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Although television seems to be mainly a visual medium which demands very little attention from us, television content depends just as much on written as on oral language. It also demands a minimum level of comprehension. The variety we find in television content is determined additionally by decisions on gender, sexual orientation, age brackets, ethnicity, race and combinations of all the above.
Originally, television conventions -although always unnatural- seemed to be clearly determined to separate reality from fiction, (news separated from entertainment; for example), but as the medium became more of a mass information vehicle, such conventions blended reality with fiction. Currently, television conventions do not necessarily work around reality; the inverse indeed is usually true. One has just to look around to see how our surroundings continues to change due to the influence of pop culture which influences society to a great extent through the air waves.
Television has morphed from a medium determined to spread mass culture, to creating a sense of reality which at the very least is disturbingly false. The medium has become more and more influential. It is a tool to create consent; mass consent. For what purpose? Many. The entertainment industry flourished for the most part thanks to television's wide spread reach. Media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch admitted in England his intentions to manipulate popular knowledge to create support for politicians and policy for the War in Iraq. Members from elite groups such as David Rockefeller admitted how the main stream media has shut up for more than forty years regarding the formation of a World Government led by the Rothchild family who control the issuance of currency around the planet through central private banks, such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve of the United States.
Television has turned into a mass pop culture medium, along with most of radio, newspapers and magazines. In a world where media consolidation becomes more and more common, it is harder and harder to distinguish between news information and entertainment or propaganda. Even though media consolidation is good for business, it is not good for television as a mass culture medium. I personally believe television, like the rest of the mass media, has been hijacked.
Television contributes greatly to the centralization of power and knowledge. In a country like the US with over 300 million inhabitants, only about a third of these possess a television set and in turn, only a fraction of this third has access to the massive variety of alternatives. (De Swaan). Added to this, television's reach is determined by how language is utilized in it. The conversational way in which television programs come to us is unnatural at best. It is scripted, edited, and abnormally spoken. Television language seems to change as the fast as the seasons, which influences the way in which the public sees, hears and watches its content. Writing for television has become an art, which is accommodated to suit every format.
Even if we consider that the language used on television can be understood by most elements of an audience, it also restrains many people's understanding. Television language is not equally effective, either because it is created to reach a certain group or because it fails to deliver a general recognition of what the message is or what its intention is.
Television tries to correct this problem by using “standard language”, which may or may not reach an audience. In general, television language still represents a barrier as it continuously polarizes audiences by leaving out society's groups such as Blacks or Anglo-Saxons, native speakers or foreigners, religious believers or agnostics, etc. The way we understand television is not the way it was intended as most of us do not know how television is made or its conventions. Television watchers understand the medium as a conveyor of content. From movies to soap operas, from news shows to game shows, from documentaries to docudramas. The public does not necessarily know what is behind each minute of air they watch or listen. There is not a dictionary to help viewers understand television or its language.
In a study published in 2004 by doctor Robin Close, an independent researcher of the Natural Literacy Trust, she concluded that the amount and quality of television a human being watches as an infant has a great effect on this being as a future adult and citizen of the world. According to Close's research, a child's age and linguistic maturity, the suitability of the content for his or her age group, the quality of the content viewed, the amount of television viewed, and the involvement of parents during viewing all inform the likelihood of language learning from television. The problem today is that children do not watch content that is appropriate to their age or mental skills, and most of the time they watch television by themselves. ( Close p. 5 ).
The study continues to mention that given the right conditions, children between the ages of two and five may experience benefits from good-quality educational television. For this group of children there is evidence that attention and comprehension, receptive vocabulary, some expressive language, letter-sound knowledge, and knowledge of narrative and storytelling all benefit from high-quality and age appropriate educational programming. The research did not established though, whether children develop grammar, phonological awareness, and knowledge of literacy from viewing such programming. Although there is evidence that children's entertainment television provides opportunities for verbal interaction and talk, there is also evidence that children who are heavy television viewers have lower expressive language scores. The study shows this is more so, in households with low incomes, poor education and that males are the most negatively influenced. ( Close p. 6 ). So how do we as parents, siblings or care givers address the issue of television's influence on a society?
If children who are heavy viewers of television are more likely to be linguistically underdeveloped; it is quite probable the cause of such underdevelopment is the low quality of content or the lack of understanding. The results of studies such as Close's call for more supervision by relatives or higher quality content. This last one is less likely to change since television is today the greatest mass medium available, and therefore, the best way to convey commercial meanings. One cannot expect children to learn the conventions of television at an early age, but it is possible to explain to them how to interpret what they see. It must be explained in the best way possible; putting the content in perspective, relating it to the surroundings, making the difference between what is true and what is not; what is good and what is wrong. Family and society values play a determinant role in understanding la “tele”.
How literate we are as a society depends on how knowledgeable we are. If most of our knowledge is obtained through television, it is imperative we understand how the medium works; how a show is put together and why it is shot in a particular way rather than another. Although it would be too much to ask from a child to understand why a specific shot is used and at what angle, it is realistic to explain how deliberate decisions are when making television; good or bad. Aspects like social interaction, intimacy, space, could be easily explained to an 8 year old. How different societies are and why is it correct or incorrect to do what is shown on t.v., how feelings are portrayed and for what reasons, etc. Later in life, it will be easier for teenagers or young adults to understand the use of verbal language, such as a scream in a horror film, non verbal language, like a middle finger, a wide shot to appreciate a panorama or a helicopter shot to access a view of a congested highway during rush hour.
