Week 8 – Material Culture: Television and Cultural Forms

 1. When I was young, I used to watch TV most of the day. Cartoons were my obsession at the time as I was glued to the screen for the whole day while talking to my friends over the phone. My parents would get angry if I didn’t go out or if I hung on the phone for too long since the bill would be huge. As most people have, I transitioned from watching cartoons to watching poorly made American flicks and comedies that were being played on a random channel. I would watch them with my dad since my mum wasn’t that interested in TV at the time. Nowadays though, I watch movies and TV shows with my friends and rarely with my parents. There are shows which I watch alone because I no one else is interested in them. The thing is that most of my friends have a Netflix subscription, but I find pirating to be much more easy and sufficient. Currently, I don’t even have cable television and a lot has changed from when I was little. The only purpose my TV serves is for connecting it to my playstation in order to play games. The big bonus is that I can even watch movies and shows over the playstation which kind of makes it look as if I were actually watching TV. I believe that watching anything with friends or family can be considered a social activity. If you watch anything at the same time and place as someone else, then you have something to talk about and discuss. Personally, I like to chime in sometimes to react to a show or movie when I watch it, simply because it’s in a home environment and I don’t have to worry about disturbing others.

2. Mad Men

Female characters in the TV show Mad Men are depicted the same way they were treated back in the 50s along with its social norms. Men were the dominant “boss” types, wearing suits and having successful jobs. Female characters were never as “important” as the male characters are, simply working as secretaries and the like while male characters are represented as strong corporate leaders and superiors. This is simply what gender roles looked like back in that time. That time has passed, and people generally don’t think like that anymore, but sadly there are rare occurrences in which men treat women like they have no rights and that they belong in a kitchen. Hopefully that kind of stereotype is disappearing and more and more women are becoming corporate leaders and bosses in big businesses.