Core Response: Week 3 Newcomb and Hirsch

Newcomb and Hirsch’s essay seems to mark an academic departure from anxiety over television as either replicator of dominant ideology or as aesthetic medium. Their intervention scorns the limits of either approach, insisting that television is a process, a ritual, a practice of rhetoric. Television as rhetoric seems intuitively to build upon communication analysis’ concern with persuasion and comprehension without discounting the role of the individual artist, or the rhetorician. I’m intrigued by their idea of the forum, as it puts me in mind of the classical Roman forum, which has multivalent uses and meanings as a public place, a place of entertainment, and military and political display. The various genres of TV seem to also contribute to this idea of a forum – like the open spaces (fora) with multiple purposes, television genres have different purposes expressed through their form. All taken together, in a flow strip, or strip of programming, a chunk of TV time functions like an open space through which there are different paths to traverse, giving a sense of freedom and freeplay, but bound together by the very same open space they are travelling.  In this sense, the diversity of content of TV programs notwithstanding, they are delineated by our awareness that they are televisual, fictional, even. At a remove from lived experience. Newcomb and Hirsch argue that this seeming disconnect allows TV to create a hermetically sealed world of representations that stand in for the real world and play around with those ad Infinitum, but I would argue that the individual viewer’s stake or standpoint in the forum affects the vitality of the televisual content to them. Television is classed: access to television, familiarity with its visual vocabulary, even scepticism towards television is informed by class and gender.  For audiences watching television content produced elsewhere (such as people across the world watching popular American shows, how are we to understand the discussion-oriented nature of tv? Are these views even staekholders? Are they addressed?

Newcomb and Hirsch’s piece seems to argue that progressive and conservative battles are inchoate, but are both present in a dialectical tension. Is this tension harmless, such as the token presentation of leftist or right-wing views only to be bashed in a show leaning heavily towards the opposite? Is it benevolent? The liminal pace of the cultural forum is ultimately arrested and given limits to by authority, yes? I very much enjoyed their essay, but found it provoking more questions than it answers.