“When you watch television you don’t dress up for it, you don’t go out for it, you don’t pay for it, the lights are on, and you do things and you talk, and all that is largely detriment of the experience—but if something is working it can be extraordinarily powerful because it sits right in the middle of all that mundaneness.”
Dennis Potter’s quote best summarizes the importance of the course “Understanding Media Contexts.” While there are many ways to approaching the course objectives, the most productive way is problematizing the ordinariness of any medium in everyday lives. This course taught at Northwestern University-Qatar introduced ways of analyzing the cultural, economic, political, and social contexts in which producers and consumers use media. A wide range of critical approaches was employed including narrative criticism, ideological analysis, audience reception, and aesthetic analysis.
The course looked into contemporary TV shows, historical TV shows, online videos, TV commercials, and reality TV shows. Even though most of the materials screened in class were from America, TV shows outside the U.S. were also included as an object of study. Similar to the film and media course I took in Main Campus, the course tackled theories central to television and media studies while situating it in a chronological timeframe. This class converges well with the first media class I took because it complemented the critical and methodological tools I was equipped with from the first class. Now I can say that I am able to analyze the reception and production of films and television.
The application of the theories and methods was something that became a habit for me after taking the class. Prior to taking the class I would watch shows and just take the message at face value. Now, even months after taking the class, whenever I watch an episode, my brain automatically assesses the episode in relation to television narratives, the representations of gender and race, the historical and political context, and the motivations for the episode’s theme. The course allowed me to question directors’ decisions when it comes to their framing, character blocking, lighting, and scoring.
Although considered as traditional media, I think the study on television is still relevant because the medium might have changed but the message has not. The course made me think that television is not dead—it is alive; it is not static, it is changing. The final project for this course was to choose a TV show produced outside the U.S. and give a brief analytical presentation about the show, highlighting its relationship with the corresponding class course reading’s topic. The theme that was assigned to me was about commercial strategies and new forms of engagement to woo consumers to be the audience of a specific show.
The project itself made me realize how these theories permeate through regions and cut across cultures in a way that it appropriates it to the consumers. I found out that although Coke Studios Arab edition was ought to be the same installment as its origin Coke Studios in Pakistan, the mission and target audience of both shows were different. Here, the same critical approaches were applied like the ideological analysis, aesthetic analysis, and production analysis—all elements contributing to understanding media contexts.