And if you think that the meaning that it is giving is very different from or a kind ofdistortion of what it really means, then your work on representation would be inmeasuring that gap between what one might think of as the true meaning of anevent (or an object) and how it is presented in the media.

Nevertheless, this notion that somehow representation represents a meaningwhich is already there is a very common idea and, on the other hand, one of theideas that I’m going to try to subvert.

We just swim through them, unthinkingly absorbingthem as fish in water. What cultural studies would like us to do is step out ofthe water in a sense and look at it, see how it shapes our existence, and evencritically examine the content of the water

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?

Hall is very closely identified in media studies with an approachknown as “cultural studies,” and he starts with one of its central concepts:representation. The usual meaning of this term is connected with whether thedepiction of something is an accurate or distorted reflection. In contrast to this,Hall argues for a new view that gives the concept of representation a muchmore active and creative role in relation to the way people think about the worldand their place within it.

While the aesthetics and cultural impacts of box set design and packaging certainly warrant more attention, I wish to turn to the insides of the boxes more fully, considering how the shift toward TV-on-DVD publishing changes the possibilities of serial storytelling and narrative consumption.

he industry has grappled with these technological changes, lowering the ratings threshhold for success while establishing cable channels as a viable outlet for first-run programming that has yielded some of the most innovative developments in the medium’s history.

he segment is a relatively self-contained scene which conveys anincident, a mood or a particular meaning. Coherence is provided by acontinuity of character through the segment, or, more occasionally, acontinuity of place.

hereas the classical narrative model, basically a fiction model,still underlies our assumptions about the entertainment film, it would seemthat no such generalised conception of TV narration would be possible

The former usage shows up in closeanalyses of television content in the immediate wakeof the publication of Williams’s work

When first formulated in his seminal 1974 bookTelevision: Technology and Cultural Form, RaymondWilliams’s concept of flow was a compelling metaphorof the ideological power of television

Yet we have become so used to this that in a way we do not seeit. Most of our habitual vocabulary of response and descriptionhas been shaped by the experience of discrete events.

B. PROGRAMMING AS SEQUENCE OR FLOWAnalysis of a distribution of interest or categories in abroadcast-ing programme, while in its own terms significant, isnecessarily abstract and static.

The ritual approach seesgenre as an exchange between industry and audience, an exchange throughwhich a culture speaks to itself. Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch referto television as a "cultural forum" that involves the negotiation of sharedbeliefs and values and helps to maintain and rejuvenate the social order aswell as assisting it in adapting to change

Originally a derisive term used to condemn other forms ofdrama as being hopelessly melodramatic, the term soap opera has beenrefined in a confrontation between such historical examples as the afternoon serial drama, prime-time serials, and British soap operas

As we will see, attempts tomeasure the comic forms of mass media against the norms of drama aredoomed to failure. At this point in the development of film genre theory,the concept has been applied most usefully to American film and television.

Traditionally, the literary concept of genre has referred to broad categories of literature (such as comedy and tragedy) that tend not to be treatedas historically or culturally specific manifestations. For example, Aristotle defined tragedy as an ideal type according to which any particulartragedy must be measured.

As one literary critic hasremarked, "biological classification is itself an explanatory system, whichhas been devised primarily to make sense of an otherwise disparate groupof individuals and which is changed primarily in order to improve thatsense

By the autumn of 1947 there were still only 60,000 TV sets in the entirecountry, two-thirds of them in New York City, the result of setmanufacturers’ sales allocations to retailers in the nation’s media andadvertising capital and TV programme makers faced an unusual, if transient,audience demographic problem.

ere were also early doubts about the possibility of bringing televisionsignals to virtually every American home as network radio had done in themid-1930s.

y Mar 1948 Newsweek reported that TV was “cating on like acase of high-toned scarlet fever.” Despite its first real growth in the secondhalf of 1947, the early television industry faced a number of hurdles.

Another legacy of these early regulatory decisions is thefact that U.S. television operates under an inferior standard of imageresolution and colour quality, part of a paern of incoherence and duplicityin federal broadcast regulation.

eimpact of these decisions on the competing private interests inside andoutside the broadcast industry was to create a small group of extremelyprofitable station and network operators who quily became powerfulfigures on the political and regulatory scene.

is notion of domestic cohesion was integral to the design for living putforward in the home magazines that popularized the family room in theyears to come. It was also integral to the role of the television set, whi wasoen pictured in the family rooms of the magazines’ model homes.

Nelson and Wright, who alternatively called the family room “the roomwithout a name,” suggested the possible social functions of this newhousehold space

e home magazines helped toconstruct television as a household object, one that belonged in the familyspace. More surprisingly, however, in the span of roughly four years,television itself became the central figure in images of the American home; itbecame the cultural symbol par excellence of family life.

is meant that the contradiction between unity anddivision was not a simple binary opposition; it was not a maer of either/orbut rather both at once.

Finally, withseemingly murderous intentions, Jim okes him. e camera pans acrossthe TV set, its bluish static heightening the sense of family discord.

n a series that foregrounds competency in science,intelligence is as important as physical strength. Sometimes, however, these programsreaffirm extant stereotypes about women. A woman may supply the key element that solvesa crime, but does so with ‘special women’s insights’.

Notwithstanding its melodramatic nature, contemporary crime drama is linked withcrime news and reality television; indeed, crime fact and crime fiction blur on televisionin representing the spectacle of crime (Altheide, 2002; Jewkes, 2004).

The frameworks of understanding about crime are unnoticed then, because they reflectdominant, taken-for-granted assumptions, but they, in turn, perpetuate those assumptionsand, in so doing, perpetuate cultural views about crime and criminals.The crime genrealso circulates cultural images of gender.

We suggest that in this situation where the moral authority of policing and scienceseems to be lacking, CSI offers surety and certainty, and that this, in part, is why the programis so successful. Our research focuses on how CSI combines the traditions of the crimegenre with a new forensic realism to fuse the police and science with a convergent moralauthority.

Two important institutions – policing and science – stand somewhat discredited today. Asa result of continuing revelations about wrongful convictions or the FBI’s failure to processevidence that might have prevented the attacks on September 11, 2001 the police have lostsome of the moral authority that is necessary for their legitimacy in a democratic society. Andthe certainty that science traditionally has been promised as a solution to problems causedby ignorance or disease is lacking today