Saturday, April 02, 2005

TV and community

Some see TV as a source to facilitate conversation. How much of a role does this have in community building? Spiogel discusses how people used to get together to watch TV, which to me, seems like a form of community building. This doesn't happen too much anymore, but I still think TV is a major source of interpersonal interaction for many people, although it probably has waned somewhat with the rise of the Internet.

2 comments:

umaysay said...

In terms of audience study in media cultural studies, I also think that TV program genre such as drama may contribute to creating "community." At this point, the community is like a fandom.

Aaron Veenstra said...

I think we underestimate the extent to which entertainment media influence interpersonal interaction, especially TV. "Global village" or not, our day-to-day experiences are pretty dependent on very small-group factors, except for the mass media, and entertainment TV is at the top of that heap. Maybe 4,000,000 people saw the top movie in the country last weekend, and a very successful record will maybe hit 5,000,000 units sold, but 20,000,000 tune in to watch CSI every week. The vastness of that shared field of experience tends to be underappreciated, IMO.