 14

Genre

Answer 14

Stems from the Latin word ‘genus’: type
Crime genre, comic book genre, musical genre, horror genre
Interplays repetition (what two films of the same genre share in common) and differences (how two genres differ)
Anti-authorial in nature:
Creates expectations for audiences
Establishes models for writers
Robert Hodge: a ‘system of genres is the product of an act of classification and classification is always a strategy of control’

Question 15

Genre

Answer 15

Genres subject to market terms, as well as morality, conscience and taste
Genres dictate:
Morality and conscience: pornography?
Taste: soap operas, blockbuster movies?
Reality: cop dramas, documentaries?
Possible postmodern view of reality TV – reality turned on itself

Question 16

Genre

Answer 16

2 groups: historical and theoretical
Historical:
practices of scheduling and promotion
John Caughie: audiences understand TV genres in terms of how TV shows organise space and time (we expect advertisements, which organise the flow of TV programmes – recap: we pay for TV by watching ads)
Theoretical:
criticism and theory
John Caughie argues that most criticism of TV shows draws on the elementary without paying attention to its more complex aspects

Question 17

Audience

Answer 17

Audiences are fictional
John Hartley: ‘The TV audience is pervasive but perplexingly elusive: the quest for knowledge about it is the search for something special; literally, knowledge of the species.’

Question 18

Nation

Answer 18

Nation
Different from nation-state
Not empirical
‘imagination which binds citizens of states to those states’
TV has the power to bind audiences
Slippery
Audiences and TV can only meet under TV under the sign of pleasure
Audiences have shared and fragmented understandings of signs and TV programmes
Similarities of discourse re: Americanised Australians, to Malaysians impacted by ‘yellow culture’

Question 19

Culture

Answer 19

Culture is either understood anthropologically (social meaning) or aesthetically (textual meaning)
TV involves both the banal and everyday finite, and the infinite imagination (the profane and the sacred)
Both apply to TV, eg:
Olympics (social meaning for the nation, highly ritual for citizens)
Stephen Heath: TV shares ‘seamless equivalence with social life’

Question 20

Policy

Answer 20

Systematised
Involves a statement of position (eg: policies are often guided by ideologies)
Often a guide for action (eg: health policy, disaster relief policy, financial policy, censorship policy)
Adopted by an organisation
Instrument to achieve hoped for results
Ronald Dworkin: ‘the economic and the lofty’
Economic – market approach
Lofty – insists on govt intervention to develop ‘a rich cultural structure’ – moving beyond TV as a pleasure medium

Question 21

Industry

Answer 21

Culture industry:
Institutions ‘which employ the characteristic modes of production and organisation of industrial corporations to produce and disseminate symbols in the form of cultural goods and services, generally, although not exclusively, as commodities’
Demand is dispersed
Supply is centred
Management is organised through central administration
Those who mobilise cultural technology sit at the economic apex of production
Manipulation of consumers

Question 22

Industry

Answer 22

Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer
How culture industries and technologies develop
Excitement of millions when entertained
Necessitates identical systems of reproduction (in other words, do not fix what is not broken and do not reinvent the wheel)
Edward Shils
Mass society = apex of modernity
Mass society = expanded civil society as central political organs and agendas are receptive to the masses (more horizontally angled relationships, and more down-up vertical influences on power)
Less marginalisation, less authority, acknowledgment of individual rights
Increased interpersonal relations on a wide scale via mass communications
(eg: advertising breaks down high and low culture barriers)

Question 23

Postmodernism

Answer 23

Explaining modernism and postmodernism to 5 year olds:
Modernism:
Historical response to Renaissance period
It’s all about logic: critical of metanarratives and religion
Postmodernism:
Historical response to WWI and WWII, 70s and 80s popular consumerism
Relative, rather than absolute:
Breaking down of history as we know it
Signs and simulations – ambiguity of meaning
Depthlessness
Technologies
Breakdown of high and low culture (think of Mona Lisa postcards)
Nothing is original

Question 24

Postmodernism

Answer 24

Why is TV postmodern? Some examples:
Exemplifies confusion of post WWI and WWII periods
Represents technology
Represents consumerism
Involves signs and simulations to generate meanings
Depthless – The Matrix, reality TV
History no longer matters – no beginning or end (eg: prequels as sequels, retrospective histories as sequels)
Realism meets illusion (documentaries are also constructs)