Getting Better - 2nd Edition

Taylor & Francis

Ever since the fifties, when television became ascendent in American popular culture, it has become commonplace to bemoan its \""bad\"" effects > Ever since the fifties, when television became ascendent in American popular culture, it has become commonplace to bemoan its \""bad\"" effects. Little or nothing, however, has been said about its \""good\"" effects. With this observation, Henry Perkinson introduces his provocative and original analysis of television and culture. Rejecting the determinism inherent in most studies of the effects of television (\""We are what we watch\""), he insists that it is people that actively change culture, media having no agency to do so. Nevertheless, he argues that television did facilitate the changes we have made in our culture over the past thirty years.Perkinson describes how television helped us become critical of our existing culture, especially of the relationships that were commonly accepted between men and women, blacks and whites, politicians ae