24 has made torture acceptable and a good thing in many peoples eyes.
Pulp fiction detectives have been tormenting gangsters at least since the 1920s. Compared with Bulldog Drummond, Jack Bauer looks like an ACLU activist.
How about that icon of the mid-century American male, Archie Bunker? We laughed & swore never to think like him.
Also, I think that PBS shows like Sesame Street showed kids that learning could be fun. Also on PBS, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos challenged the “common person” to rethink science. I loved both shows.
Love, Phil
TV gives me an excuse to sit on the couch munching snacks while I have essays on the effects of media to write.
Seriously though, I think the jury’s still out on this one, but more recent work has emphasized the freedom of the audience to interpret what they see on television.
But it also gives us a common talking point. Something to talk about with others the next day. I’m sure it happened more when there were less television stations and less TiVos, but still the difference between printed entertainment/news and television entertainment is that everyone watches it at the same time on the same night and can discuss it the next day.
Obviously that is not an iron-clad argument in these days and times but still, even with TiVo, people like to watch their favorite shows at air time. I know I do, just so I can discuss it.
Also, how is television different from radio in this respect? (re: gives us a reason to sit on our asses and not interact with one another for four hours every evening). Or did you grow up in a time pre-radio, too, where everyone sat around and discussed current events after dinner?
Personally, I think it’s nice to have a few zone out hours every day. If you spend 8 hours interacting with people at work than an hour or two interacting with the family after work, do you really need to spend 4 more hours engaged in further discourse?
It simultaneously gave the world Kathy Griffin, and showed how unfunny and annoying she is.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that those four hours probably weren’t free time before radio and TV. Urbanization and technology gave us those fours hours and radio and then TV emerged to fill the void. That’s one of the points in the article linked to by Shalmanese.
So, I pose the hypothetical question: What would most people do with their free time if TV never existed?
Actually, the phenomenon of celebrity culture was alive and well in the 19th century.
Sarah Bernhardt, for one, was ridiculously popular in both Europe and the US, well before the advent of television or film. Part of it had to do with her talent as a stage actress, but much of it had to do with her scandalous career as a high-society courtesan.
Edmund Kean also was quite famous in his time. Or howzabout Lord Byron, who had European society all a-twitter because of his scandalous poems and even more scandalous behaviour?
Film and radio made it much easier to become “world famous”, so to speak, but there were still plenty of celebrities to feed the gossip mills and to be admired from afar by the public.
In your three examples, you mention that they we’re the subject of gossip. But, were they admired? Did children want to grow up to be Sarah Bernhardt or Lord Byron? How many 11 year-old girls want to be Britney Spears now?
Actually, some probably did. The difference is likely just a matter of how much people have access (via TV) to the work of Britney Spears verse how many people had access to to the work of Sarah Bernhardt in 1880.
The other side of that coin, is how many more people have access to information more meaningful than the work of Britney Spears. I’ll use myself as an example. In 1981, when I graduated high school, we had one TV channel with limited programming. I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career. I stumbled into college mostly by accident. There, I learned about the possiblity of becoming an engineer. Until then, I had no idea what an engineer did.
Today, I can watch the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, etc. and see all sorts of career possiblities that pique my interest. If I had had access to those channels as a kid, college would never been questioned; it would have been a given.
That (IMHO) is the most positive impact TV has had. It lets kids see the other side of the world. Unfortunately, you have to accept a lot of Everybody Loves Raymond as part of the package.
Or that we can glean DNA from an object the person once farted in the vicinity of.
Not as up front or as popular. 24 even influenced the interrogators.
Wow, thanks for sharing that!
Or simply stupefied with media saturation. Seems like advertisers feel a need to get more and more creative every year – just to compete for our attention.