This week our focus was on television and I find it fascinating how much has changed about our society in such a short amount of time. Simply the dynamic of television and media in general in a household has changed dramatically. What used to be about bringing family and friends together seems to now separate us more than ever. For example, in the episode of The Seventies that we watched, we learned about a family hour and Saturday Night Live, I think it is so interesting to see how people lived their lives around these airings of shows. 

To go off of that, we learned about how the government wanted to monitor family hour, claiming that Television could not show certain things prior to what they deemed an appropriate time. I think it is interesting about how angry this made both the consumer as well as Hollywood, what’s even more interesting is how now are media seems to control us even more, yet we don’t seem to care about these effects. 

In my art history discussion this week we always referenced the use of television, however, from the point of view of an artist. We talked about how in the later 60s, and early 70s broadcast networks would allow the artist to play around in their television studios during the day, or what was known as “dead time” (where no program was scheduled to play). Many of these art pieces would be a variety of colors, designs and flickers-therefor many individuals with TVs in their homes were deeply concerned because they thought the TV was broken, it freaked many our that this “private” TV that was in there holme could be accessed and changed by the artist. I thought this was both very interesting and referenced what we talked about in Mass Media. 

“The Medium is the Medium” by Fred Barzyk is one example of this: (not exact clip, but the similar idea) 

Finally, I found the Rob Sterling documentary very interesting, in a time which I feel there are an influx and high variety in both television shows and movies, I think it is fascinating how hard of a time he had getting producers to believe in his fantasy scripts. I think his impression on television and media, in general, was a lot more lasting and significant that he believed. Changing both what producers created and the consumer/viewer wanted to see.

-Grace Hanlon