| 书目名称 | Television and the Moral Imaginary | | 副标题 | Society through the | | 编辑 | Tim Dant | | 视频video | | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | Just how bad is television? Drawing on a range of theoretical sources including Husserl Lacan, Lefebvre, Sartre, Schutz and Adam Smith, this book takes a phenomenological approach to the small screen to offer an original sociological approach to television and its contribution to moral culture of late modern societies. | | 出版日期 | Book 2012 | | 关键词 | morality; sociology; television; media research | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035554 | | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-31362-4 | | isbn_ebook | 978-1-137-03555-4 | | copyright | Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012 |
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,Introduction – The Small Screen and Morality, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
I wonder whether Aristotle would have enjoyed watching as much television as many people in modern societies do. . He tells us that the arts give pleasure to people through mimesis: ‘Imitation comes naturally to human beings from childhood (and in this they differ from other animals, i.e. in having a strong propensity to imitation and in learning their earliest lessons through imitation); so does the universal pleasure in imitations’ (Aristotle 1996: 6). He was writing about poetry and drama, but television is today the medium that mimetically reproduces the life that humans directly experience as actuality and as fiction. The arts (including comedy, music and drama), the telling of history, the reporting of news and spectacles such as sports events are all mimetic forms that appear on television and give pleasure. Mimesis is not the same as a ‘copying’ or a ‘mirroring’ actual behaviour; it is always a representation. Even the most detailed and accurate audiovisual representation of live, actual events can never be direct duplicates of the events themselves, which, however faithfully captured, lose their smell, feel, depth and all-around-ness. Mimesis is a process in which something of ‘reality’ is always lost, and something is always added by the intervention of human action, and television’s increasing capacity to appear to represent the real does not stop it from being mimetic.
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,Morality on Television, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
Television creates what I will call a ‘moral imaginary’; the various aspects of other peoples’ lives seen through the small screen swirl in an imaginary realm that is shared among people in a variety of ways. I will develop this idea of a moral imaginary later, especially in Chapter 8, but here I want to show simply that television programmes can have moral content that fits with the traditional themes of morality addressed by philosophers. The philosophic tradition has tended to discuss morality in terms of the intrinsic qualities of individuals (virtue), the principles by which their conduct is guided (duty) or the consequences of individuals’ actions (seeking greatest good for the greatest number), and the content of television programmes can be seen as fitting with these approaches. This approach has been used as a way to make sense of literature (see, for example, the pieces collected in Pojman, 2000) and, more recently, computer games (see Schulzke, 2010) but not, surprisingly, television. The three themes I want to discuss – the good, the dutiful and the fair – would be, in principle, discoverable in any programme, but some are more relevant than others. What follows is not intended to be sophisticated philosophical debate but simply to draw out the connections between the narrative logic of television programmes and some well-established philosophical ideas about morality – virtue, duty and liberal utilitarianism. However, before I show how these themes are the stuff of television programmes, it is important to recognise that the issue of moral impact of television has been a contentious issue since if first began.
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,Sociology and the Moral Order, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
Morality is about the obligations of the individual to the social group, and moralists over the ages have been keen to clarify what those individual obligations are. Philosophers and theologians have used the tools of systematic thought to consider how people should act and how we should judge the actions of others. I showed in Chapter 2 how some of their ideas can be used as a way to understand the content of television programmes, but one limitation in the philosophical tradition is that morality is treated as a matter primarily for the individual – if a person’s way of thinking or being is right, the goodness of their conduct will follow. The philosophical tradition pays great attention to the cognitive aspect of morality; thinking precedes action and makes it what it is. Sociology turns the emphasis around so that morality refers to the behavioural standards of a society and derives from seeing what people normally do in that society rather than from thinking about what an individual might do.
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,Televisuality, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
What makes television a distinctive medium? I have suggested that just what ‘television’ shows us has evolved, and in this chapter I want to point to some of the features that make television different from what it was when if first became a mass medium. John Thornton Caldwell (1995, p. 55) and Jeremy Butler (2010, p. 26) both refer to the traditional form of television in which the medium effaced itself and simply transmitted visual information, as ‘zero-degree style’, by which they mean the process was conventional and not self-consciously stylised.. This was the standard way of capturing live studio shows (music, games, comedy and variety performances, soap opera) as well as reporting outdoor events including sports, in which the camera simply gave the television viewer the perspective of a spectator at the live event. For recorded drama, there was a stylistic element in that close-ups, and a number of camera angles were used, but the aesthetic was restrained and derived from early movies rather than making distinctive use of what television could do. While the cinema had from the beginning developed an aesthetic interest in the look of the screen imagery that connected with the story of the film, television as a technology was more constrained and directed towards what was live and actual. Things changed as television developed its own distinctive ‘look’, and I will borrow Caldwell’s term ‘televisuality’ to refer to what has become the aesthetic of television as communication, although my use of the term is rather broader than his. For Butler, as we will see, the evolution of a televisual aesthetic is primarily about style, but Caldwell sets the emergence of a distinctive televisual aesthetic against the competition for an audience with cinema and the technological changes in cameras and recording equipment. Television is, after all, an industry in which economic capital is invested and managed with an expectation of a return, either in financial terms or as a public service. To organise the technical equipment and teams of skilled people requires a corporate institutional structure to plan and steer the making and broadcasting of programmes. Unlike one-to-one communication in which the two parties shape communication iteratively according to each of their interests and perspectives, one-to-many communication operates on ideas generated within a corporation with very cumbersome feedback systems of public criticism through other media, individual complaints and comments and the responses of advertisers and regulators, but above all, the information from viewing figures.. In the early days, the institutional structure was directed toward organising and creating largely live programme content to fill the schedules; things had to be made quickly and did not need to last. But as the technology changed, and the economics of television became more competitive, aesthetics became as important for the small as for the big screen.
