Read one of these "Television Studies" Articles. What do you think of it and of teaching "television at all" in college.
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=3655
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I just read through "And a Purple Dinosaur Shall Lead Them: Barney and the Future of Intergenerational Politics" http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1994/12/cadre.html
ReplyDeleteand it was fantastic! it had some great stuff about the difference between Barney and Sesame St. I'm trying to think of a good way to summarize, but its difficult. I'll just post 2 excerpts 1 on Sesame St. and the other on Barney.
on Sesame St:
ReplyDelete"And what kind of education were you getting? One without any kind of core curriculum or lesson plan, where you sort of picked up whatever you could from among all the bells and whistles, where learning about cultural diversity was just as important as learning the alphabet. Which was fine, but it wasn't the sort of thing likely to lead to stratospheric SAT scores. Nor was it likely to inspire patience for anything that wasn't completely entertaining at all times. And like I said earlier, it taught that the world is full of conflict, and that the misfortune of others is funny — muppets are always tripping and falling and banging their heads and stuff, and the other muppets laugh. It's not 'Beavis and Butt-head', but for educational TV, there's quite a bit to raise the eyebrows of the media police. "
on Barney:
ReplyDelete"Let's take a quick look at the kind of education Barney's legions are getting. First of all, it's much more structured. Every show is built around one theme, and sticks to it fairly faithfully — if the show's about how to count to ten, ninety percent of the show is going to be about how to count to ten. Over and over and over. Secondly, unlike 'Sesame Street', there is only one authority figure in 'Barney & Friends': Barney himself. Barney has all the answers and the kids follow him without question. And what does Barney preach? Universal love, community, sincerity, friendship, team spirit; but also conformity, unquestioning adherence to authority, and enforced happiness. (One recent episode revolved around the attempts of Barney and some other kids to pester a little girl into cheering up ?? they simply *would not let* her be sad for a while.) These are the kind of values, both positive and negative, associated with the civic peer personality."
omg this is fantastic stuff!! I don't even know what more commentary i can provide except how interesting this is!
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to look at this from the writers perspective. okay. so you got a job writing for a educational children's tv show. Whatever values you instill into the episode your working on (and you have to instill values)will be followed by it's child audience unquestioningly and plant seeds that will last well into adulthood. what do you write.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you would try to get as universal as possible, but again as we can see from the article, whats universal to one might not be universal to the other