So our concepts operate as a system of representation, but wehaven’t finished the circle yet because, supposed we all shared the sameconceptual map, that’s to say we made sense of the world in roughly the samesystem of classification in our head

Well, the one thing you can be certain is that,though the capacity to use concepts and to classify concepts in this way is abiological, genetic phenomenon, it is a feature of how we are constituted ashuman beings. The particular classifications that we use to classify out theworld meaningfully is not printed in anybody’s genes; it is something that islearned.

Suppose one says, “Yes, I can see that people are meeting now in NorthernIreland to discuss the Northern Ireland situation.” But what it means, what is themeaning of that meeting, is a very complicated thing to decide.

So I give you the common-sense meaningto try to take it back a little bit in what I’m going to say. But then there’s anotherunderstanding of the word representation, which also plays a role in what webring to this topic because we speak of political figures as representing us insome way.

Cultural studies has paid a tremendous amount of attention in oneway or another to the centrality of representations and of the practice ofrepresentation. And media studies itself is, in an obvious sense, concerned inpart with the variety of different texts, in my instance, visual texts:representations which are transmitted by the media

Hall is very closely identified in media studies with an approachknown as “cultural studies,” and he starts with one of its central concepts:representation.

CSI employs other emotional hooks as well. These include the pain of loss to a victim’sfamily.

The code sheet was organized around three aspects of CSI: (1) crime statistics, forexample types of offenses and demographic details about offenders and victims; (2) crimegenre, for example elements typical of the genre such as the nature of plot development(such as personal involvement narratives); and (3) forensic science, that is, how CSI employsdialogue, narrative, or other programming features to present science.

In the earlier crimedramas, the hero was a man, usually macho, and likely to be an iconoclastic loner. Thus,gendered identity, the nature of work, and the hero’s moral authority were stitched nicelyinto the narratives of television crime dramas. But times change and so do the narratives

CSI

It debuted to 17.3 million television viewers and was ranked eighth onNielsen’s weekly top 10 television programs (Armstrong, 10 October 2000).

Indeed, someof these challenges actually come from science in the form of DNA evidence.

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.

As Jonathan Gray discusses regarding the Lord of the Rings DVDs, boxed sets recontextualize the ephemeral media text into a collectable media object, sized perfectly for the bookshelf and appropriate for placing next to their literary siblings. Just this placement redefines our video collections from the archived flow of homemade videotapes to authorized and legitimate published cultural objects.

The 2000s have been a remarkable decade of transformation in American television.

Being self-contained, the segment tends to exhaust its material,providing its own climax which is the culmination of the material of thesegment. It is a characteristic of soap operas that they withhold theclimactic revelation or action to the end of the segment and the end of theepisode. This reaches a purely formal perfection with a series likeCrossroads where the climactic revelation is followed directly by thecredits (entering, emblematically, from every possible direction), and isthen repeated as a kind of coda: two characters in frozen face-to-faceconfrontation with one delivering a line that summarises the previoussegment.

Cinema narration has a strong internal dynamic, a movement from aninitial equilibrium that is disrupted towards a new harmony that is the endof the fiction.

Broadcast TV is capable ofadopting a filmic mode of narration as a kind of borrowing from an alreadyestablished medium. This will almost always be announced as such: by theform of the TV movie (often a ‘pilot’ for a series), or by the designation ofa programme as a prestigious cultural event.

Williams’s claim that “an increasing variability andmiscellaneity of public communications is evidentlypart of a whole social experience” is more apt todaythan ever (1974, 88). The televisual flow that Williamsanalyzed in the 1970s was experienced through a citi-zenship engaged by viewing and listening to mediatedlocal and national spaces. However, the hegemonicflows of the early twenty-first century (in the mosttechnologically advanced societies) converge upon therelatively more instrumentalized “user,” a node in seem-ingly endless online networks. Entry into the mediatedcitizenship of Williams’s 1970s was gained through theprivate achievement of material class markers (privatehome, TV set, leisure time, etc.)

Over the past forty years, the concept of flow hasbeen used in media studies as a conceptually influential,but ultimately limited model for the textual analysisof television content, or more broadly as a metaphorfor postmodern culture, of which television is the ul-timate exemplar.

But the impulse to go on watching seems more widespreadthan this kind of organisation would alone explain. It is signifi-cant that there has been steady pressure, not only from thetelevision providers but from many viewers, for an extension ofviewing hours. In Britain, until recently, television was basicallyan evening experience, with some brief offerings in the middleof the day, and with morning and afternoon hours, except atweekends, used for schools and similar broadcasting. There isnow a rapid development of morning and afternoon ‘pro-grammes’ of a general kind.2 In the United States it is alreadypossible to begin watching at six o’clock in the morning, seeone’s first movie at eight-thirty, and so on in a continuous flow,with the screen never blank, until the late movie begins at oneo’clock the following morning.

In an American radio programme listing, which is beforeme as I write, there is a further specialisation: the predominantlymusical programmes are briefly characterised, by wavelength, as‘rock’, ‘country’, ‘classical’, ‘nostalgic’ and so on.1 In one sensethis can be traced as a development of programming: extensionsof the service have brought further degrees of rationalisation andspecialisation.

‘Home’,‘Light’ and ‘Third’, in British radio, were the eventual names forwhat were privately described and indeed generally understoodas ‘general’, ‘popular’ and ‘educated’ broadcasting.

The magazine, invented as a specificform in the early eighteenth century, was designed as a miscel-lany, mainly for a new and expanding and culturally inexperi-enced middle-class audience. The modern newspaper, from theeighteenth century but very much more markedly from thenineteenth century, became a miscellany, not only of news itemsthat were often essentially unrelated, but of features, anecdotes,drawings, photographs and advertisements

In all communications systems before broadcasting the essen-tial items were discrete. A book or a pamphlet was taken andread as a specific item

Thus the sitcom, around 1970, shifted away from the "one dramaticconflict series" model of The Beverly Hillbillies and toward an expandedconception of the domestic comedy. 1

Of course, the audience itself no doubt changed from the late 1960s tothe mid-1980s-specifically, the baby boomers matured during this period. And of course, cultural changes no doubt influenced the genericshifts in the sitcom. But they did not directly cause the genre to change.

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.

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 specie

The term genre is simply the French word for type orkind.

e emergence of the term “family room” in the postwar period is aperfect example of the importance aaed to organizing household spacesaround ideals of family togetherness

n 1946, social workers at VA hospitalscounseled some 144,000 men

e more melodramatic socialproblem films su as Come Back Little Sheba (1952) and A Hatful of Rain(1957) were aracter studies of emotionally unstable, oen drug-dependent,family men. S

e transition from wartime to postwar life thus resulted in a set ofideological and social contradictions concerning the construction of genderand the family unit