Television

The Medium and its Manners

Peter Conrad author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:2nd Sep '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Television cover

It dominates our lives. It is the twentieth-century medium. And yet we're all a little sheepish when it comes to television, disowning it by disavowal or by inventing subtle, innocuous disguises for it. Why is this? In this book, first published in 1982, Peter Conrad argues that our unease stems from the way that the medium works: it absorbs the messages it transmits, it invents a reality of its own and ends by luring the world into the confines of its box. Television's achievement is to have estranged us from the reality which it puports to represent, but which it actually refracts. This invasion of our lives is monitored and projected in programmes designed to ape the human routine. Following a discussion of television as furniture, Peter Conrad explores its various versions of reality: the simulated conversation of the talk show, the competitive consumerism of the games, the messianic commercials, the eventless protraction of the soap operas and the camera's incitement of happenings which the television calls news.

ISBN: 9781138207417

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 408g

170 pages