Watching television has become a major part of today’s western culture, whose people spend an average of three to six hours a day staring at the flickering images transmitted right into their/our living rooms. Still, watching television "has often been seen as a routine, unproblematic, passive process: the meanings of the programmes are seen as given and obvious; the viewer is seen as passively receptive and mindless." (Livingstone 1990, p. 3) This would mean, that the television audience does not have to do anything but to stare without thinking, and that the pictures we see do not leave any space for interpretation. This, in fact, is not true. It might just be that we have all grown up learning to interpret the conventions of television in order to put a meaning to the images shown, and therefore regard the process of ‘reading’ television as ‘natural’. As we have to learn the alphabet and language to be able to read a book, we also have to learn to interpret the images shown on TV to be able to understand them. We constantly have to refer to our knowledge and experience both of the world we live in and the ‘television reality’ as well. We have to have a certain amount of cultural competence and social knowledge, and, on the other hand, we have to be familiar "with the conventions and requirements of the medium and genre" (Livingstone 1990, p. 39) itself.
Television is an oral (and visual) medium, but, just as in everyday life, we do not consider oral language as highly as the written word. This might be because of the long tradition of written text, but I guess it has something to do with the realisation that we cannot capture television, which is like an endless flow, a continuous stream going on and on; we just tune in and become part of an impersonal, silent and invisible audience. When reading a book the pace is ours, we can read a sentence over and over again, it will always be there, it is material and gives us a feeling of truth and eternity. Television, on the other hand, seems to be transitory (and all through the history of mankind people have been searching for immortality), and it does not have a beginning and a conclusion, even though the programmes shown on television have. But they are only segments of the whole and not even commercial breaks take away this assumption of the ‘endless flow’.
Nevertheless, "we should not mistake an oral medium for an illiterate one" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 16). After all, television is our ‘window to the world’, and "it uses codes which are closely related to those by which we perceive reality itself" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 17). As television has quite a huge impact on society and influencing everyday reality, it is itself a ‘human construct’ merely reflecting the world it is produced in, presenting its values, morals and ideology (for example gender roles, justice and self-justice, or war coverage (Gulf War / Cold War)), very often favouring the purposes of the authorities, might they be political or industrial. "The media is conceptualised as telling the viewer what to think about or what not to think, or talk, about" (Livingstone 1990, p. 49). Or, to quote a more Marxist point of view, television could be seen "as an agent of the domination of capitalist society through the ideological character of the text and the passive nature of the audience. In watching television, people are persuaded to accept a view of society, and of their place in it, that confirms their subordination" (Abercrombie 1996, p. 200).
There definitely is some truth in this, and the influence of the society represented in the media on society and culture should not be underestimated, referring to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the global village’, which due to globalisation becomes more and more of a ‘western community’ strongly influenced by US-American values and ideology. Still it goes against the idea of the ‘active’ viewer, who has the knowledge and the competence to interpret television in his/her own way, able to turn the set off when it does not fulfil his/her expectations. It is not conform with the 18th century movement of Enlightenment: "The human reason is the only and the last authority, which decides about the method, truth and mistake of all knowledge" (Meyers Grosses Taschenlexikon, Part 9). After all, human sense, the cultural environment we live in, our rules and values, and our very own personality, as well as the viewers purposes, needs and moods influence the sensory data just as well as the context of a programme.
In order to make sense of the world we live in and the world shown to us on TV, we make use of schemata, we categorize "to go beyond the information given" (Chandler 1997), to put meaning to what we observe. Television programmes can be divided into genres, which the viewer recognises by interpreting conventional signs and codes. There are physical (what we see) and conceptual (what it means) signifiers. For example, in Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply the cello represents the body of Nina’s dead husband Jamie. When she puts the cello into its case in the end of the movie, it is a metaphor for her burying Jamie. This interpretation goes far beyond what we actually see (her putting a cello into a case). And the more often a sign is used the more conventional it becomes, leading the viewer’s expectation. "The relationship is purely conventional – dependent on social and cultural conventions" (Chandler 1994). Signs themselves depend both on the producer (denotation, "the definitional, ‘literal’, ‘obvious’ or ‘commonsense’ meaning" (Chandler 1994)) as well as on the audience (connotation: "refers to its socio-cultural and personal association" (Chandler 1994)), and different symbols have different meanings in different cultures (e.g. a cross does not symbolise religion all over the world).
In Semiotics (the science of signs) there are two central concerns: "The relationship between a sign and its meaning; and the way signs are combined into codes." (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 37) Signs frequently used in television programmes can be categorised into social, technical and representational codes. Social codes include the dress, the make-up, gestures and language of a character, codes to inform the viewer about the social class of a person, profession and/or education. Stereotypes (black dress equals bad man/woman, grey suit symbolises bureaucracy) are often used because they do not need much explanation, and the viewers expectation, resulting from what he/she has experienced on TV and in his/her own social surrounding, are predictable and can therefore either be fulfilled or broken.
Technical codes, such as the camera, the lighting, the editing or the use of sound and music, also lead to strong expectations and mainly signify the genre of a programme, if it is documentary or drama, fact or fiction, a game-show or the news. They also have a strong influence on the mood of the spectators, drawing the audience into the programme, to have them/us feel what the producer/director intents. More subconsciously works the lighting of characters, for example whether a character’s face is lit from top or below giving him/her a soft or a harsh expression. Another example would be the camera angle: while a top-shot represents inferiority, vulnerability and insecurity, a low angle lets the character grow, making him/her superior and strong. Again, technical codes tell the viewers what to expect.
