Sublime

Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.

Following Smith, Adams was convinced that men valued wealth not for its intrinsic value, but rather for its instrumental value in earning social recognition and distinction. “The answer to all these questions is,” Adams asserted, “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.”

“emotional realism” of Star Trek promotes this complex and highly unstable relationship between reader and fiction and helps to explain the cultural and ideological “productiveness” of fan culture.

Henry Jenkins

Instead, taste amounts to a form of consumerism in which what you buy or watch is the last word on your identity and dictates your future consumption as well.

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity, and courage. The

Three or four generations from now, the present-day entertainment medium most likely to be “studied” by cultural historians will be television, based on the belief that TV finally became a serious, meaningful art form around the turn of the twenty-first century.