Television As The Cultural Forum Summary

In “Television as a Cultural Forum” and Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum”, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch, and Heather Hendershot, respectively, address the role of television as a cultural forum in different eras of television, with Newcomb and Hirsch writing on the Network Era of television in the mid-1980s and Hendershot writing about the Post-Network Era of the 2010s. As explained by Hendershot, her revision of Newcomb and Hirsch’s original cultural forum theory was necessitated by the industrial conditions of the Post-Network Era which fragmented viewing audiences across multiple platforms and channels so that the collectivity inherent in the original theory of the cultural forum is no longer applicable. As such, Hendershot presents

Quoting Victor Turner, Newcomb and Hirsch explain that liminality is, “the ‘inbetween’ stage, when one is neither totally in, nor out of a society” (505), as well as that the arts are inherently liminal, and as such, contemporary cultures use arts to through ritual reflexivity, or examining themselves through art. Thus, they argue that in American that television is the central medium for this “bardic function” of art, which presents a “multiplicity of meanings” (506) and “often focuses on our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas” (506), in a way that emphasizes process, contradiction, and confusion rather than coherence. So, as an art, television metalanguage through which we understand who and what we are and how values and attitudes are adjusted and meanings are shifted. Furthermore, in the liminal stage, they argue that, rules can be broken, bent, roles reversed, that there are no normal constraints. 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

No longer is it common for a single show to present a mass audience a range and variety of ideas and ideologies, which she makes evident in her study of Parks and Recreation which she claims still attracts a heterogeneous audience after the old cultural forum fizzled out with the decline of the Network Era and fragmentation overtook the television industry. Even though the show attracts a heterogeneous audience, she explains that it still does not reach the mass audience of Network Era shows like Father Knows Best and, thus preventing the show from maintaining the sense of cultural collectivity and investment through simultaneous viewing. Thus, the special interest groups that Newcomb and Hirsch view as an important part of the cultural forum and its effects within a society no longer exist in the Post-Network Era. With hundreds of channels and platforms through which viewers can access television programs, it is easy for them to avoid what they deem controversial or oppositional and the necessity of network programs, which could perhaps garner the audience necessary for controversy to erupt, to maintain advertiser support, suppresses potentially edgy or controversial topics for fear networks will lose funding. Thus, it is harder to produce high profile controversy. This erases the traditional confrontation of one’s beliefs and