Mobile television is a very common medium now and it came to be during the information age in the late 1990’s to the early and mid-2000’s. My question is, Is mobile television the new norm or not? I will be talking about how television was a dominant force so long and not mobile television became so popular and how major television networks have had to adjust. Television was an experience that was dominant until it wasn’t because of mobile television.
Television was an extremely dominant medium for many years. It was used in the article “Multidimensional Social History of Television: Social Uses of Finnish Television from the 1950s to the 2000s” by Kortti for many different things and was a way of life for people for so long. “A television as a family member was an extremely typical point of view in advertising in the early 1960s” It was an experience and advertisers played to that.
It was something that you could do whenever and not think about all of the other things that you could have going on and just watch TV.
People could have other people over and watch TV in addition. There became disagreements with television: “With the divergence of viewing and the increase of program supply, there emerged conflicts and disagreements within families over selecting programs and, more generally, individual preferences concerning TV viewing.” When more options came to be, people saw things differently and had their view of how television should be watched. Television was a big part of what most people did.
With television being a part of many people’s lives, it then became a subject of conversation for lots of people. “As television sets became more common, the social life of families began to revolve around television more and more.” It was a big part of people’s daily life and television was something they could enjoy and make a serious or fun conversation with different people. It was something people really enjoyed and could share their opinion about and the article “Multidimensional Social History of Television: Social Uses of Finnish Television from the 1950s to the 2000s” Kortti says that you would have to watch television to fit in and keep conversations. It could represent that you belonged in whatever group you wanted to belong in by watching television.
Television was seen among people in the article “Multidimensional Social History of Television: Social Uses of Finnish Television from the 1950s to the 2000s” as something that you could always use and enjoy. It was something that people could enjoy, it was a way families could spend good quality time together and even you could watch TV alone. It was something for everyone. Television can blame the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by Bill Clinton which in many ways was the opposite of the Communications Act of 1934. In the book “Understanding Media Industries” Havens and Lotz say there was significantly looser restrictions on what companies could purchase and the business they could get into whereas the Communications Act of 1934 was much more rigid about the guidelines that they had to follow and was not going to change. It was there to have more and more competition which is exactly what it did. Now, everyone was competition against each other with little to no restrictions that they previously had before.
When mobile television came to be, there were serious questions about television going forward due to new inventions being used. There was serious competition among phone companies and phones were now a thing you could use for just about anything. In the article: Defining mobile television: The Social Construction and Deconstruction of New and Old Media” on Dawson writes; In 2004, Sprint became the first American carrier to offer its subscribers a phone capable of taking and sharing digital photographs. Phone companies wanted younger people to get phones and they customized the phones to how they thought young people would use and enjoy their phones. Everyone’s life was in their phone where they could access the number of different people, get the Internet, watch TV, check their email and find out information is a significantly quicker way.
This changed viewing habits where people did not have to wait until six or seven pm in the evening to watch the news and find out everything that is going on during the day. It was on their phones and computers and they could find it out immediately. People could go on a ride somewhere and have a big televised event on their smartphone which affects television since now they have to be more interesting. There are more and more options for people and they do not dominate like they used to. This was a great opportunity for mobile television to take over and according to Dawson: “As noted above, Sprint became the first American wireless carrier to deliver television programming to its subscribers in 2003 when it began offering services provided by the tech startup Idetic and the multimedia streaming company RealNetworks.” It is really easy to say that television needed mobile television in order to keep going as their own medium and there is truth to making that statement, in my opinion,
Are Mobile TV The New Normal?. (2022, Mar 08). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/are-mobile-tv-the-new-normal/