Now we know that about advertising, it may be more difficult to see in terms ofillustrations in the newspapers about events of faraway places. But even there,unless there’s something in the picture with which you can even imaginativelyor imaginarily identify, it’s very difficult for the meaning to pass. But insofar asyou pause, you know, and that you don’t do what most of you do with our dailynewspaper such as that, and you stop and look, it has arrested you, it has said,“something for you here, something for you here,” what can you then get out ofthe image? You can only get something out of the image if you position yourselfin relation to what it’s telling you.

Let me try and make a very simple distinction about two statements whichsound as if they’re exactly the same, which in my view are absolutely different.The first statement is, “Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse.” I thinkthat statement is true. On the other hand, “Nothing exists outside of discourse,”in my view, that statement is wrong. The statement, “Nothing exists outside ofdiscourse,” is a sort of claim that, as it were, there is no material existence, nomaterial world form, no objects out there, and that is patently not the case. Butto say that “Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse” is a way ofsumming up what I think I’ve been trying to say to you

Now, the word has a kind of double meaning, even in itscommon-sense understanding. It does mean “to present,” “to image,” ‘todepict” – to offer a depiction of something else. And the word representation orrepresentation does sort of carry with it the notion that something was therealready and, through the media, has been represented.

The image itself – whether moving or still and whether transmitted by avariety of different media – seems to be, or to have become, the prevalent signof late-modern culture. Late-modern culture is not only that culture which onefinds in the advanced, industrial, post-industrial societies of the western world.But because of the global explosion in communication systems, it is also thesaturating medium, the saturating idiom, of communication worldwide.

One way he does that is through what he calls interrogation of the image. Theidea of interrogation normally brings to mind asking hard questions of asuspect. But how do we interrogate an image? By examining it, asking the hardquestions about it rather than just accepting it at face value. Just as a goodinterrogator looks behind the suspect’s story or alibi, so must we probe insideand behind the image.

CSI circulates these cultural meanings through narratives that reflect and reproducepopular beliefs about crime. Crime is a random, routine event on these programs. Crim-inals typically are selfish, venal, remorseless people, so no causal explanation of criminalityis needed. The idea that there is a social context in which crime occurs is not an issue or isdepicted as a farcical one. The proper response to the criminal event may be predicated onthe rationality of science, but it also takes for granted a strong measure of punitiveness,what Jewkes (2004: 180) calls an ‘authoritarian populism’, which plays as indignationagainst the criminals by the investigators. Many episodes end with the investigatorsconfronting the criminals and engaging in status degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel,1956)

‘Women are four times as likely as mento be victims in sexual-related murders, and men are ten times as likely to be the murderer’(CSI, Episode 207)

two investigators argue about whether it was a mistakefor a colleague to put up posters that call attention to a pedophile.

black characters typically are in a largely white world where race is not aconcern

ironic.

Having control of when and how you watch also helps deepen one of the major pleasures afforded by complex narratives: the operational aesthetic. Deriving from Neil Harris’s analysis of P.T. Barnum’s public entertainments, the operational aesthetic takes pleasure in marveling at how a cleverly crafted bit of entertainment is put together, highlighting a meta-appreciation of a hoax or contraption

Kompare highlights this transformation as a shift from flow to publishing, outlining the history of this development in terms of industry, technology, and dominant mode of consumption. I want to expand on this latter idea, particularly concerning the aesthetic dimension of boxed sets. Aesthetic issues concern both the form of the DVD set and its content – the box itself has become a site of signification unique to the home video era. While television programs in the broadcast era lacked comparable tangible paratexts like movie posters and book jackets, in the last decade, the design of DVD sets has constituted a key site of extratextual meaning. The packaging for these boxes help establish their meaning, both as an object to be owned and a narrative to be experienced.

In contrast, the shelves of my current academic library’s video collection at Middlebury College, cataloged under the Library of Congress call number PN1992, are a testament to the transformation of the past decade. We have hundreds of DVD sets of television series arranged in alphabetical order, placing The Twilight Zone between 24 and Ugly Betty―far from any network executive’s idea of ideal hammocking.

Repetition across the series is one of problematic, of both charactersand the situation (or dilemma) in which they find themselves.

It provides the ground for a series of relatively self-contained segments that deal with particular actions. These segmentscould be called ‘clinches’: a struggle at close quarters (and also thestandard term for an embrace between lovers in the entertainment cinemathat thought mostly of such encounters as the male conquest of the female)

but also because of the attention span that TV assumes of itsaudience, and the fact that memory of the particular series in all its detailcannot be assumed. People switch on in the middle and get hooked; theymiss an episode or two; someone phones up in the middle. The TVproduction cannot be hermetic in the way that the film text is, otherwise theaudience for a long-running soap opera like Coronation Street would nowconsist of half a dozen ageing addicts.

