Television
TELEVISION STUDIES: AN OVERVIEW
Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass-communication research, which tends to approach the topic from an empirical perspective. Defining the field is problematic; some institutions and syllabuses do not distinguish television studies from media studies. Some study programs classify it as a subfield of popular culture studies. Television studies is roughly equivalent to the longer-standing discipline of film studies in that it is often concerned with textual analysis. Analyses of so-called "quality television," such as Cathy Come Home(BBC drama 1966) and Twin Peaks( USA drama, 1990), have attracted the interests of researchers for their cinematic qualities. However, television studies can also incorporate the study of television viewing and how audiences make meaning from texts, which is commonly known as audience theory or reception theory. My own experience of television studies has been part of my film and media studies as a teacher in colleges of advanced education(CsAE) and technical and further education colleges(Tafe).
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MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE PRINT AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA
Although my experience with the print and electronic media began insensibly and sensibly by 1950 after my conception in October 1943, my formal study of these media did not begin until I taught media studies at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education from 1976 to 1978. I was then in my early thirties. I taught media studies again in the 1990s at the Thornlie College of Technical and Further Education(Tafe) in the 1990s. Media studies became one of the subjects in the long list of subjects I taught in this Tafe college in Perth Western Australia. When I retired from teaching in July 1999 I kept the three arch-lever files of notes on media studies, notes which I had accumulated by 1999. In the twelve years of my retirement, 1999 to 2011, from the world of jobs, these three files have become five arch-lever files and three two-ring binders.
It has been sixty-eight years since the media first became a part of my life. The radio, the record player, newspapers and magazines that were all part of my parents' experience when I was in the womb, then in the cradle and finally out into the wide-wide world. The story of the relationship between the print and electronic media and my life over these years is a long and complex one, far too long to write in any detail in an introduction to my media studies files, as this introduction is, or an introduction to my experience of media for readers here at this 4th edition of my website. Now, at the age of 67 though, I have a base in these files for the study of this important part of my life and the life of my society and for any writing that emerges from this study, this research, this reading. There is now a cross-fertilization, an interdisciplinary-study, of this subject with other aspects of my life and the life of my society as well as the religion I have been associated with now for nearly sixty years.
As another Bahá’í Plan opens, April 2011 to April 2016, I update this introduction yet again and, as I do, I think to myself that this update will be followed by many an update in the years to come if I am granted a long life. But who knows when one's end will come!
Ron Price
21 October 2008 to 5 Septmber 2011
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Some of my posts on the internet in relation to television and cinema are found below:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread
http://www.movieweb.com/forums/
http://www-SERIAL-KILLERS-and-PSYCHOPATHOLOGY-Ted-Bundy
http://www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message
http://forums.rl2worldcupedition.com/showthread
http://www.tv-forums.com/cgi-bin/gforum.
http://www.movieweb.com/forums/ (click on my photo for several more posts)
http://able2know.org/topic/
1972 to 1974: BIG YEARS
This weekend I watched some of the two part telemovie Paper Giants-The Birth of Cleo.(1) In early 1972, six months after I arrived in Australia as an international pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community, Ita Buttrose and Kerry Packer got together to create a magazine that became the most dramatic sensation in Australian publishing history: Cleo. At the time I was too busy to really connect with Cleo. Teaching in secondary schools and a college of advanced education, escaping from the rigours of one marriage and running far-too-quickly into a second, and assisting the Australian Baha’i community to complete its goals for the Nine Year Plan: 1964 to 1973 and the then Five Year Plan: 1974 to 1978---kept my life on all-ahead-full. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC1 17 and 18 April at 8:30-10:00 p.m.
The magazine was mainly for women:
helping them and Australians define
who and what they were while I was
continuing to define myself-a-life-long
exercise that had nothing to do with non-
frontal nude male centrefolds, Playmates
of the Month, but everything to do with the
changing roles of men and women and the
wreckage of long-cherished ideals and time
honoured institutions being swept-away and
relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and for-
gotten doctrines1-as the foundation of my own
life was being swept from under me & recreated.
