Media scholar John Fiske was a Professor of Communication Arts and author of eight books. In his books he analyzes television shows to examine their content based on sociocultural meaning that it represents. In order to communicate meaning to their audiences, television uses verbal, nonverbal, and representational codes. John Fiske explains this codes of television using three levels which are: reality, representation, and ideology.
Level 1, reality, is encoded by social codes such as dress, make-up, speech and gestures. John Fiske gives the example of a tree reflected in a lake which may be the setting for a romantic scene. There are different sort of trees which have different connotative meanings encoded into them. It all depends on other technical codes which help in setting the mood of the scene and encoding a completely different meaning.
Watching television has become a major part of today’s western culture, people spend an average of three to six hours a day staring at its screen. Television has a huge impact on society and influencing everyday reality. The media is responsible in persuading people to accept a view of society. To understand the correct meaning of what is shown, people have to refer to their knowledge and experience of the world they live in, so that they can differentiate the reality of what they know from what they see in television.
John Fiske uses an example from a scene in the show Hart to Hart in which he compares the settings, costumes, make-up, action and dialogue used for the heroes and villains. The hero's cabin is larger than that of the villains. It is humanized and made more attractive by drapes and flowers. On the other hand the villain’s cabin is designed with all sharp angles and hard lin...
... middle of paper ...
...side the population of the dominant ideology, on the other hand, will have far different perception of the individuals and lifestyles depicted on this show. A late-thirties, stay-at-home mom in a rural area, for example, will likely see this lifestyle as unattainable and even undesirable in its superficiality. She may perceive the women on the show as shallow, out-of-touch, snobbish and spoiled.
John Fiske outlines the codes of representation which determine the way television is created and understood. Television is designed to signify meanings which appeal to a society’s dominant ideology, but it is circulated to household across a diverse span of backgrounds and social classes. Thus, television directors create and intend a certain meaning, but meaning is truly made when the viewer receives the message and decodes them using his or her unique frame of reference.
This essay will discuss how national attitudes towards the working-class and the impoverished are represented in American Television. The purpose of this paper is to comprehend that television shows are not solely designed to entertain consumers but also contain a hidden agenda whose task is to protect certain ideological perspectives and therefore constant framing strategies take place. The paper will commence the analysis by discussing how males and females are represented in the television show Friday Night Lights, secondly it will look at the
Not only educational shows accomplish these goals, but fictional television programs can often incorporate information that requires viewers to grapple with a topic using logical reasoning and a global consciousness. In addition, not to diminish the importance of reading, television reaches those who may never pick up a book or who might struggle with reading problems, enabling a broader spectrum of people to interact with cognitive topics. Veith has committed the error of making generalizations about two forms of media when, in truth, the situation varies depending on quality and content. However, what follows these statements is not just fallacious, but
Craig talks about how in John Fiske’s book, Television culture (1987, Chs. 10,11), Fiske discusses “gend...
Even with these weaknesses, Postman makes a significant contribution to enlarging our understanding of television and the epistemology it establishes. He may be too fond of typographic America, but he has some very important things to say about how television works, and we should be paying attention.
The many evils that exist within television’s culture were not foreseen back when televisions were first put onto the market. Yet, Postman discovers this very unforgiveable that the world did not prepare itself to deal with the ways that television inherently changes our ways of communication. For example, people who lived during the year 1905, could not really predict that the invention of a car would not make it seem like only a luxurious invention, but also that the invention of the car would strongly affect the way we make decisions.
In the world today watching television is so addictive that everything else looks unattractive. The author argues that television is not lethal as drugs and alcohol but it can have many effects such as children getting more violent and reality seem second best. Every person lives are filled with emotions including anxiety, depression, and stress so after long hard work day the best medicine is to turn the television on and not to worry about anything. For example, I usually drive from site to site to take care of business. So when I return home from work I will sit on my couch and turn the television on and flick the channel until I fall to sleep. As Marie Winn describes, "the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and e...
Any act of conscious communication always true, in varying degrees, two fundamental objectives. One is to inform, instruct and describe, and the other is to entertain or occupy. The products of the mass communication industry made that mandate the particularity that are targeted to a wide receiver, whose acceptance is intended to conquer. The intent of the act is expressed with the term broadcast (spread through mass media), which once meant to sow broadcast the farmland. The cinema, especially the US, is the great communication industry of the twentieth century. Although in recent decades seems to have given primacy to television, the information, education and entertainment on Western culture influence is undeniable.
Presently 98% of the households in the United States have one or more televisions in them. What once was regarded as a luxury item has become a staple appliance of the American household. Gone are the days of the three channel black and white programming of the early years; that has been replaced by digital flat screen televisions connected to satellite programming capable of receiving thousands of channels from around the world. Although televisions and television programming today differ from those of the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984, we are beginning to realize that the effects of television viewing may be the same as those of the telescreens.
Newcomb and Hirsch propose that this characteristic of television is what allows it to functions as a forum in which important cultural topics may be considered. It promotes the various readings established by Stuart Hall that allow for the various interpretations of the text that are required of television as a cultural forum, in which its purpose is to raise questions and promote dialogue, without providing answers. It the texts were to provide answers in their
Up until recently television has been the most prominent medium of entertainment and information in our lives. Nothing could beat Saturday morning cartoons, the six o'clock news and zoning out from the world by the distractions of prime time sitcoms. It is all of these things and more that formed television into what was thought to be the ultimate entertainment medium, that is, up until now. Television in the twenty-first century is not the television our parents watched or in fact what we watched as children. Today’s generation are no longer satisfied with the traditional television experience. Today’s audience no longer has to follow the network’s predetermined schedule nor is television the one dimensional experience it used to be. Viewers no longer need to schedule a fixed time in order to gather information or watch their favourite show (Smith 5). They can record it with the push of the DVR (Digital Video Recording) button or watch it on a device and obtain background information via the Internet. In addition, viewers now have the opportunity to interact with, share, and produce their own material from their favourite show (5). In order to not lose the authenticity of television, media theorists have created transmedia. This new twist on television gives the user more control and more involvement than ever before. The concept has been termed as transmedia storytelling. The online journal Infoline defines transmedia storytelling in its January 2014 issue as “social, mobile, accessible and re-playable.” Originally coined in the 1990’s it was not until 2003 when Henry Jenkins, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, wrote his article “Transmedia Storytelling” that the term began being ...
“A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory” argues that the application of film and literary genre theory do not fully translate when analyzing television, because of “the specific industry and audience practices unique to television, or for the mixture of fictional and nonfictional programming that constitutes the lineup on nearly every TV channel. 2” The goal of media genre studies, Mittell asserts, is to understand how media is arranged within the contexts of production and reception, and how media work to create our vision of the world.
Gauntlett, D. Hill, A. BFI (1999) TV Living: Television, Culture, and Everyday Life, p. 263 London: Routledge.
Everything and every ideal were formed from something else in the world and this rule holds very true especially with television. The themes and ideas t...
Whether consciously aware of what is being displayed or not, media plays a substantial role in influencing consumption patterns and lifestyle. Researchers noted television's power to influence even people who are illiterate. Smith-Speck and Roy (2008) explained that even individua...
Television has become one of the major entertainment providers in our modern life. It sits in the living room of about almost every home in the world and it is the one thing that most people like to come home to after a long day of work or school. Not only does it give us something to laugh or get scared at but it also provides us with valuable information about what is happening around our local community and around different places in the world. But, as good as this sounds, Television may be affecting us without even realizing it. Being one of the major distractors in today 's society, it gets us attached to its content in which a lot of people spend a lot of their time watching. Being thus, watching too