Television and Culture Essay Sample

Television is the most popular mass amusement and information medium ; it can be seen as a potentially powerful beginning of socialisation that is capable of advancing its ain position and thoughts about society. Television scheduling is a really powerful manner of communicating. With 1000000s of people watching its messages and propaganda. one show on a individual channel can make a monolithic sum of viewing audiences and alter their perceptual experience of society. By 1990 in the developed universe 98 per centum cent of places had come to possess a telecasting. With its ability to act upon people of all ages. it changes the manner of thought and positions of a individual. Although the telecasting has improved its representation of gender. work forces are still portrayed as the dominant figures over adult females who are portrayed as dependent and emotional. The discoverers of telecasting from the 1890s until the 1950s idea of it as an extra agency for presenting information and amusement. as an extension of telephone. wireless. theater. and film: but it has now gathered to itself a scope of maps beyond the entertaining and informing the audiences. What the inventor’s ne’er rather realized was that telecasting would go a normative. that so much of what we see on the screen would plan to propose how things ought or ought non to be.

We see a telecasting plan incorporating a representation of household life and we have used it as a usher or as a gage of what a typical household should stand for. Of the many influences on how we view work forces and adult females. media is the most permeant and one of the most powerful. It is woven throughout our day-to-day lives ; telecasting insinuates their messages into our consciousness at every screening. All signifiers of media communicate images of the sexes. many of which perpetuate unrealistic. stereotyped and confining perceptual experiences. Womans are underrepresented. which falsely implies that work forces are the cultural criterion and that adult females are unimportant and or unseeable. Work force and adult females are portrayed in stereotyped ways that replicate and sustain socially endorsed positions of their gender. The representation of relationships between work forces and adult females emphasize traditional functions and normalize force against adult females.

The primary mode that telecasting shows a deformed world is in under stand foring adult females. Prime-time telecasting shows three times as many white work forces as adult females or in children’s scheduling. in which males outnumber females by two to one or newscasts. in which adult females make up 16 % of newscasters and in which narratives about work forces are included 10 times more frequently than 1s about adult females. This media portraiture misrepresents the existent proportions of work forces and adult females in our population. This changeless deformation makes us believe that there are truly more work forces than adult females and that work forces are the cultural criterion. Television has represented the American adult females as a “stupid. unattractive. insecure small family hack who spends her martyred. mindless. deadening yearss woolgathering of love and plotting awful retaliation against her husband” . The media portrays both work forces and adult females in stereotypic ways that limit our perceptual experiences of human possibilities.

Work forces are typically represented as active. adventuresome. powerful. sexually aggressive and mostly uninvolved in human relationships. Womans are seen as sex objects who are normally immature. thin beautiful passive. dependant and frequently unqualified and dense. Female characters devote their energy to bettering their visual aspects and taking attention of places and household. Because we let media embrace our lives. this deceits of the genders distort how we see ourselves and what we perceive as normal and desirable for work forces and adult females.

Television and the media has created two classs images of adult females: good and bad. Good adult females are reasonably. regardful and focused on place. household and lovingness for others. They are low-level to work forces ; they are normally casted as victims. angels. sufferer. loyal married womans or house keepers. Even though I Love Lucy had the obvious traditional gender functions. it was a land breakage show for its clip. Lucille Ball was the first adult female to hold the starring function in a situation comedy. Additionally. Ricky was one of the first immigrant histrions to besides hold a leading function. While the show was advanced for its clip in many ways. it is evidently still reenforcing the traditional gender functions that society was anticipating. In authoritative episode “Job Switching” . Lucy and Ethel are homemakers. who when they try and acquire a occupation in the mainstream work force. are either non qualified for many places or ( as the episode shows ) fail at the places they are given. Similarly. Ricky and Fred are shown as incapable of making “women’s work” . The show is warning us. that if we do non follow our specific gender functions ( work forces back uping the family while adult females keep the house clean ) . so terrible pandemonium and devastation will result.