1 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan message, 1974.
Ron Price 19 April 2011
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TV AND THE TEMPEST
During the decade of the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963) which Baha’is see as the ninth stage of history, television swept into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. This poem describes what was and is a wonderful invention, an invention that brought the possibilities and pleasures of culture, education and entertainment to people everywhere in the world where access to this technology was available. By the time the tenth and final stage of history began in 1963, people could watch the social breakdown of society, a breadown which this poem describes by means of contrasting images of darkness and tempest. These contrasting images of social upheaval that beset these same people during the ninth and tenth stages of history were graphically analysed by Shoghi Effendi, the appointed leader of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to his passing in 1957. His analysis is especially outlined in his letters in the several years before he died.-Ron Price with appreciation to Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, Wilmette, 1965.
A whole world opened
before the eyes of millions
in that ninth stage of history,
with the technology for it
set up during the eighth.
Becoming one psychologically
has been taking place slowly,
with His sweet-scented streams
of eternity giving humans so much
more pleasure, culture, passivity,
entertainment, infotainment than
they had ever tasted-drunk before;
with the fruits of the tree of His being
given them to taste; and with His other
hand, He sucked the spirit unobtrusively,
and not so unobtrusively, out of all those
traditional orthodoxies, so seductively
that the world moved into a dark heart;
and the tempest, that had been sweeping
across the surface of the earth perhaps---
for centuries, for more than a hundred years---
was gradually leaving humankind everywhere:
bewildered, agonized and helpless, as he said
it was, as he said it would be, as we see it now,
as we saw it then.
1 Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, p.1.
13 December 1999 and updated on 4 April 2011
THE MANUFACTURE OF WANTING
The Baha'i Faith in North America expanded and consolidated in an advertising age. By the 1890s when the first Baha'is taught in Illinois, advertising had been part of the American way of life for thirty years, since at least the Civil War: 1861-1864. The approach of Christian evangelists, with their emphasis on redemption and the experience of grace, was transferred subtly and not-so-subtlety to the advertising world and its method of sale of patent medicines in the 1870s and 1880s. In the first three decades that the Baha'i Faith expanded in the USA, 1894 to 1924, the population of the USA expanded by twenty-five percent each year. This population was exposed to the magical promises and the philosophy of modern advertising.
By the time the first teaching Plan began in 1937 the golden age of radio had arrived and advertising found a new home in this medium. The same was true of TV where, after WW2, television brought advertising's pictures right into people's homes. In the late 1950s and 1960s advertising moved away from a conformist,sclerotic, mode, some would say military style and tone, to a reliance on the techniques of surprise, cleverness and creativity. The year I became a Baha'i, for example, in 1959, the Volkswagon Company developed an advertising campaign based around 'The Bug.' -Ron Price with thanks to ABC Radio National, "A History of Advertising," 1:00-2:00 pm, 2 August 2001.
Was He trying to block the air-waves,
trying to fog-up their oral/visual worlds,
trying to make it as difficult as possible
for them to get at all near, even close to,
this Most Great Ocean? It seemed so?!*
An increasingly dark incoherence spoke
across that vast American landscape,
advertising's endless jingle-jangle told
them again and again the source of their
current disturbances could be found in
the lack of an equal distribution of wealth,
or of indoor plumbing, or another comfort.
Was He simply giving them ways of learning
about this Great River of Life: some millions
of papers, sounds floating through the air,
pictures right in their noses? Just stuffed!
Yes, yes, but what a jungle of sensation
and triviality, evanescence and idiocy:
the manufacture of wanting everything
but the Voice of Him Who is the most
manifest of the manifest and the most(1)
hidden of the hidden.....I often wonder
just what was and is His game Plan!!!!
