One of the first things that Jason Mittell asked in is presentation “Media Studies as a Liberal Art: The Case of Television Storytelling in the Digital Age” was “how does someone teaching TV belong at a liberal arts school?” I had wondered the exact same question myself when I decided to attend this lecture. Why is TV in a college curriculum in the first place? What can good comes from it? By studying television, no one examines factors that change the lives of thousands of people as one may in many other classes, such as politics or history. Few will understand knowledge from television that they will use in a future career, as they might in a biology, chemistry, or economics classes. Studying television doesn’t help oppressed or marginalized groups like anthropology or ethnic studies can. And I doubt one can analyze deeper meaning in a TV series like one might in the Shakesphere play of an English class. So how is learning about television going to educate us? Do we want to learn about it simply because it entertains us?
The presentation that Mittell gave I found fascinating, however, on some simplified level I thought that it was about how television can amuse us. It may now be using more complicated techniques like story arcs and complex narratives to entertain us, which is interesting to analyze, but how much of deeper meaning does this analysis contain?
In defense of Mittell I do see something of a parallel between studying television and studying art history. There are a lot of similarities in the two subjects, they are both examining popular media, and they are both criticized as being pointless. Here I think of the Mittell’s joking (or maybe only half-joking) definition of a liberal arts education, that it “celebrates designed uselessness.” After all, what is useful about studying television?
All that I could think of to answer this question is that studying television will teach us ways to think about what we encounter in the rest of our lives. Knowing how to analyze television as well as watch it will not only make television more entertaining, but help us analyze anything else we encounter in our lives, be that a book we read or a crisis at our job. This meshes with another of Mittell’s definitions of a liberal arts education, that it is an “educational outlook for life.” This interpretation makes sense to me, although I probably won’t know if I agree with it until after I graduate. However, for now there is still something somewhat unsettleing about a class on television. Should we go to a television class when we could be learning something that will benefit ourselves or others in the future? We would gain the same analytical skills that would contribute to our “educational outlook” from other classes. Although I guess we are paying many thousands of dollars to be here, so we might as well study something we enjoy.