The comedy of this show reinforces the absurdness of believing adult females are capable of making men’s occupations and work forces are non fit to make women’s’ occupations. Television in the 1970’s responded to the 2nd moving ridge of feminism. the female characters were more independent. without being difficult. embittered or without close relationships. During this period. premier clip shows like “Maude” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” starred adult females who were able and accomplishing in their ain rights and populating their lives on their ain footings. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted in 1970. when the universe was booming with the societal. economic and cultural alteration. The Women’s Movement was naming for equal rights. equal chances and equal wage in the work topographic point. In the pilot episode. Mary Richards. a thirtyish. individual career-woman is relocating to Minneapolis. MN following a hard break-up with her long-time fiancee. She was the new modern adult female. on her ain. working to back up herself without a adult male. A full decennary after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” went off the air ; it’s truest replacement “Murphy Brown” was on premier clip telecasting.

The rubric character was an fact-finding journalist and intelligence ground tackle that was fresh from rehab after enduring from alcohol addiction. Murphy was a individual. forty-ish adult female who became unwed and pregnant. It was so controversial for that clip period. that the so Vice-President Dan Quayle infamously spoke out against the show’s discourtesy of household values when Murphy chose to raise the kid entirely. “It doesn’t aid affairs when primetime Television has Murphy Brown. a character who purportedly epitomizes today’s intelligent. extremely paid professional adult female. mocking the importance of male parents by bearing a kid entirely and naming it merely another lifestyle choice” . The media throughout America spent the following several months debating household doctrine and national policy precedences via a fictional situation comedy character. Womans that departed from the traditional functions were get downing to be portrayed more positively. but this was done by doing their calling lives unseeable. This was the circumstance with Claire Huxtable from The Cosby Show.

Claire was around a small excessively much for a on the job lawyer and a female parent of five. She was free from the tensenesss of a demanding calling vs. maternity. which lead her to be labeled “post-feminist” . The working adult female was “softened” to do them more consistent with the traditional position of muliebrity. “Having it all” was the new phrase for the modern-day adult females. The new American adult females could hold a demanding calling. a loving matrimony that was a true partnership. perfect childs and a house that was ne’er a muss even though she did non hold hired aid and she looked better than anyone else at the PTA meeting. Motherhood was no longer perceived as a full clip. womb-to-tomb business. Stay-at-time Moms began vanishing from Television screens. Television households of the mid-1980s were runing on the premise that Mom had a calling and a life offprint from the family. But despite the great additions in the work force. adult females were still the chiefly gender-segregated in lower paying occupations gaining about two tierces every bit much as work forces. The situation comedies Murphy Brown and Roseanne showed the opposite representation of maternity in the “non-traditional” ways. In 1988. the introduction of Rosanne gave American viewing audiences an wholly different position on the trials of the working female parent.

Money jobs were changeless. Rosanne was laid off from her occupation. and Dan’s building occupation was frequently idle due to the recession. The hard-pressed status of the American household. on Television and off. was seen by many as a unsafe component in the hereafter of telecasting. Roseanne put the working category life and non-standard organic structure shapes into premier clip situation comedies. The universe of telecasting continues to germinate and come on. The images have undergone legion alterations over the past 40 old ages and it will go on to turn and alter. While telecasting can be said to reflect the altering functions of adult females. it seems to stand for them in a positive or negative harmonizing to the functions that the patriarchate favours. Common female stereotypes that are found in the media have a powerful influence over how society positions adult females and how adult females view themselves.

Mentions

hypertext transfer protocol: //womenintvfilm. sdsu. edu/resources. hypertext markup language
hypertext transfer protocol: //www. museum. tv/eotvsection. php? entrycode=genderandte
Creeber. G. ( 2001 ) . The Television Genre Book. London: British Film Institute. J. Podrazik. H. C. ( 2010 ) . Watching Television: Six Decades of American Television. New York: Syracuse University Press. Watson. M. A. ( 2008 ) . Specifying Visions: Television and the American Experience in the twentieth Century. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.