

How television changed society in the 60s - entangld
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1231/1224309666607.html

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Macha
I feel that this is probably rather specific to Ireland. I'm not sure of any
other examples of television having as large a societal impact as toppling the
Catholic Church's influence over the country. So, I'm surprised to see it on
HN. That said, I haven't exactly looked, either.

I can't see television ever having that large an influence again, anywhere.
While Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show made a very significant influence on
the time period in the modern history section I had to study in the Leaving
Cert (Irish exam at the end if secondary school), people nowadays are too
skeptical of anything televised.

Once the number of channels people have available to them is taken into
consideration, plus the fact that the only shows to gain widespread popularity
are fiction shows like 24, news shows, or lighter non-fiction shows (like
Mythbusters), anything trying to make a serious impact just won't get watched
by enough people to get a large response.

Then of course there is the fact that the people in power are a lot more
conscious of how all media affects them. Politicians aiming for soundbites,
and companies having PR teams trying to influence media also reduce how
seriously media is taken. (This particular point also applies to the internet,
even if many politicians haven't quite figured that one out.

One of the reasons it had so much influence at the time is that, at least here
in Ireland, there is a certain older generation who used to take "what the man
on the telly said" as an authoritative source. Even talking to my own
grandmother reveals a certain amount of this attitude, at least for RTE or
BBC.

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entangld
I think the point of the article was to show how a form of new media changed a
society. It's particularly useful for people trying to understand what the
future of the web will look like.

They're showing how the nature of the medium (as an entertainment vehicle)
shaped the nature of the the public's interaction with it. You could apply an
abstraction like that to the internet as well.

A pipeline for mass communication was built and changed their attitudes toward
authoritative sources. Our pipelines are fracturing and we probably have
certain attitudes that aren't useful for the future.

Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much, but reading it figuratively is
much more useful to me.

