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E-book Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind

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Penilaian

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Yet we cannot foreclose the extent to which some thinkers and theorists, especially looking back over the long arc of TV reception, have raised concerns about the medium’s deleterious potential: its apparent agency in human dissipation and degeneracy. While Raymond Williams offered a critical materialist approach equipped with a searing interest in how serious criticism of TV-as-form was possible (having already co-written Preface to Film in 1954);3 Paul Goodman placed TV in the context of social change and worried about its detrimental effects; Norbert Weiner charted a course for the tele-visual via cybernetics; Newton Minow admonished viewers of the ‘vast wasteland’ of television with its ‘procession of sadism’;4 Marshall McLuhan spoke of television as a ‘cool medium’ that instigates active viewership;5 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi posited the notion of ‘flow’ and TV as its antagonist (in the form of ‘mindless entertainment’6); Leslie Fiedler regarded television as providing a ‘relief from art’;7 and Neil Postman generated a culture critique insisting the shallow offerings of TV underwrite a shallow society,8 it is Cavell’s philosophical uptake of moving images—at first, movies, and in time, television—that calls and keeps our attention on the present occasion.What if spending a lot of time with TV shows—and their characters—is positively transformative for one’s character or moral sense (even when those characters are morally depraved), leading not to degeneracy but efflorescence and a tilting towards perfectionism? In this alternate take, television would be a condition for sharing company and receiving instruction, for finding a friend and welcoming a teacher. Instead of adopting Larry David’s resolute credo for Seinfeld—‘no hugging, no learning’—we find reasons for contem-plating television’s impact on the articulation and exercise of moral perfectionism, an outlook that displaces the prospect of achieving perfection for the more vital aim of incremental improvements, progressive if minor insights. The form and content of television, especially since the new millen-nium, provides portraits of human behavior and sustains them—thus what we watch and how we behave (and think) are interactive. We have more characters and we have more time with them in their ‘worlds’. Could it be that television in the present age has become, perhaps without us noticing or articulating it in so many words, the audiovisual equivalent of the novel—or depending on a character’s age or arc, perhaps the Bildungsroman? In this analogy, the brevity of films (as we have known them) can suddenly seem like short stories, or poems even.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

384.55 LAR t

Penerbit

London : University of Exeter Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

349 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781804130209

Klasifikasi

384.55

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Television Broadcasting

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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