Television resembles reality so strangely because the images are extraordinary at the same time that they appear in our most ordinary settings. They come from afar, but they loom up right there in our own living rooms and bedrooms. That is why journalistic and academic critics of particular shows or genres, or of specific features of television, like violence, miss the essential point about TV's force. The images register with us as symbols, as diversion and ideology at the same time, by virtue of the fact that our guard is down when we watch. It is certainly true, as many researchers remind us, that we screen these symbols differently according to who we are and how we already see the world. We notice and soak up and ignore selectively, although not always consciously. The presence of the medium is such that we don't so much reflect on the meanings or (most of the time) study them; we swim in them. Television inscribes images of the acceptable that go beyond its stereotypes of men and women, blacks and whites, history and domesticity, significant as these are. Television has become the collective, secondhand dream of American society, and we don't even need to tune in to be wired up, affected by the look and the values that TV radiates. "Ideology" to Americans usually smacks of a foreign disease: something that afflicts other people. But ideology means nothing more or less than a set of assumptions that becomes second nature; even rebels have to deal with it. Television can no more speak without ideology than we can speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don't believe in it.
Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time