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,The Phenomenology of Television, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
Just how does television communicate with its audience? In this chapter, I will explore the phenomenology of television by which I mean the . by which viewers give their attention to moving images on the small screen and make sense of what they see. What most people see in such moving images, especially when there is synchronised sound, makes sense to them in a direct way that affects them, often viscerally. It may make them laugh or cry or feel shock, surprise, anger or other less extreme emotional states such as curiosity or irritation. They may learn things from the television or see things in the world differently than they had before. When television holds viewers’ attention, it is usually because the experience is pleasurable, and they are amused and interested, although it may be because they are fascinated by something they find horrific or ghastly. If viewers did not derive pleasure from watching – even what horrifies them – they would not watch; viewing television is something that is seldom, if ever, imposed on anyone, and it is very difficult to imagine how a person could be force-fed the contents of the small screen while they have the power to turn it off. Television is a medium of communication, a device that carries information transmitted in sound and light, but for viewers it often feels . ; once immersed in the process, which requires very little effort or preparation from them, the embodied and material process of watching is often forgotten. Children get the hang of television very quickly without needing to be taught how to watch it, and people who have never seen it before can engage in its delights without introduction or training. If it did not work in this way, people would not watch television with the regularity and the interest that they do; they would not pay attention to the flickering light and the babble of sound emanating from the box with the screen. So how does it communicate? How does it connect with people? I want to argue that television represents the world well enough for people to make sense of it in broadly the same way as they do the ordinary world around them. This is not the way that television has usually been treated by academic commentary that has tended to see it as being a special medium of communication that is potentially rather dangerous precisely because it is so accessible. The danger is largely that viewers might not notice the effects that it is having on them as individuals so it could be changing people in ways that are not good for society. Commentators, analysts and critics have tried to reveal the dangers of television, to investigate how it works and to lay bare the unconscious or unnoticed impact it has on those who watch it.
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,Society and the Small Screen, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
The fear that television might take over society and dominate individuals was articulated in George Orwell’s classic ., first published in 1949:
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,Mediating Morality, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
Up until now, I have argued that television simply . us morality in its audiovisual content by presenting instances of good and bad human actions and their consequences. Programmes are usually designed and made to entertain, amuse, educate or stimulate viewers rather than to bring about a moral effect. I’ve argued that viewers’ interest in the content of programmes has a moral edge, because just as people are interested in whether what those around them are doing is right or wrong, they have the same interest in the content of television. But television can also . moral in the sense that its own communicative action can have a direct moral effect; the audiovisual moving images are moral in . they show what they do. This is broadly the field of media ethics in which the viewers and those who intervene on their behalf, such as the state and regulators, critics and commentators, expect certain things of the media in return for taking what they see and hear seriously. The moral relationship is between the medium and the viewers and may be simplified in the idea that what is shown is . . Much of what appears on the small screen is fiction, and both those producing it and those receiving it are in no doubt that it is. Nonetheless, there is always presumed to be a measure of truth in what is shown, that the fictional represents the real truthfully in a general way while the specifics may not be literally true. Even jokes or comedy sketches are built on an exaggeration or distortion of the truth and depend for comic effect on a shared recognition of what is true that is being distorted. When what is being shown is presented as actuality, both producers and audiences know that it is an abstracted, summarised and truncated version of the truth and will always be lacking. Nonetheless, in all these instances, there is a presumption that the media are telling the truth and that its limitations are clear. The ethics of the media extend beyond simply expressing the truth because sometimes the truth should not be told, and sometimes how the truth is told must be managed so that it does not cause harm to individuals.
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,Television and the Imaginary, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
To act according to rules is to have disciplined behaviour and might be seen as ethical, but to be moral requires having an imagination through which to consider the possible consequences and ramifications of an action and so distinguish between what would be right and what would be wrong. It takes imagination to reach a judgement that can inform one’s own actions or react or respond to other people’s actions. This does not necessarily mean that moral reasoning requires a rational, conscious, cognitive act of weighing up pros and cons, calculating causes and effects. In the imagination, a person may . what the outcome will be and have the sense of simply knowing what is right or wrong. This capacity of the imagination often becomes habitual or routine and is the result of prior experience, of having learnt through seeing similar social situations followed through. Some situations may require a more conscious or semi-conscious process of deliberation and reasoning, especially when decisions have to be made collectively as, for example, in making a decision about the ethical consequences of how to treat an ill patient. For collective decisions, a discursive sharing of the process and the judgement will be necessary, but for the individual actor, moral decisions will usually be silent and intuitive. There is an emotional component to the individual process that makes it more fluid than the mechanical calculation of consequences, so that the person . what would be the right thing to do.
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,What’s Good on Television?, |
Tim Dant |
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Abstract
How frustrating! We have got so far, and still I haven’t told you what the morality is that you can see on the small screen in your home. I’ve written about all sorts of social theories and philosophical ideas, reminded you of some programmes you might have seen and mentioned some you have heard of but never watched. But I haven’t spelt out what the messages are, what the sum of morality on our screens is. So, is it good or is it bad? Which are the good programmes, the good channels? Which are the immoral depictions on the small screen? Which channel, programme, director, writer is producing the best morality for the audience? What are the criteria for judging good from bad television ... in terms of morality, that is?
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发表于 2025-3-21 19:00:51
