A Few Thoughts on the Boob Tube

This week in my US Popular Culture class at Pitzer we have been discussing the advent of the television and its impact on popular culture and American society. Iin class, I found myself virtually unable to imagine the era before television. For so many people today, the television forms such a fundamental aspect of daily life that I think its power often goes unnoticed. I mean, we plan meals around primetime, we arrange our furniture to accommodate for the television (which is more often than not the focal point), and we rely on the television to provide us with our daily source of news and entertainment. Though I have never been much of a TVaholic, I still find it hard to imagine life without its existence. As perhaps the most pervasive form of popular culture, it is fascinating to learn how fast and hard we all fell for the comforting glow of this monumental technological advancement.

One of the shifts in TV production I found most interesting was that as the successor of radio, television programming was initially paid for entirely by advertising. The result was that television shows were not produced for the pleasure of the audience but rather in order to produce an audience that could be sold to an advertiser. Thus the audience, not the show, was the real product being sold by a station or network. For example Camel Cigarettes which sponsored a show called "Man Against Crime" distributed the following instructions to the show's writers: "Do not have the heavy or disreputable person smoking a cigarette. Do not associate the smoking of cigarettes with undesirable scenes or situations plot-wise." While you always hear about this kind of thing in the magazine and newspaper industry with complimentary copy and all, I had never thought of this within the context of TV culture.

Though networks later moved to a strategy of selling advertising slots for particular shows instead of having a single advertiser pay for the entire program, I wonder how much this actually increases the power of viewers. With channel surfing reaching all time highs and the increasing popularity of technology such as TIVO which allows viewers to skip commercial time all together, I wonder how effective TV advertising actually remains? Are TV viewers taking control?