Understanding Television in Our Globalized Profit-Driven Village

Although television seems to be mainly a visual medium which demands very little attention from us, television content depends just as much on written as on oral language. It also demands a minimum level of comprehension. The variety we find in television content is determined additionally by decisions on gender, sexual orientation, age brackets, ethnicity, race and combinations of all the above.

Originally, television conventions -although always unnatural- seemed to be clearly determined to separate reality from fiction, (news separated from entertainment; for example), but as the medium became more of a mass information vehicle, such conventions blended reality with fiction. Currently, television conventions do not necessarily work around reality; the inverse indeed is usually true. One has just to look around to see how our surroundings continues to change due to the influence of pop culture which influences society to a great extent through the air waves.

Television has morphed from a medium determined to spread mass culture, to creating a sense of reality which at the very least is disturbingly false. The medium has become more and more influential. It is a tool to create consent; mass consent. For what purpose? Many. The entertainment industry flourished for the most part thanks to television's wide spread reach. Media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch admitted in England his intentions to manipulate popular knowledge to create support for politicians and policy for the War in Iraq. Members from elite groups such as David Rockefeller admitted how the main stream media has shut up for more than forty years regarding the formation of a World Government led by the Rothchild family who control the issuance of currency around the planet through central private banks, such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve of the United States.