Social aspects of television

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The social aspects of television are the influences media has had on society since its inception. The belief that this impact has been dramatic has been largely unchallenged in media theory since its inception. However, there is much dispute as to what those effects are, how serious the ramifications are and if these effects are more or less evolutionary with human communication.

Negative effects

As television became an increasingly dominant form of mass communication, critics complained of how poorly the medium lived up to its promise of serving the public interest. Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his 1961 speech. Television was characterized as the "boob tube", a mindless occupation and time filler.^[1]

In his 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander argued that the medium of television, apart from any good or bad motives of television broadcasters, is by its very nature predisposed to certain harmful effects on society.

Complaints about the social influence of television can also be heard from the justice system as investigators and prosecutors alike decry what they refer to as “the CSI Syndrome.” They complain that, because of the popularity and considerable viewership of CSI and its spinoffs, juries today expect to be “dazzled,” and will acquit criminals of charges unless presented with impressive physical evidence, even when motive, testimony, and lack of alibi are presented by the prosecution.^[2]

Television has also been creditted with changing the norms of social propriety, although the direction and value of this change are disputed. Milton Shulman, writing about television in the 1960s, wrote that “TV cartoons showed cows without udders and not even a pause was pregnant,” and noted that on-air vulgarity was highly frowned upon. Shulman suggested that, even by the 1970s, television was shaping the ideas of propriety and appropriateness in the countries the medium blanketed. He asserted that, as a particularly “pervasive and ubiquitous” medium, television could create a comfortable familiarity with and acceptance of language and behavior once deemed socially unacceptable. Television, as well as influencing its viewers, evoked an imitative response from other competing media as they struggle to keep pace and retain viewer- or readership. ^[3]

Psychological effects

Some studies suggest that, when a person plays video games or watches TV, the basal ganglia portion of the brain becomes very active and dopamine is released. Some scientists believe that release of high amounts of dopamine reduces the amount of the neurotransmitter available for other purposes, although this remains a controversial conclusion.^[4]

Physical effects

Studies in both children and adults have found a association between the number of hours of television watched and obesity.^[5] A study found that watching television decreases the metabolic rate in children to below that found in children at rest. ^[6]

Alleged dangers

See also: Media violence research

Legislators, scientists and parents are debating the effects of television violence on viewers, particularly youth. Fifty years of research on the impact of television on children's emotional and social development have not ended this debate (see Bushman & Anderson 2001; Savage, 2008).

Bushman & Anderson (2001) among others have claimed that the evidence clearly supports a causal relationship between media violence and societal violence. However other authors (Olson, 2004; Savage, 2008) note significant methodological problems with the literature and mismatch between increasing media violence and decreasing crime rates in the United States.

A 2002 article in Scientific American suggested that compulsive television watching, television addiction, was no different from any other addiction, a finding backed up by reports of withdrawal symptoms among families forced by circumstance to cease watching.^[7] However this view has not yet received widespread acceptance among all scholars, and "television addiction" is not a diagnoseable condition according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual -IV -TR.

As an example of one study, a longitudinal study in New Zealand involving 1000 people (from childhood to 26 years of age) demonstrated that "television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 12 years of age". ^[8] A study published in the Journal of Sexuality Research and Social Policy concluded that parental television involvement was associated with greater body satisfaction among adolescent girls, less sexual experience amongst both male and female adolescents, and that parental television involvement may influence self-esteem and body image, in part by increasing parent-child closeness.^[9] Numerous studies have been done on the relationship between TV viewing and school grades.^[10] However numerous other studies have found little or no effect for television viewing on viewers (see Freedman, 2002).

Propaganda

Studies indicate that television is the second most effective method of psychological manipulation in the field of commercial media. Use of public service announcements (including those paid for by governing bodies or presidential candidates), news and current affairs, commercial advertising, advertorials and talk shows) can affect viewers on conscious and/or subconscious levels. An individual may inadvertently answer a question based on an opinion or fact stated on a television show without consciously realising where they obtained the information. This makes the format an excellent platform for propagation.^[11]

Positive effects

Although much of the discussion around television's impact on society has been negative, media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz argues that the medium has less of a stranglehold pushing its viewers and more of a handhold, guiding its views to areas and subjects to which they were previously denied access.

