ABSTRACT
As a “particular cultural technology” (Williams 2003, 3, 39), television has overhauled forms of public argument, discussion and entertainment, whilst breeding entirely new ones when it started to conquer the living rooms of middle-class families in the Americas. During the second half of the 20th century, television rose to become the dominant medium and gatekeeper to the public sphere in American mediascapes. In current days, in the midst of change associated with globalization, the medium remains a viable source of common experiences, knowledge and information for people from different socioeconomic, cultural and political backgrounds. Notwithstanding its recent dynamics of transformation (Wohlsen 2014) into what Lotz identifies as the Post-Network Era (2007), television is still the pre-eminent cultural form of our times. For the last decades, television has been observed as being simultaneously permeated by national cultures and shaped by the logic of profit that reaches beyond borders, and has driven the cultural agents and industries which produce content both locally and globally (→ Cultural Industries, III/27).
