"Channeling, Television, and the New Age" (original) (raw)

Television, Culture and Religion: A Discourse

This paper focuses on the relationship between television, culture and religion. It explores how television can be of benefit to culture and religion as well as how culture and religion can be gainfully utilized by television. It also shows how the three entities, television, culture and religion can be mutually harmful to one another. It concludes on the position that the benefits and or harm accruable to each of the entities from one another are dependent on the ability of those who use them to employ them to such ends. It then makes recommendations that the government at all levels should be more proactive when issues of religion, culture and television are brought before them. That the three entities and their proponents should ensure that what goes on air is what would not hurt the society and that the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) should employ its telescopic lens when dealing with cultural and religious matters that appear on television, among others.

Book Review-Television in the age of radio: Modernity, imagination, and the making of a medium

Journal of Communication, 2015

Sewell’s book, Television in the Age of Radio, is a detailed materialist examination of this early discourse and its underlying assumptions. Sewell illustrates how culture, along with new regulation and the radio industry of the period, helped shape the technology, for- mat, and programming of the medium. Unlike other television histories, Sewell’s cultural approach provides a unique and useful way of understanding the motivations and reasons behind key decisions and lost opportunities — not just the historical and technical milestones. Tele- vision in the Age of Radio constructs a nuanced view and compelling narrative of how the cultural imagination helped to form both the subject and its potentiality. The story of television Sewell unfolds often echoes the narratives of more recent innovations and attitudes toward audience and programming.