Core response 2 - Week 3

I really liked all the texts for this week, although I had trouble with some things. For example, Newcomb and Hirsch portray TV viewers as bricoleurs that make their own interpretation of TV content given what they bring to it (values, attitudes, personal experiences, etc), and discuss that altogether TV acts as a cultural forum rather than solely as a place of reproduction of hegemonic ideology. That is why they claim that just the raising questions in a show is important because audiences are introduced to social problems that way, despite whichever resolution the show presents to the issue (and indeed this was clear with both the examples we saw). This is all fine, but I am not that comfortable with their treatment of TV as a liminal space because one of the characteristics of liminality is a sort of suspended state where anything can happen, and so I find it kind of dangerous when it comes to TV. In other words, the authors state: “The skewed demography of the world of television is not quite so bizarre and repressive once we admit that it is the realm in which we allow our monsters to come out and play…” (p. 564). The problem I have with this is that that only works if we consider TV as a mere reflection of public thought, acting as a sort of cultural agora where things that inhabit people’s (or individuals’?) consciousness are enacted, but I think that TV also helps construct reality which means that those “fantasies transformed into plot structures” might be worth cautious analysis, particularly because it is not clear whose fantasies those are. Despite this, I do think that this text provides an important perspective that probably helped move the needle from more structuralist approaches, such as transmission models like “hypodermic needle” that assumed one passive, tabula rasa audience, without discounting the production end of this process. Given that the TV structure/broadcasting system in that text is radically different now, Hendershot’s piece was a great complement because it takes into account precisely those differences, particularly the contrast from “confronting your beliefs” through TV to the “filter bubble” of narrowcasting through TV in all its forms, although these more "general" notions of TV today could have probably been more fleshed out before jumping to the example of Parks & Recreation. 

I really liked Gitlin’s piece and I will mention it more when I present, as I hope that the example I bring forward in my presentation for this class will make clear some of his points in this article. Although I wish he had mentioned Adorno a bit more, especially when describing “format and formula”, I found his breakdown of the ways in which hegemony is reasserted really helpful. Overall, I thought that his discussion of hegemony was very well informed, not just because it follows in the Gramscian tradition, but because while he clearly states that the hegemonic process frames social conflicts into compatibility with dominant systems of meaning, he also asserts that hegemonic ideology of liberal capitalism is essentially conflicted.