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Television: The Shared Arena
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17581 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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7 / 1990 |
7,640 Words |
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Joshua Meyrowitz
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In 1950, only 9 percent of U.S. homes owned television sets. Little more than twenty-five years later, only 2 percent of households were without one. In a remarkably short time, television has taken a central place in our living rooms and in our cultural and political lives. On average, a U.S. household can now receive thirty channels; only 7 percent of homes receive six or fewer stations. Some 95 percent of homes own a color TV, 63 percent own two or more sets, and 64 percent own a videocassette recorder.
Television is the most popular of the popular media. Indeed, if Nielsen research and other studies are correct, there are few things that American do more than they watch television. On average, each household has a TV on almost fifty hours a week. Forty percent of households eat dinner with the set on. Individually, Americans watch an average of thirty hours a week. We begin peering at TV through the bars of cribs and continue looking at it through the cataracts of old age.
Plato saw an important relationship between shared, simultaneous experience and a sense of social and political interconnectedness. Plato thought that his Republic should consist of no more than five thousand citizens because that was the maximum number of people who could fit in an arena and simultaneously hear the voice of one person. Television is now our largest shared arena. During the average minute of a typical evening, nearly a hundred million Americans are tuned in. While a book can usually win a place on the lists of the top twenty-five fiction or nonfiction bestsellers for the year with 115,000 hardcover sales, a prime-time network program with fewer than fifteen million viewers for each episode is considered a failure.
Even the biggest best-sellers reach only a fraction of the audience that will watch a similar program on television. It took forty years for Gone With the Wind to sell twenty-one million copies; fifty-five million people watched the first half of the movie on television in a single evening. The television miniseries Roots was watched, in part of whole, by approximately 130 million people in only eight days. Even with the help of the television promotion, fewer than five million copies of Roots sold in eight years.
The television arena, like a street corner or a marketplace, serves as an environment for us to monitor but not necessarily identify with. Reading a newspaper requires an investment of money and reading effort, and at least some minimal identification with its style and editorial policy. We have to reach out for it and embrace it - both literally and metaphorically. But with television, we simply sit back and let the images wash over us. While we usually select reading material that clearly reflects our own self-image, with TV we often feel we are passively observing what other people are like.
Most of us would feel uncomfortable stopping at a local store to pick up the current issue of a publication titled Transvestite Times or Male Strippers' Review, or a magazine on incest, child abuse, or adultery. But millions of viewers feel quite comfortable sharing their homes with transvestites, make strippers, and victims and perpetrators of incest, or almost anyone else who appears on Donahue, Oprah, or Geraldo. Ironically, our personal dissociation with TV content allows for the most widespread sharing of similar experience in the history of
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