Screen Culture: A Global History by Richard Butsch

Author:Richard Butsch [Butsch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, Photography, Techniques, Cinematography & Videography
ISBN: 9780745653242
Google: nz-JuAEACAAJ
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-04-09T20:30:10.472849+00:00

Source: Nordenstreng and Varis, 19742

This chapter and the next will examine television broadcasting, texts, and audiences from the post-war beginnings through the 1980s, before digital media and the internet. We will begin with the US as the culturally hegemonic nation of this era, and move from there to the UK and Europe, then to Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This chapter will include the US, Britain, and Europe; the next chapter will concentrate on Latin America, Asia, and Africa, in many cases, nations recently independent from colonial rule.

Governments generally shared an assumption, beginning with radio, that broadcasting should serve the public or national interest, even while that varied in how it was implemented.3 In the 1920s US law and policy established that broadcasting would be an independent commercial business enterprise, with some government regulation. Most South American countries followed a similar path, although often with a closer collaborative relationship between television broadcasters and governments. In Britain and Western Europe the typical premise was that broadcasting would be a government-subsidized public service but, to varying degrees, independent of government. In Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and in many post-colonial nations in Asia and Africa, radio and television broadcasting were overt instruments of nation-building controlled directly by the government.4

Across this spectrum, industries and agencies developed policies and practices in relation to issues of nationhood. Television was used to promote nationalism and a uniform national identity. Even in the US commercial system, corporate advertisers used television to promote ideas of the civic corporation and the consumer-citizen.5 This was more notable than with many other industries because television distributed not things, but ideas. By virtue of their immense audiences and the time to repeat the same themes over and over in show after show, broadcast television texts could create a quality of ‘unquestionable’ truth, shaped by and in turn shaping and anchoring mainstream values and beliefs. Television texts, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, became imbued with matters of nationhood and watching television became defined as a civic practice. The concepts of nation and national identity however, elide class, race, gender, and other statuses of inequality, by universalizing one group as the national identity.

In order to assay how much television texts repeat similar themes time after time, we will examined a wide-spread, popular genre – domestic drama serials – known colloquially as soap operas or telenovelas. Domestic drama serials provide an ideal genre on which to base comparisons of both texts and audience reception across nations, as they have been popular in almost every nation around the world. They are notable for how audiences have used these texts and how cultural elites have reacted to both texts and audiences. Whether for radio soaps in the US in the 1940s, television soaps in the US or Britain in the 1960s, telenovelas in Brazil and Argentina or India and China in the 1990s, audiences responded to these shows enthusiastically, using them to address issues of class, gender, race, and generation, and conflicts between traditional and modern values.

Drama serial audiences

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.