Before the occurring of the television, printing was considered as the main channel to access the information and knowledge. The way of people in those days in reaching the information is limited in many ways.

Educational advantages

Despite this research, many media scholars today dismiss such studies as flawed. See David Gauntlett's article "Ten Things Wrong With the Media 'Effects' Model." Dimitri Christakis cites studies in which those who watched "Sesame Street" and other educational programs as preschoolers had higher grades, were reading more books, placed more value on achievement and were more creative. Similar, while those exposed to negative role models suffered, those exposed to positive models behaved better.^[12]

Technology trends

In its infancy, television was a time-dependent, fleeting medium; it acted on the schedule of the institutions that broadcast the television signal or operated the cable. Fans of regular shows planned their schedules so that they could be available to watch their shows at their time of broadcast. The term appointment television was coined by marketers to describe this kind of attachment.

The viewership's dependence on schedule lessened with the invention of programmable video recorders, such as the Videocassette recorder and the Digital video recorder. Consumers could watch programs on their own schedule once they were broadcast and recorded. Television service providers also offer video on demand, a set of programs which could be watched at any time.

Both mobile phone networks and the Internet are capable of carrying video streams. There is already a fair amount of Internet TV available, either live or as downloadable programs, and video sharing websites have become greatly popular.

The Japanese manufacturer Scalar has developed a very small TV-system attached to the eyeglasses, called "Teleglass T3-F".^[13]

Gender and television

While women, who were “traditionally more isolated than men” were given equal opportunity to consume shows about more “manly” endeavors, men’s feminine sides are tapped by the emotionally invocative nature of many television programs.^[14]

Television played a significant role in the feminist movement. Although most of the women portrayed on television conformed to stereotypes, television also showed the lives of men as well as news and current affairs. These "other lives" portrayed on television left many women unsatisfied with their current socialisation. This opened up a lot of discussions and arguments about the roles of women in a society that they now knew about in greater depth.^{[citation needed]}

The representation of males and females on the television screen has been a subject of much discussion since the television became commercially available in the late 1930s. In 1964 Betty Friedan claimed that “television has represented the American Woman as a “stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred mindless, boring days dreaming of love—and plotting nasty revenge against her husband.” As women started to revolt and protest to become equals in society in the 1960s and 1970s, their portrayal on the television was an issue that they addressed. Journalist Susan Faludi suggested, “The practices and programming of network television in the 1980s were an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women.” Through television, even the most homebound women can experience parts of our culture once considered primarily male- sports, war, business, medicine, law and politics.

The inherent intimacy of television makes it one of the few public arenas in our society where men routinely wear makeup and are judged as much on their personal appearance and their "style" as on their "accomplishments."

From 1930 to 2007 daytime television hasn’t changed much. Soap operas and talk shows still dominate the daytime time slot. Prime time television since the 1950s has been aimed at and catered towards males. In 1952, 68% of characters in primetime dramas were male; in 1973, 74% of characters in these shows were male. In 1970 the National Organization for Women (NOW) took action. They formed a task force to study and change the “derogatory stereotypes of women on television.” In 1972 they challenged the licences of two network-owned stations on the basis of their sexist programming. In the 1960s the shows I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched insinuated that the only way that a women could escape her duties was to use magic. Industry analysis Shari Anne Brill of Carat USA states, “For years, when men were behind the camera, women were really ditsy. Now you have female leads playing superheroes, or super business women” Current network broadcasting features a range of female portrayals.

