Topic Proposal: The Role of Television in History

Television is a means of communicating to all the viewers through pictures and sound and it has proven to be a very effective way of relaying information since it covers family members of all kinds of ages, old and young. It has been used in many ways from bringing issues that affect the society either positively or negatively to the limelight, to conducting political mobilizations especially during campaigns.

The annotations below are from three different readings and they discuss the different ways the television has been of help in the past.

Mary Beth Haralovich. Sitcoms and Suburbs, Positioning the 1950s Homemaker. One of the ways that the television distributed knowledge and created awareness of a social economy that had placed women as homemakers was through the suburban family sitcom. Due this awareness created by the television, the sitcom’s signifying systems invested in the social subjectivity of the homemakers which were put forth by the consumer product industry and the suburban development.

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The lives of the middle-class families were changed by mobilizing the discourses of other social institutions by television series such as leave it to Beaver and Father knows best. As a result of the character traits of family members on television and the realistic mise en scene, middle-class home life was naturalized, masking both economic and social barriers to entry into the privileged domain. This is true but it does not apply to all middle-class families since some may require more than a TV show to be changed. Johnson. Introduction, The Heartland Myth and the Value of Cultural Populism Among all the technologies that exist such as speaking robot which smokes cigarettes and electric dish washers, television is the one technology that captivates all members of the family and their multiple generations.

In 1939, Westinghouse promoted the marvels of modern tech on a display that was held at the New York World’s Fair (World of Tomorrow) Pavilion, by sponsoring a film production. The television’s ability to bind great reaches of space and to transcend with picture and sound, holds great promise in this newness. Its adoption is time and again considered non-threatening and consistent as it has in itself modes of communicating and already familiar media. This is true since even in today’s life so many advertisements are made on TV be it to inform the viewers or to market a certain product to the viewers. Richard Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation, The Myth of the Frontier in American History On 16th July 1960, John Kennedy came forward to the Los Angeles Coliseum podium to accept his nomination from the Democratic party’s nomination as their candidate for president and as the norm or tradition in America’s political oratory, he had to give a slogan or phrase from his speech that would define the themes of the upcoming campaigns. Kennedy and his advisers chose The New Frontier as his signature. Kennedy would address his audience to see him as a new kind of frontiersman confronting a new kind of wilderness and the television played a great role in ensuring the message is conveyed to even those at their homes. I can say that the television played a vital role in communication of the slogan since it is evident 20 years later still relevant among Americans.

Summary of The Jefferson’s TV Show. This has been a great show which is about an African-American couple George, a rude and obstreperous guy who thinks wealth can get him to any place he desires to go, and Louise who is a levelheaded wife who cuts George down to size when his schemes go awry. The show touches on issues such as suicide, alcoholism, racism, adult illiteracy, transgender among others that provide important life decisions to family members.