TV is a multiplicity: a speeding up, a slowing down, history all at once and not at all. It is often alienating and yet acts as the locus of the global village. It is a medium that empowers the viewers: all... [more]

TV is a multiplicity: a speeding up, a slowing down, history all at once and not at all. It is often alienating and yet acts as the locus of the global village. It is a medium that empowers the viewers: all messages are accessible; we can decide when to watch it and what to watch. Television acts as history's archive. It was the television lens that filtered the Vietnam War, the Immaculate Reception, the Exxon Valdez, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. How would those of us who missed that episode of Seinfeld ever catch on to the "Bubbleboy" joke? Today, cable TV stations broadcast sitcoms and commercials from earlier decades that play as ironic relics from a crude and naive culture. The medium continually allows for a re-broadcasting, re-visiting, and re-contextualizing of our cultural moments. Some critics argue that television birthed the Postmodern condition, creating a realm in which we are alienated from each other personally, but recognize each other in the fears and stereotypes writ large across the small screen. The massive reach of televison broadcasting gives rise to a monitoring of our collective consciousness that has been matched by no other art form. As we watch, we all share the same pair of eyes. We see Rodney King on a L.A. highway; aerial shots of SWAT teams escorting students from a mid-western school; fictional dramas played out between beloved characters; game shows won by people eerily similar to ourselves. In short, television offers the vocabulary for a large part of our cultural dialogue. The cancellation of a popular series can send our culture into mourning. Who didn't cry when Barney Miller turned out the precinct lights for the last time? Or when Hawkeye looked out the chopper window to see Honeycut's "Good Bye" spelled out in rocks? In these moments, television seems to slow time down, or at least, to extend it. In no other medium can we follow the development characters and relationships over such lengths of time. Of course, television also speeds up the passage of time, as we measure time in increments of half-hour sitcoms. Unlike feature films, television has explored a shortened collage style of representation. To capture the light-speed attention spans of the late twentieth century, producers and artists have created new art forms such as music videos, flashy advertisements, documentaries that chronicle 200 years of history in an hour, and real-life dramas that offer rapid jump-cuts of police chases and daring rescues. We see footage of actual events, but it is a record of life as witnessed by no one: film editors construct the sequence of events and our understandings of their consequences, and voice-overs are our storytellers. Indeed, television is a telling representative of the pastiched psyche of our modern state. [show less]