FREE ESSAY ON RADIO AND TELEVISION

RADIO AND TELEVISION

The Development of Radio and Television
Radio is a part of most people's everyday lives, but more so is television. Television
virtually emerged from radio, which set the foundation down for what is known today as
the main source of mass media and communication. The reason being that almost all
households in developed nations has a television. With such a norm it is often overlooked
as to the controversy caused by the T.V which is almost literally the addition of
pictures to radio. Many interesting things happened with the emergence of the television
from the radio.
The radio is one of the, if not most, important elements in the development of mass
media. The emergence of radio took place in the early 1920's and for the first time it
was possible to reach a large number of people at the same time. Radio at first was used
in World War I where it served only to transmit important messages to and from certain,
specific points. It was after the war when radio started to become commercialized. The
commercialization of radio took different steps in the development process depending on
the social and political circumstances in the particular country. These differences were
in propaganda radio, elite radio, and democratic radio. Democratic Radio is more familiar
to us and it was developed according to what the audiences wanted to hear. This type of
radio is what we know radio as today; freedom to listen to what we want to listen to.
This emphasis on the audience is what made the radio so popular and with this popularity
came the opportunity of profiting from advertisements and promotions. More money being
put into these programs brought about better quality. As more and more people listened to
these quality programs the people taking part in them became popular with the audiences,
which in some cases were spread nation wide. These people were becoming better known as
celebrities. The sound, expression and personality of the voice were all a part of the
popular notion of a celebrity. It wasn't hard to believe the excitement that the
audiences felt when they found out that these celebrities were going on to T.V also.
All of the excitement seemed a waste when pictures were actually added and viewed by the
same audiences. The former radio audiences had different views on how these actors
actually looked and when they saw that they didn't look the way they thought they would
they became upset and confused. Former radio actors who didn't fit in with the part
according to their appearance were replaced by people who did or in a more extreme case
like the 'Amos n' Andy' show, the whole show was cancelled. With the introduction of
television came the visual bias which basically meant that all the emphasis was on how
the person behind the tube looked and it no longer mattered what this person was saying
or the purpose for which they served. This phenomenon is better known as the
'predominance of the image' in which the content of the program we watch doesn't matter
but what matters is purely the visual aspect or how the actor or actress looks. Everyone
has heard of the famous saying; Don't judge a book by its cover and this is clearly what
has taken place with television because we continue to constantly judge shows on the way
that the actors and actresses look. A popular show from the 90's was 'Baywatch' which
consisted of some of the worst acting ever seen, yet the ratings were extremely high.
Almost all males who watched this show didn't watch for the actresses' acting skills but
rather for the enjoyment of watching attractive women run around in bathing suits.
This type of visual bias has become so common and normal that we don't often stop and
think about the actual content of television programming. We don't necessarily have to
feel guilty about this but we should realize that the world is not as perfect as it's
shown on TV. Some people realize this to a great extent but others do not and that's
where problems can arise from the unfair treatment of others in the real world.
Television programming is not the problem, we the viewers see what we want to see.