Cultural Context
- “Television is the Drug of the Nation”
- “Like Religion Television is a form of Social Control”
- “Television has a disproportionate status in our lives”
- “Television is cool, there’s loads of great programmes and those massive HD, LCD/Plasma screens are so awesome. I’m gonna get a 3D TV and sit in my front room with the silly glasses on, woo-hoo!”
Marshall McLuhan
- “The Medium is the Message” – Like the Cultivation Theory McLuhan suggested in the 1960s what was important (but not so important) was media output. He suggested what was more important was the medium itself, the whole concept of Television as an object in our living rooms that can dominate our lives. Draw parallels with Mobile Phones today.
Cultivation Theory
- “Our perception of ‘reality’ and our understanding of the world is dictated to us (passive consumption) by what we see on Television” (George Gerbner)
Example – TV News
Selection and Construction dictate content with reference to target audiences (Encoding/Decoding theory – Stuart hall) e.g.
- Fox News – Tabloid news with a subjective, bias pro republican editorial ideology
- Sky News – Tabloid News designed to ‘entertain’ and titillate the typical Sun reader target audience (both owned by the News Corporation)
- CNN – Cable News Network: American ‘world news’...
