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Links Amtrak links.Links Amtrak links InformationIn TV's Anti-Families: Married . . . with Malaise, Josh Ozersky talks about the repackaging of American TV families from Ozzie and Harriet into Rosanne. From the point of view that the corporate world has manipulated television viewers into watching TV he shows the exaggerations of current day dysfunctional TV families. He goes on to discuss what the effects of these shows are on family values.Ozersky mentions the idea that a boundless discontent exists in our culture and its beginnings are found with the family, "where social patterns are first internalized." Ozersky furthers this notion by saying that boundless discontent means there are boundless needs. An understanding of the origins of these boundless needs in American culture can be understood from the context of The More Factor, by Laurence Shames. "An endlessly fertile continent whose boundaries never need be reached, a domain that could expand in perpetuity, a gigantic playing field that would never run out of room and on which the game would get forever bigger and more filled with action." The corporate world knows this all too well as they exploit the needs of consumers and manipulate them into buying their product. In Ozersky's words, "Given TV's entirely corporate nature, it is unreasonable to assume that the channels are referenda." Ozersky reminds us that many of these corporate executives are independent in the market and have not experienced a rich family life. What kind of effects on viewers do these dysfunctional families have? Ozersky points out that in mocking traditional family values on TV real families are sabotaged. He explains how this happens by saying that problems within the family are trivialized preventing any healing and only causing discontent. While TV is criticized on TV and even by us, we somehow become flattered and keep watching anyway. Why do we do this? " . . . To feel superior to TV and yet keep watching it," as Ozersky writes. It delivers the dream of having our cake and eating it too. By criticizing TV we put ourselves above it, yet we deem it harmless and continue to watch it anyway. Ozersky says that we have no power of our own to reject this "anti-life world" which we see on TV because we have been manipulated into thinking we have control. In going back to the idea that American family values portrayed on TV have changed we must accept that so has the real American family. The corporate advertisers have shown us dysfunctional families in a terribly exaggerated form that matches the attitude of our current generation. By allowing television to penetrate our lives so deeply we subject our power and ourselves to the corporations whose goals are only to gain money. |