1 Baha'u'llah, Baha'i Prayers, USA, 1985, p.143.
Ron Price
2 August 2001 to 6 June 2011.
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THE CONSPICUOUS AND INCONSPICUOUS
Nine days after I began my travelling-pioneering life in Dundas Ontario the then President of the United States, JFK, made a speech at Rice University. On that day, 12 September 1962, as I was settling into my matriculation studies, he said: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade….not because it is easy, but because it is hard." Kennedy cited accelerating scientific progress as evidence that the exploration of space was inevitable and he argued that the United States should lead the space effort in order to retain a position of leadership on earth. I was also part of another inevitability associated with the great drama in the world's spiritual history, an inevitability given voice by the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith and Their successors--little did I know or believe it at the time.
In order to get some perspective on where I and others stood on that September day in 1962, Kennedy said: "No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history." Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40,000 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover themselves. Then about 10,000 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves and his hunting and gathering communities to construct other kinds of shelter associated with agriculture. Only 5000 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began 2000 years ago. The printing press 600 years ago and, then, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available just the other day. A Bahá’í might have added that "just the other day the greatest Being to have drawn breath on this planet came and went; and last week the nucleus and pattern for a new world Order, the administrative structure of the Bahá’í Faith, was given its first shaping. Its divine teaching Plan finally began to be implemented when my father and mother met in the 1930s. My pioneering life began whilst the machinery of the national and local institutions of a nascent Order was in the first four decades of its erection and perfection, erecting and perfecting.
For the speech itself go to the following link:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/jfk-space.htm
The speech was a news item on TV. The TV news was sandwiched between the homework I had been working on that afternoon after getting home from school and the homework I would work on that evening. It is quite possible I did not even watch the news that night since it was some fifty years ago. Perhaps my mother and father were getting ready for a meeting of the locally elected Baha'i spiritual assembly, the first one in that town of Dundas in the Golden Horseshoe of southern Ontario; perhaps my mother went to bed early on the evening of 12 September 1962 since she was in the last months of her last job, a very demanding one. She retired in the first months of 1963 from a working life which began in the 1920s. Her husband, my father, was retired and he had less than three more years to live. He was 72 in 1962.
Just last week, so to speak, to continue the pattern in Kennedy's speech, penicillin, television and nuclear power were developed. America was now about to reach the stars just before midnight tonight. The Baha'is were about to achieve a unique victory in the world's first global democratic election in 1963 and in subsequent elections, also before midnight tonight, so to speak on the historical horizon. The pace was indeed breathtaking and such a pace could not help but create new ills as it dispelled old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space and the new global undertaking by the Bahá’í community promised high costs and hardships as well as high rewards. It is not surprising that some would have us stay where we were on earth and not go to outer space and, in the case of the Baha'is, some would prefer that the Baha'is not attempt their utopian experiment for the unification of the peoples of the world and the fulfillment of a long-range and breath-taking vision of a golden age.
Kennedy went on to mention a William Bradfordand what Bradford said in 1630 about the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony. Bradford had said, Kennedy pointed out, "that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage." Kennedy also said in this brief survey, this brief capsule, of the history of humankind, "if our progress teaches us anything it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time……Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it-we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond." There is little doubt that the co-heirs of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the North American Baha'is, would lead the global undertaking for the spiritual conquest of the planet and the fullfillment of the extension of this new world Faith to every corner of the planet. I had just joined in this process as a pioneer and I had very little comprehension of what I was getting involved in back in September 1962.
In the 24 hours before his speech at Rice University, Kennedy pointed out that he had just seen facilities then being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. He said that he felt the ground shake and the air shatter due to the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn and generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. He said he had just seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined which would be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48-story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of a football field. Beginning in 1961 at least 45 satellites had come to circle the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America." And I was getting ready to be launched on a journey of travelling-pioneering the following year for the Canadian Baha'i community. It was a journey that, in 1961, was completely unknown to me as I finished grade 11 and started grade 12 at high school, and as I played ice-hockey and baseball as if my world was never going to change. But change it did sensibly and insensibly, incrementally and decade by decade until, as I write these words half a century later, I am in the evening of my life and not the teenager I was on the day Kennedy gave that speech.
