Television

‘Television is the popular cultural form of the twenty-first century’ (Storey, p9). We know this because between 1936 and 1940 no-one had even seen a television but by the 1960’s 72% of people owned one. This shows how much culture has changed as a owning a television has changed from being a luxury item to a necessity, and is indicative of working class affluence and the way in which they entertained themselves.

Just as ownerships of televisions have grown so have studies on the ways of looking at television i.e. audience receivership. As Richard mentioned there are several different ways of looking at how audiences receive television, the glance is one way of looking at audience reception of television and occurs within a domestic environment. There is also The Hypodermic Needle Model where television is seen as a ‘narcotic where messages are injected into the mass audience as if from a hypodermic syringe’ (Abercrombie, p4). This is a view with which Adorno would agree as he views all popular culture as ‘rubbish’. The Uses & Gratifications Model takes the opposite approach whereby it insists that viewers create their own meanings from the text, this is also supported by the Encoding-Decoding Model because it says the ‘output of media is polysemic’ (Abercrombie, p13).