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Television And Its Impact On Society

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The early nineties thus emerged as a liminal period in the trajectory of media practices. Television shows during this period were forced to navigate the methodological shift from maintaining the myth of television as a living reflection of the movement of time to the imminent advancement of the spectacle. This intermediary condition of the period gave rise to shows with equally confused psychic realities, often appearing to straddle the thin line between real and fake, and highbrow and lowbrow.
However, deconstruction of the terms “real”, “fake”, “highbrow” and “lowbrow” with regard to television reveals that these categorizations are inseparably fastened to its normalized methodological conventions. Perceptions of the “realness” of a …show more content…

To this effect, “highbrow” refers to the intellectual content of programming and historically disregards the inherent semiotic power of the visual channel. Something attains the categorization of “lowbrow” if it is devoid of thoughtful transmissions of language, the deeply historicized notion of television’s essential content. Thus there is an inherent and widespread critical bias against the rising practice of television’s communicative power through imagery. W.J.T. Mitchell prophetically identified this phenomenon when he posited an inherent “shock of new media (11).” Lowbrow television henceforth chiefly represents an abandonment of the conventionally sanctioned form of transmission and is a potentially fertile site for the avant-garde.
Television that rose to prominence out of these conditions melded both sides of the shifting paradigm and effectively mirrored modern circumstances. The WWF (now the WWE) entered its “Golden Age” when new CEO Vince McMahon introduced its televised content on syndicated national television in the eighties, and continued to rapidly grow in popularity through television’s shifting methodology in the nineties. The Simpsons was launched in 1989 to immediate mainstream success. Despite these two programs’ immense differences in reputation and acclaim, each achieved increasing success through the early nineties

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