Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series) Quotes

“In the economies of late capitalism leisure displaces labor, consumption displaces production, and commodities become the instruments of leisure, identity, and social relations.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Because men's idea of masculinity can rarely be realized at work they have developed a masculine style for their leisure and social activities that consists of excessive signs of masculinity in an exaggerated and compensatory display. The same gap between the ideological ideal and social experience also explains the sexism and aggressiveness of much adolescent male style, for, like lower-class men, young boys are also denied the social means to exercise the power that our ideology tells them is the prerequisite of their masculinity.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“There is no pleasure in being "duped" by the text into a helpless viewer, but there is considerable pleasure in selectively viewing the text for points of identification and distance, in controlling one's relationship with the represented characters in the light of one's own social and psychological context.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Identification then becomes a process of imaginative wish fulfillment which can be, and is, criticized from at least two points of view. The moralists criticize it on the grounds that it is mere escapism, and in encouraging people to imagine a better existence for themselves discourages them from working to achieve it in reality. At the other end of the spectrum, the ideologists argue that identification is the process whereby the values of the dominant ideology are naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual, and are thus endlessly reproduced and perpetuated.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“The alienated audiences was one that was aware of the performance as an arbitrary construction of the real, of the difference between players and characters, and was therefore aware that the people and incidents on stage were there to perform social an ideological actions that could only be understood in terms of their relationship to the dominant ideology. Alienation produced a thinking, interrogative socially aware audience.”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)

“Gless's lexical shift from "sexiness" through "femininity" to a "real strong lady" is a discursive shift and therefore has sociopolitical dimension. "Sexiness" is from an explicitly patriarchal discourse, "femininity" is from a discourse that attempts to naturalize gender construction and difference in terms of the status quo and is therefore implicitly patriarchal, whereas "real strong lady" is from a discourse that consciously opposes and exposes both the explicit and implicit patriarchy of "sexiness" and "femininity".”
― John Fiske, Television Culture (Studies in Communication Series)