Thirdly there are representational codes. The dialog and the narrative differ from genre to genre. They indicate, for example, whether it is a news-programme we are watching or a comedy. After all, we have learnt these conventions a long time ago and are constantly confronted with them when watching television. And due to our experience we are able to understand them in the way they are intended to (or in the way they fit with our own experience, ideology, knowledge of the world: we are able to criticise!). Even if we do not understand the actual language of a programme we can still ‘read’ the language of television and can judge by interpreting conventional signs and codes (although language itself is one part of it). And yet the seemingly most obvious conventions, like first showing a person looking at a point off-camera and then showing an object, which we all interpret as this person seeing that object, does not necessarily have to make sense to a viewer who has never experienced television before.
"Categorization is a key ‘top-down’ process which is involved in perception" (Chandler 1997), they help us to simplify, speeding up our recognition and the process of relating given information to our experiences. If we would not have learnt to ‘read’ television, we could not understand it (as mentioned many times before). On the other hand, the way we put meaning to what we see on TV does not differ too much from how we understand the world we live in anyway. "We perceive both of them [reality and television reality] in a similar way, and as a result they interact with each other" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 67). Still we have to be and are aware of television ‘framing’ reality. We understand that television does not only pretend to be realistic, ‘connecting with the experience of the viewer’, but also purely entertaining, fitting "with the conventions and requirements of the medium and genre" (Livingstone 1990, p. 39)
Codes, after all, "depend on the agreement of… users" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 59). and therefore are not static, but changeable. Conventions nowadays are very different from conventions fifty years ago. They depend on changes in society, "to meet the changing needs and practices of their users" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 59). When watching a news programme from the '50s, for example, we cannot but realise the strong political and subjective view-point of the coverage. But it represents the time it was made in. Because we live in a ‘different’ society nowadays and have knowledge of the past as well as the present, we cannot relate the given information to our own experience and therefore have a distant look at it. And especially the vision has changed: the speed of images is steadily increasing, but we somehow still seem to manage this huge amount of information. We are used to it, and when people in the future look at today’s TV-programmes they will probably start laughing (or crying, depends on the future). But signs do not only vary in time but very much in ‘place’, "for although a signifier remains the same, the sign itself is altered by change of genre within the medium, as the same way as it is by a change of medium itself" (Fiske & Hartley 1978, p. 53). So, to make a meaning out of what we see, we have to not only identify the sign but also the genre, referring to the context of the programme, identifying its codes.
‘Reading’ television is indeed a very complex process that we seem to achieve effortlessly. As many things in real life, they might be "simple to carry out, but never simple to analyse" (Livingstone 1990, p. 3). And when breaking down this ‘endless flow’ of television, we deal with segments, that can be ‘read’ in different ways according to the viewers (and the producers) knowledge. Because television is a mass medium, most of the programmes are designed to reach as many people as possible, and therefore, regarding the differences in social and educational backgrounds, have to respond on a rather ‘low level’ to attract as many viewers as possible. Due to changes in transmission (cable, now digital) broadcasting is changing into ‘narrowcasting’, which might lead to a development in quality, but it takes away the event-character of television programmes, and would, in a way, destroy McLuhan’s idea of the ‘global village’, for it would feed different groups with different information.
Finally, an interesting point about how we make a meaning of what we see on television is our capability to distinguish between fact and fiction – because in real life, what we see is what is true, we primarily trust our sight, even though, of course, our experience, our schemata, our knowledge, therefore our expectations effect our perception. But we know that television is ‘lying’, making up stories, often driven by sensationalism due to a growing competition. Perceiving television might include a lot of modes in which we make sense of our very own reality, but in real life there are not as many signs and symbols (the essence of every programme), in real life we have to be selective (omission). By no means could we pay attention to every car passenger passing us on a street, but we learn what things are important (that is a reason why different cultures see differently), how to interpret them and so on. Television is even faster, there is nothing in the frame that is not supposed to be there, that has a meaning, and sometimes the frame is so full of symbols that we only perceive them subconsciously (just like in real life), we have to decide what data is actually necessary.
There is a danger in television as a medium. Because perception is so close to ‘reality’ and television can provide the viewer with a multitude of feelings and experiences, we are endangered to make ‘TV reality’ our reality, to have television live our lifes, This will never lead to any satisfaction, but it gives the viewer pleasure and a glimpse of happiness. As TV-Junky Homer Simpson from The Simpsons puts it: "Television – teacher, mother, secret lover."
To conclude: Televisual codes constitute a kind of ‘language’, and we all learn how to interpret signs and symbols in order to put meaning to what we see. This process is orally and visually, and does not differ from what we do in perceiving reality in everyday life very much. Due to differences in cultural and social background all over the world we are likely to interpret the same symbols differently, depending on whatever convention a society has agreed on. But just as well, television is its own medium/mode of communication and therefore obeys its own rules, which we have to take into consideration when figuring out meanings (an example could be, that when phoning someone, we do know that the other person does not see our body language; we know and therefore adjust ourselves).
It should also be considered that people watch television for different reasons, to actually learn something, experience something, or just as background sound in the next room. This, again, has an effect on how we ‘read’ television.
May 2000