Socialising children

Children were once controlled by adults through means of literacy. The literacy level of books would often correspond with the "appropriate" topics for children. Topics unsuitable for children would be written for a higher level of literacy and when most children would try to read these books they would be beyond their literary capabilities. ^[15]

With television, the literacy level required to understand is substantially lower as well as it being difficult to monitor a child's use of the device and anticipate the content that will be delivered through it. However, much research and development is being dedicated to regain control, monitor and restrict children's consumption of television.^[16]

Often, television can show children what adults may not want them to know. A key example of this is in the television show Father Knows Best where children are let in on perhaps the biggest secret: that adults keep secrets from them.^[17]

Suitability for audience

Almost since the medium's inception there have been charges that some programming is, in one way or another, inappropriate, offensive or indecent. Critics such as Jean Kilborne have claimed that television, as well as other mass media images, harm the self image of young girls. Other commentators such as Sut Jhally make the case that television advertisers in the U.S. deliberately try to equate happiness with the purchasing of products, despite studies which show that happiness for most people comes from non-material realms, such as warm friendships and feelings of connection to one's community.^[18] George Gerbner has presented evidence that the frequent portrayals of crime, especially minority crime, has led to the Mean World Syndrome, the view among frequent viewers of television that crime rates are much higher than the actual data would indicate. In addition, a lot of television has been charged with presenting propaganda, political or otherwise, and being pitched at a low intellectual level.

Television

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"TV" redirects here. For other uses, see TV (disambiguation).

For the American rock band, see Television (band)

Television is a widely used telecommunication medium for sending (broadcasting) and receiving moving images, either monochromatic ("black and white") or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission. The word is derived from mixed Latin and Greek roots, meaning "far sight": Greek tele (τῆλε), far, and Latin vision, sight (from video, vis- to see, or to view in the first person).

Commercially available since the late 1930s, the television set has become a common communications receiver in homes, businesses and institutions, particularly as a source of entertainment and news. Since the 1970s, recordings on video cassettes, and later, digital media such as DVDs, have resulted in the television frequently being used for viewing recorded as well as broadcast material.

A standard television set comprises multiple internal electronic circuits, including those for tuning and decoding broadcast signals. A display device which lacks these internal circuits is therefore properly called a monitor, rather than a television. A television set may be designed to handle other than traditional broadcast or recorded signals and formats, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), digital television (DTV) and high-definition television (HDTV).

History

In its early stages of development, television included only those devices employing a combination of optical, mechanical and electronic technologies to capture, transmit and display a visual image. By the late 1920s, however, those employing only optical and electronic technologies were being explored. All modern television systems rely on the latter, however the knowledge gained from the work on mechanical-dependent systems was crucial in the development of fully electronic television.

In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 20-year old university student in Germany patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for "rasterization", the process of converting a visual image into a stream of electrical pulses. The holes were spaced at equal angular intervals such that in a single rotation the disk would allow light to pass through each hole and onto a light-sensitive selenium sensor which produced the electrical pulses. As an image was focused on the rotating disk, each hole captured a horizontal "slice" of the whole image.

Nipkow's design would not be practical until advances in amplifier tube technology became available in 1907. Even then the device was only useful for transmitting still halftone images - those represented by equally spaced dots of varying size - over telegraph or telephone lines. Later designs would use a rotating mirror-drum scanner to capture the image and a cathode ray tube (CRT) as a display device, but moving images were still not possible, due to the poor sensitivity of the selenium sensors.

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette images in London in 1925, and of moving, monochromatic images in 1926. Baird's scanning disk produced an image of 30 lines resolution, barely enough to discern a human face, from a double spiral of lenses.

By 1927, Russian inventor Léon Theremin developed a mirror drum-based television system which used interlacing to achieve an image resolution of 100 lines.

Also in 1927, Herbert E. Ives of Bell Labs transmitted moving images from a 50-aperture disk producing 16 frames per minute over a cable from Washington, DC to New York City, and via radio from Whippany, New Jersey. Ives used viewing screens as large as 24 by 30 inches (60 by 75 centimeter). His subjects included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

(This summary drawn from History of television remains incomplete. See Talk:Television "Move "History of television" into this article."

Social aspects

Main article: Social aspects of television

Television has played a pivotal role in the socialization of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are many social aspects of television that can be addressed, including:

• Positive effects
• Negative effects
• Gender and television
• Politics and television
• Socializing children
• Technology trends
• Suitability for audience
• Alleged dangers
• Propaganda del

History of television

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Television history)

The History of television technology can be divided along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those dependent only on electronic principles. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without the discoveries and insights garnered from the development of the electromechanical systems.

