Core Post: TV + Internet as Ritual

While the idea of the televisual cultural forum proposed by Newcomb and Hirsch is relevant and important within its context, reading about it felt dense and overly complicated at times. A part of me wondered if I struggled to be intrigued by the theory because it maybe it no longer exists in our current TV landscape or if it really could have just been more succinctly explained, like Hendershot does in the first few pages of her chapter on Parks and Recreation.

I agree with Hendershot that Newcomb’s and Hirsch’s television forum no longer exists in the same mainstream and universal way, but I was particularly interested in how traces of their ideas might still present in the TV-watching experience. Their idea of TV as a ritual of examining culture is something that still exists with TV, and perhaps it has been taken to a deeper level with the internet and the online 24h aftermath cycle of any new episode airing, with an overwhelming amount of tweets, comments, gifs and memefications of the episode. It augments the television ritual if we think about how Hirsch discusses how media creators seek and create “new meaning in the combination of cultural elements” (563). With the viewer now also being a potential creator, it elevates the ritual of examining society and opens up TV’s questions to bigger and more participatory conversations. It also becomes a lot of noise since it’s so much information all at once, but this online post-new-episode frenzy might be a space where more definitive and controversial opinions and answers live, if a show were to still function in the balanced debate proposed by Newcomb’s and Hirsch’s television forum theory. Also, how might we look at a user-creator that has enough of a following to have as big of an impact like a non-amateur creator, such as influencers and extremely popular meme pages?