Huge Mega Post for Final Readings!

The Television in Architecture reading focused on the evolution of television in connection to our culture, and how it has become a fixture to our homes and ubiquitous in our everyday lives, from dominating our home lives to appearing in animated billboards, waiting rooms, everywhere. Now they're even in NYC cabs and in checkout lines at grocery stores, television screens are everywhere. I found the first part of the reading interesting in talking about the so-called reflective nature of television, in their depiction of the real American family. It's sort of a strange loop where television executives put on programming that they feel will reach all audiences in depicting a typical American family, or any kind of unit or sub-culture, then said group watches so much of that kind of archetype that they begin to believe that's who they should emulate or aspire to be. So as society reforms itself to match television, television will begin to regurgitate that and throw it back out to people, who will then reformat around that, and it will keep going until apparently we'll all be some kind of marketing-infused unusually-processed media culture. Or maybe... IT'S ALREADY HAPPENED. [dramatic music sting]

Television, Furniture and Sculpture talked more about television as a household entity, focusing on its command on our lives, and how it communicated ideals and ideas to us without us having to think them through. Television, prior to the Internet now, was something that kept everyone's lives in connection; at some given moment millions of people from all over the country could be doing the exact same thing in the act of watching a television show, and the thought of that is kind of mixed. While some part of me thinks that it's really neat that there can be this global connection and unity over something as simple as a television show, entertainment, there's also this weirdness to it in that television is making our lives more generic in basic. In watching television, we start to lose a sort of uniqueness in our lives.