The Mariner spacecraft then on its way to Venus was the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot was comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in the football stadium at Rice University between the 40-yard lines. Transit satellites were helping American ships at sea to steer a safer course. Satellites were giving Americans unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and would do the same for forest fires and icebergs. The city of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, would become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years, 1962 to 1967, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expected to double the number of scientists and engineers, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion in the City of Houston. The rise of the World Administrative Centre of this new Faith within the precincts and under the shadow of its World Spiritual Centre in Haifa Israel had begun in the last 24 hours, indeed, in the last two or three minutes outlined in a letter written by Shoghi Effendi in 1951. The apex of that Baha'i administration, the nucleus and pattern of a New World Order, was about to be elected in the first democratic and international election less than eight months later.
Many years ago, Kennedy concluded his speech, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he wanted to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." "Well, space is there," said Kennedy, "and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." For the Baha'is, too, there were and are hazards and dangers in this the greatest drama in the world's spiritual history. They, too, have been asking for God's blessing on their work. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 6 June 2011.
Little did I know, then, of
those plans and programs
for the conquest of space
as I got started in another
year of high school and of
football and my final year
in that town by the lake
where I had grown up,
been a child-adolescent
who had discovered this
new religion with its high
hopes for knowledge and
peace, unity and order!*#
Little did I know, then, of
the tenth and final stage
of history that was just
about to begin and the
full-blown, mysterious
institutionalization of a
charismatic Force, one
unique victory...... that
would take us to galaxies
beyond our wildest dreams
and imaginations and lead
us to a struggle of decades
and a window on the cyclical
nature of our history.......our
experiment & its conspicuous,
quite inconspicuous beginnings.
Ron Price
22 November 2006 to 6 June 2011
RONALD REAGAN AND ME
Ronald Reagan(1911-2004) was a busy fellow from the beginning of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937. He moved to Los Angeles that year and had a screen test with Warner Bros, a test which led to his first, his seven year contract lasting to the end of that Plan. His first screen credit was the starring role in the 1937 movie Love is on the Air released five months after the start of that Seven Year Plan. In the first two years of that Plan, 1937 to 1939, Reagan appeared in 19 films. I won’t outline Reagan’s entire life until his death in 2004 at the age of 93, but I will highlight some of the events using a type of synchronicity with which those who read my prose-poetry are familiar. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Wikipedia and (2 )SBS1 TV, 27 March 2011, 9:30-11:30 p.m.
You switched political allegiances
in ’62 the same year that I began(1)
my travelling-pioneering for the
Canadian Baha’i community, and
you became Governor of California
the year I went to Baffin Island: ’67.
By the time you tried for the Presidency
that second time in ’76 I was in Ballarat
at the University in a teaching career far
beyond my adolescent-young adult hopes.
You finally arrived in that Presidency in ’80—
the same year that my bipolar disorder was
stabilized and there you stayed until my job
at the Swan College of Technical & Further
Education began in ’89: with the Berlin Wall
about to crumble unbeknownst to all those
Kremlinologists: or so I have been informed.(2)
Your last 10 years, Ron, dealing as they did
with Alzheimer’s, as I was heading for a sea-
change in ’99, and the end of my career in
teaching by 2004 when you died were sad
ones hardly recognizing anyone in the end.
It all came and went so fast, eh?....Me, too,
Ron; it has all been so fast……You became
President at 69............Perhaps my greatest
achievements are ahead of me, too, Ron.....
I wish you well, Ron, in that land of lights….
that mysterious place, the daybreak of one’s
hopes where one makes final political switchs
to the True Party of the People: as objects of..
endless grace?(3)
(1) Reagan changed at the age of 51 from Democrat to Republican which he remained for the rest of his life.
(2) I have been given to understand, although I cannot recall the source, the reference, that no expert in the study of modern Russia, Kremlinologists, predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall.
(3) Abdul-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, Baha’i Pub. Trust, 1975(1928), p.172.
28 March 2011
