"Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore . . . how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged." After making this comment almost 20 years ago, Neil Postman went on to analyze the effects of television on our culture, particularly how television was affecting public discourse. In this course, we will continue Postman's analysis, examining first what television is and how it works, and then how television affects not just what we know and how we know it, but the nature of that knowledge itself. Are we moving from a print dominated to an image dominated culture? What techniques can we use to analyze the images that fill our world? What is the rhetoric of television, and how does this rhetoric shape our knowledge of the world? After we read a number of texts on television and the nature of the image, we will plunge into critically and analytically viewing television, determining its effects on how each of us sees the world, and examining the world that television constructs for each of us.
