Television

            Many political scientists have lately been questioning the potency of television. Because of the advent of the internet, it seems that more and more politically-interested citizens have been getting their news online instead of from television. Prime time audiences have been shrinking steadily for the past couple decades as people give up on time-dependent programming and turn instead to services like DVR, Netflix and Hulu, where the programs you want to watch are available to you at whatever time you choose to watch them. For these reasons, it seems that television is becoming obsolete. And yet, in this past campaign, Super PAC spending pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into television advertisements.

            It seems that the television ads didn’t really make as much of an impact as the PAC’s probably wanted them to, because of shrunken view audience. But some of the best (and worst) ads did make appearances on Youtube and other video sharing sites and various web forums and blogs. This is actually an example of the internet underlining and emphasizing pieces of televised media. So while there’s no doubt that television’s popularity and importance has been shrinking and making way for the internet to take over, they’re still capable of complementing one another.

            It’s also very easy to communicate with others about political happenings and public media through the internet’s many social channels. The political debates, for example, became like a sort of social gathering, with people making events on facebook, trying to get their friends to watch the debates as they happened live. Though they weren’t all watching through the same television set, sitting around and talking in person, a lot of people took advantage of instant messaging, blog posting, facebook chatting, and twitter updating while watching the debates. Although people weren’t encouraged to get off the internet and watch TV instead, they were encouraged to at least watch a live broadcast and then use the internet simultaneously to discuss it. Some could argue that this was immensely distracting, and that people shouldn’t be on their phones and laptops while trying to pay attention to a political debate, but it can also be argued that the people who did so gained valuable insight into what other people were thinking. They had their views challenged while they were watching and were forced to think about multiple different viewpoints as they watched. So while the internet is kind of stealing pertinence from television as a medium, it’s also enriching it’s social impact by providing a sort of hybrid medium of live broadcasts combined with live social interaction.

Article on “Why TV Still Matters.” http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/08/dead-tree-alert-why-tv-still-matters-in-politics/

            There’s also a great number of people who use television programs to get most of their political news, but not in the form of news broadcasts. Not nearly as many people watch the nightly news as did twenty or thirty years ago, but political comedy shows are becoming increasingly popular. Shows like The Colbert Report and even Saturday Night Live frequently poke fun at the political atmosphere and sometimes even raise interesting points about controversial issues. Shows like these are a good way to get a more satirical, humorous view of everyone’s current political standing, and sometimes they’re even preferred as a news source. But while these shows are written, recorded, and basically designed for television, they’re not always viewed at the television-programmed time. You can watch episodes of The Colbert Report at his website, colbertnation.com, and most SNL skits are available on Hulu for free. So when someone on a blog you frequent draws your attention to a great political parody that you should really see, you go look it up online. You find that skit on Hulu, or the Colbert episode on its respective site. You can probably even find that hilarious political ad on Youtube for free, too. So while the internet can emphasize elements of television, it often takes them out of the environment they were originally designed for. A television clip will be viewed hundreds more times on the internet than it ever would have been viewed on television.

            Even though the internet more or less depends on television for a lot of material it distributes, it kind of takes the credit away from the original source. If a tv clip like a political ad goes viral on the internet, chances are good that the original creator and publisher of the clip won’t get the reward that the internet receives. Television relies on its ratings to stay high in order to be able to continue to function, and when something becomes incredibly popular in another arena, it’s not quite fair, in a sense. Ratings are based on how many viewers a channel has, so when millions of people use the internet to watch something that was on a TV channel, it’s not carried over in the channel’s ratings. This makes for an awkward combination of healthy contribution and imbalanced viewership between television and internet. Obviously they’re both still valuable resources for political news and he like, but it’ll be very interesting to see how that awkward imbalance pans out for both of them. 

Additional Sources:

Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Richard Campbell. Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 8th Edition. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Print.