Although television seems to be a transparent medium, with its slick news shows and all its Discovery Channel HD content, the truth is that it has a whole language of its own, and this language is what determines the programs we watch, and to a great extent how and why we understand its content. As an article in the New Internationalist says, television is a creator of meaning. The images on the screen only appear to be realistic because we think they are. We do actually know that you can't fit a tree into that box in the corner of the room. All the realism is the result of technique – of the way the pictures are selected, colored, framed, lit – of all the conventions covering fact and fiction. The effect of realism is produced by the tricks of the trade – the long-shots, tilts, pans. zooms – and in the way that the sequences are edited. If we see a long-shot of someone walking down the street, followed by a close-up of the face of someone, also walking, we will assume, from the convention, that it is the same person. All of this is based on our habituated recognition of such things as realistic. ( New International, Television: A Creator of Meanings).
It is safe to say that the quote of realism television presents depends also on the things it omits as much as those it includes. For example, when we watch a documentary about lions in the wild, we would never see the production crew with their night time equipment as they capture the lions hunting a buffalo. It would be distracting and unnecessary. The viewer does not need to see the crew to understand what is going on in the TV box. Television is a meaning creator such as any other form of language. It has a set of fundamentals that convey meaning, just as spoken words do. This brings us to the point of how do we understand television even when it seems apparent or common sense. I have to argue that what we see is not always what we get and vice versa.
Television has the power to get us into and out of the matrix which is our lives and the way we live them. Just because what we watch seems to make sense, it does not mean it is real. The fact we watch it on a popular channel or network does not make it more realistic either. What we watch has been carefully put together, the words chosen to describe a situation are cautiously written to “enhance” the viewers' experience. The crisp sound of rain falling on a pond followed by lightning and thunder is arbitrarily selected. A news feed of a police standoff with a group of bank robbers is not shown only to support accuracy, but to attract and sustain an audience. Why shows like “24″ are on? Is it because we want to convey how important is it to torture those who do not give us information? How effective torture is when one wants to obtain information? How it is OK to torture those who do not cooperate? How morally right is it to torture? Do viewers enjoy watching a person being tortured? Does television act as a creator of reality? Does television content become reality? Do societies accept television content as reality? How? Why? it's all about learned conventions. Our learned conventions have to do with Semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning; particularly with connotative meaning. ( Is Television Like a Language Which we Read? ).
I believe there is a general sense of what is wrong or what is right; but more important, there is an even more general sense of who is wrong and who is right, who is good and who is bad. As an audience, we all side with who we are told is right and good, and oppose who we are told is wrong and bad. In a sentence, the problem is that society as a mass audience learns to trust, not to understand.
Television never works around what reality. Even in its most faithful moments, television could not be further from reality. We are given the impression that what we watch is somehow natural while in fact it is produced by the structure of the TV language; the visuals, the scripts, the camera shots, angles, etc. Suddenly, television makes reality, and we all accept it as such. Not only does television make reality, but also determines what we watch. By applying labels to people or situations, television tells a mass audience what is cool, right, wrong and worth watching. It will depend on the viewers' capacity to accept or reject such “reality” and to determine if it is a representation of what he lives or should live. As explained before, the capacity to make sense of a situation presented through a medium like television depends on an audience's education, interactions and values, among other things.
It is a general practice by content producers such as news networks, for example, to ignore the ethnic cleansing in Sudan that does not fit into its sense-making categories, it is much more difficult to ignore important local issues that similarly refuse to be broken down in this way.
The problem is particularly acute when they are working with the 'us and them' way of looking at things. 'Us' is usually taken to mean all the members of the nation and involves the idea of a free, consensual society. 'Them' are generally totalitarian foreign dictatorships. Naturally such foreign unfree societies will have dissidents: equally naturally (according to the logic of binary oppositions) it would be unthinkable for us to have dissidents. (New International, Television: A Creator if meaning ). That is what I referred to when I called television a maker of consent.
In our globalized profit-driven village, it is impossible to think we will see an improvement in the trend television, as a mass medium, has adopted to turn into a commercial tool, rather than a conveyor of culture. The only medium that could overcome television as a mass medium is the world wide web, however it is far from being as complete and consolidated as television is today. If television conventions still experience major changes to accommodate its commercial and/or educational purposes, the world wide web is far from overtaking television as the leading mass medium due to its multiple conventions and decentralization. Television will remain king for a some time. It will continue to be a meaning producer. What could and must change is us, the audience. It is not illogic to think about demanding fairness, truthfulness, more realistic television. We as an audience should demand television content that works for us and not the other way around. It is imperative television audiences become the ones whose ways of making sense are portrayed on television. Traditional content producers are seeing more often than not what happens when their product does not satisfy an audience. Television viewing has declined steeply for news programs, for example, in part because people do not get the news they are interested about. I think the world wide web's You Tube and Google video are great examples of what television could turn into if the audiences' needs are not met. Audience members as content producers is the new trend. Why would it work? Because content is produced by those who demand it, not by profit driven executives. But more importantly, because us as an audience -provided the government does not control it- will still have the option to choose what to watch.
Consulted Literature
Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1989.
De Swaan, Abram. “Notes on the Emerging Global Language System: Regional, National and Supranational.” Media, Culture and Society (London), 1991.
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971.
Natural Literacy Trust. Television and language development in the early years:
a review of the literature. Robin Close. 2004.
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Research/TV.pdf
New Internationalist. Television: A Creator of Meaning. John Hartley. 1983
http://www.newint.org/issue119/watch.htm
Young children, language and television. Dr Deborah Linebarger
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Pubs/linebarger.html
Is Television Like a Language Which we Read? Katie Harris
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/kjh0001.html
The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Language and Television.
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/L/htmlL/languageand/languangeand.htm
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