Each time there is novelty. The characters of thesituation comedy encounter a new dilemma; the documentary reveals anew problem; the news gives us a fresh strike, a new government, anotherearthquake, the first panda born in captivity. This form of repetition isdifferent from that offered by the classic cinema narrative, as it provides akind of groundbase, a constant basis for events, rather than an economy ofreuse directed towards a final totalisation

It depends on the conception of TV as acasual, domestic form, watched without great intensity or continuity ofattention

Accordingly, flow today incorporates the very sys-tems that propel global capitalism and determine ourpositions within it. The consumption of mediated tex-tual sequences is important, but only one small aspectof this grand flow, which incorporates flows of energy,raw materials, labor, finance, and information across

audience, the proliferation of user-generated content,the multiple platforms through which media texts areconsumed, and the ongoing war between feminismand antifeminism are presenting new challenges andopportunities for further elaboration of feminist mediaanalysis to the ongoing, explosive changes in our digitalenvironment and how it too is now profoundly shap-ing gender identity, performance, relationships, and thestill elusive hope for gender equality

Yet it is a characteristic for which hardly any of our receivedmodes of observation and description prepare us. The reviewingof television programmes is of course of uneven quality, but inmost even of the best reviews there is a conventional persistencefrom earlier models. Reviewers pick out this play or that feature,this discussion programme or that documentary. I reviewed tele-vision once a month over four years, and I know how muchmore settling, more straightforward, it is to do that. For most ofthe items there are some received procedures, and the method,the vocabulary, for a specific kind of description and responseexists or can be adapted.

BC 1, 13 June 1973, from 5.42

American television this development was different; the spon-sored programmes incorporated the advertising from the outset,from the initial conception, as part of the whole package. Butit is now obvious, in both British and American commercialtelevision, that the notion of ‘interruption’, while it has stillsome residual force from an older model, has becomeprogramming: distribution and flow90

Meanwhile, sporting events, especially footballmatches, as they became increasingly important public occa-sions, included entertainment such as music or marching intheir intervals.

From the late nine-teenth century this came to be reflected in formal layout,culminating in the characteristic jigsaw effect of the modernprogramming: distribution and flow 87

. Although it ispossible to construct the TV sitcom according to this evolutionary model,one could equally argue that the sitcom has gone through repeated cyclesof regression to earlier incarnations, as exemplified by the cycle of mindless teen comedies of the 1970s and by the return to the traditional domestic comedy in the mid-1980s. Another theory of film genre developmentargues that after a period of experimentation, a film genre settles on aclassical "syntax" that later dissolves back into a random collection oftraits, now used to deconstruct the genre.

Marc says that we are invited to test our own cultural assumptions because "the antagonists are cultures" and the characters "chargedcultural entities:' He concludes that Paul Henning's The Beverly Hillbillies, although it is not satire per se, is nonetheless a "nihilistic caricatureof modern life:'

Within the institution of film criticism, however, the concept of genrewas initially employed to condemn mass-produced narratives such as Hollywood studio films for their lack of originality.

Drawing on Aristotle, the literary critic Northrop Frye attempted inthe 1950s to further develop the idea of classifying literature into typesand categories that he called genres and modes

In many respects theclosest analogy to this process would be taxonomy in the biological sciences. Taxonomy dissects the general category of "animal" into a systembased on perceived similarity and difference according to certain distinctive features of the various phyla and species

the company’s efforts to keep key tenicalpersonnel out of the war effort

CBS head William S. Paley to an industry groupin 1946, whi identified the recent public criticism of commerciallysupported radio programming as “the most urgent single problem of ourindustry.”

two dominant network firms, NBC and CBS

three or fewer stations in most large cities

ideological and economic constraints during television’s early growth

Screenshot of trailer for Fallout 76 (2018)

“It keeps us together more,” andanother commented, “It makes a closer family circle.” Some women evensaw television as a cure for marital problems. One housewife claimed, “Myhusband is very restless; now he relaxes at home.” Another woman confided,“My husband and I get along a lot beer. We don’t argue so mu. It’swonderful for couples who have been married ten years or more.... Beforetelevision, my husband would come in and go to bed. Now we spend sometime together.”

William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man(1956) presented illing visions of white-collar workers who weretransformed into powerless conform-ists as the country was taken over bynameless, faceless corporations.

themagazines included television as a staple home fixture before mostAmericans could even receive a television signal,

but can’t affordto buy them with the expense of television

but still allow for social and sexual divisions in the home

As this classic scene illustrates, in postwar years the television set becamea central figure in representations of family relationships