Programming our lives

Walter M. Cummins, Walter Cummins, George Gordon

In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought - and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see very different sets of values reflected acorss the board. They would,...

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