Electromechanical television

Main article: Mechanical television

The origins of what would become today's television system can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, and Philo Farnsworth's Image dissector in 1927.

The 20-year old German university student Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884.^[1] Nipkow's spinning disk design is credited with being the first television image rasterizer. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others. The photoconductivity of selenium and Nipkow's scanning disk were first joined for practical use in the electronic transmission of still pictures and photographs, and by the first decade of the 20th century halftone photographs, composed of equally spaced dots of varying size, were being transmitted by facsimile over telegraph and telephone lines as a newspaper service.

However, it wasn't until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology made the design practical.^[2] The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of still monochromatic images with continuous tonal variation (as opposed to halftone) was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909, using a rotating mirror-drum as the scanner, and a matrix of 64 selenium cells as the receiver.^[3]

In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Kosma Zworykin created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the electronic Braun tube (cathode ray tube) in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".

On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave a demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridge's Department Store in London. But if television is defined as the contemporaneous transmission of moving, monochromatic images with continuous tonal variation — not still, silhouette or halftone images — Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925.^[4] Then he gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London. Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.

In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow. In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company / Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission. He also demonstrated an electromechanical color, infrared (dubbed "Noctovision"), and stereoscopic television, using additional lenses, disks and filters. In parallel, Baird developed a video disk recording system dubbed "Phonovision"; a number of the Phonovision recordings, dating back to 1927, still exist.^[5] In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany. In November 1929, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathe established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. In 1931, he made the first live transmission, of the Epsom Derby. In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's electromechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines of resolution on BBC television broadcasts in 1936, before being discontinued in favor of a 405-line all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI.

In the U.S., Charles Francis Jenkins was able to demonstrate on June 13, 1925, the transmission of the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion from a naval radio station to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with 48 lines per picture,^[6] 16 pictures per second. AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted halftone images of transparencies in May 1925.

Meanwhile in Soviet Russia, Léon Theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926, and as part of his thesis on June 7, 1926 he electrically transmitted and then projected near-simultaneous moving images on a five foot square screen.^[6] By 1927 he achieved an image of 100 lines, a resolution that was not surpassed until 1931 by RCA, with 120 lines.

However, Herbert E. Ives of Bell Labs gave the most dramatic demonstration of television yet on April 7, 1927, when he field tested reflected-light television systems using small-scale (2 by 2.5 inches) and large-scale (24 by 30 inches) viewing screens over a wire link from Washington to New York City, and over-the-air broadcast from Whippany, New Jersey. The subjects, who included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, were illuminated by a flying-spot scanner beam that was scanned by a 50-aperture disk at 16 pictures per minute.

Electronic television

In 1911, engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton gave a speech in London, reported in The Times, describing in great detail how distant electric vision could be achieved by using cathode ray tubes at both the transmitting and receiving ends. The speech, which expanded on a letter he wrote to the journal Nature in 1908, was the first iteration of the electronic television method that is still used today. Others had already experimented with using a cathode ray tube as a receiver, but the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel.^[7] By the late 1920s, when electromechanical television was still being introduced, inventors Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin were already working separately on versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes.

The decisive solution—television operating on the basis of continuous electron emission with accumulation and storage of released secondary electrons during the entire scan cycle—was first described by the Hungarian inventor Kálmán Tihanyi in 1926, with further refined versions in 1928.^[8]

On September 7, 1927, Philo Farnsworth's Image Dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. [1] By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press, televising a motion picture film. In 1929, the system was further improved by elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical moving parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images by his television system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Pem with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required).

Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of a complete all-electronic television system on 25 August 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Other inventors had previously demonstrated components of such a system, or had shown an electronic system using still images or motion picture film.^[9] But Farnsworth was the first to coordinate both electronically scanned television cameras and electronically scanned television receivers, and present live, moving, monochromatic images with them. Unfortunately, his cameras needed too much light, so his work came to a stop.

Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with the cathode ray tube to create and show images. While at Westinghouse in 1923, he developed an electronic camera tube. But in a 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast and poor definition, and was stationary.^[10] The tube never got beyond the laboratory stage, but RCA (which had acquired the Westinghouse patent) believed the patent on Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic formation of an image. And so RCA, armed with Zworykin's 1923 patent application, filed a patent interference suit against Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth against Zworykin.^[11] In October 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts and wishing to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth US$1 million (the equivalent of $13.8 million in 2006) over a ten-year period, in addition to license payments, to use Farnsworth's patents.^[12]

Zworykin designed an improved electronic camera tube at RCA in 1931, which he called the iconoscope. It became the primary type of camera tube used in American television broadcasting from 1936 until 1946, when it was replaced by the image orthicon tube.

In Britain Isaac Shoenberg used Zworykin's idea to develop Marconi-EMI's own Emitron tube, which formed the heart of the cameras they designed for the BBC. Using this, on November 2, 1936 a 405 line service was started from studios at Alexandra Palace, and transmitted from a specially-built mast atop one of the Victorian building's towers; it alternated for a short time with Baird's mechanical system in adjoining studios, but was more reliable and visibly superior. So began the world's first high-definition regular service. The mast is still in use today.

Most television researchers appreciated the value of color image transmission, with an early patent application in Russia in 1889 for a mechanically-scanned color system showing how early the importance of color was realized. John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission on July 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination.^[13] Baird also made the world's first color broadcast on February 4, 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's Crystal Palace studios to a projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre.^[14]

Electronic color television

In 1938 the shadow mask color television was patented by Werner Flechsig in Germany, and was demonstrated at the International radio exhibition Berlin in 1939. The analog color televisions we use today are based on this technology. On August 16, 1944, Baird gave the first demonstration of a fully electronic color television display. His 600-line color system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture.^[15][16]

Television sets

In television's electromechanical era, commercially made television sets were sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom,^[59] United States, and Russia.^[60] The earliest commercially made sets sold by Baird in the UK in 1928 were radios with the addition of a television device consisting of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk (the Nipkow disk) with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage-stamp size image, enlarged to twice that size by a magnifying glass. The Baird "Televisor" was also available without the radio. The Televisor sold in 1930–1933 is considered the first mass-produced set, selling about a thousand units.^[61]

The first commercially made electronic television sets with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934,^[62][63] followed by other makers in France (1936),^[64] Britain (1936),^[65] and America (1938).^[66][67] The cheapest of the pre-World War II factory-made American sets, a 1938 image-only model with a 3-inch (8 cm) screen, cost US$125, the equivalent of US$1,863 in 2007. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 ($6,633).^[68]

An estimated 19,000 electronic television sets were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S.^[69] before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945.

Television usage in the United States skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the gradual expansion of the television networks westward, the drop in set prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962.^[70] In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.

For many years different countries used different technical standards. France initially adopted the German 441-line standard but later upgraded to 819 lines, which gave the highest picture definition of any analogue TV system, approximately double the resolution of the British 405-line system. However this is not without a cost, in that the cameras need to produce four times the pixel rate (thus quadrupling the bandwidth), from pixels one-quarter the size, reducing the sensitivity by an equal amount. In practice the 819-line cameras never achieved anything like the resolution that could theoretically be transmitted by the 819 line system, and for color, France reverted to the same 625 lines as the European CCIR system.

Eventually most of Europe switched to the 625-line PAL standard, once more following Germany's example, with France adopting SECAM. Meanwhile in North America the original NTSC 525-line standard from 1941 was retained, although analog television will be totally replaced for broadcast purposes by a 1080 line digital picture/sound system in February 2009.

See also

• History of radio
• How television works
• Television
• Television Hall of Fame
• Golden Age of Television, c1949–1960 in the US
• Archive of American Television
• Dunlap, Orrin E. "The Future of Television". New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1942.
• Lohr, Lenox, "Television Broadcasting". New York: McGraw Hill, 1940.
• Video monitor timeline
• Oldest television station
• List of experimental television stations
• Timeline of the introduction of television in countries
• Timeline of the introduction of color television in countries
• Geographical usage of television
• NTSC
• PAL
• SECAM