Fiske and Hartley - Reading Television

Fiske, John, and John Hartley. Reading Television. London: Routledge, 2003. [2nd Edition]

Originally published: 1978

Argument
Fiske and Hartley begin their explanation of how to read TV with semiotics. They also use Barthes and Mythologies to acknowledge the importance of myths in television. They discuss the audience theory of Stuart Hall.

Their conclusion is that television is best understood as a bardic and oral medium, rather than a literary medium. Examining the images portrayed on the TV is not enough to reveal its full meaning.

Bardic role of television:
1. Articulates dominant understanding of reality
2. implicates members of culture into the dominant value system by endorsing ideology
3. Celebrates individuals who adhere to the dominant ideology
4. Assure the culture of the adequacy of the dominant ideology in facing an unpredictable world
5. Exposes inadequacies in the culture's sense of itself for a potential ideological reorientation
6. Convince audience that their status and identity is guaranteed by the culture as a whole
7. Transmit a sense of cultural membership (security and involvement)

Lotz - Television Will Be Revolutionized

Lotz, Amanda D. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Argument
Television has moved from the Network stage (1952-81), to the Multi-Channel Transitional Stage (1981-2000), to the Post-Network Era. Lotz argues not that networks will disappear or even won't remain the most important channels, but rather will have to evolve to their rapidly diminishing place on television. Similarly, she argues that television won't go away as a cultural concept but rather that the meaning of television has changed.

Ex. The answer to "What's on television?" Network stage: 3 scheduled choices designed for mass appeal. Multi-Channel Transitional Stage: multiple cable "flows" to surf through. Post-Network Era: liberated from schedule, what's on television might mean what is literally recorded on the DVR (or DVDs, or YouTube, or VOD, etc)

Lotz's discussion is interesting though not surprising for someone who has taken two BT courses on TV post-1980. This would make an excellent book for a television history course. It's chapters cover changes in technology of TV (2), changes in production (3), changes in distribution (4), changes in advertising (5), changes in measuring audience (6), and changes in storytelling possibilities (7).

Connections
One of my favorite thing Lotz does is briefly recognize how media theories about television have had to continually evolve as the medium itself has evolved. Raymond Williams's "flow" is no longer applicable when commercials are so easily skipped. Television as a mass medium has been fractured into niches. Still, at the close, she holds that Horace Newcomb's conclusion that "intimacy, continuity, and history were the elements that distinguished television and earned its status as popular art" still holds true, in transformed but somewhat more pronounced ways. (265)