Everything Is Television

TV Tropes

TV Tropes, the all-devouring pop-culture wiki, catalogs and cross-references recurrent plot devices, archetypes, and tropes in all forms of media.

Television

Television is a visual interface for personal agents, a space for creating, arranging, and reusing artifacts.

The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy

Check out the first in a series on social media from Denny Center Student Fellow Rai Hasen Masoud (F'27) to learn more about the attention economy and it's impacts on our democracy.

Real signals or artificial stereotypes?

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...

How Does Media Influence Social Norms? Experimental Evidence on the Role of Common Knowledge

How does media influence beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? While many scholars have studied the effect of media on social and political outcomes, we know surprisingly little about the channels through which this effect operates. I argue that two mechanisms can account for its impact. Media provides new information that persuades individuals to accept it (individual channel), but also, media informs listeners about what others learn, thus facilitating coordination (social channel). Combining a field experiment with a plausibly natural experiment in Mexico, I disentangle these effects analyzing norms surrounding violence against women. I examine the effect of a radio program when it is transmitted privately versus when it is transmitted publicly. I find no evidence supporting the individual mechanism. The social channel, however, increased rejection of violence against women and increased support for gender equality, but unexpectedly increased pessimism about whether violence would decline in the future.

The Cultural Purge Will Not Be Televised - easyDNS

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our…

Media Ownership Monitor

Mass media influences how facts are viewed and debated in a society, contributing to crafting its public opinion. Independence and pluralism...

No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

Challenges Of Broadcast Television Aspect Ratio Changes - 15 July 2026 04:50 UTC

I find the period where television was transitioning from 4:3 to 16:9 an interesting one. When broadcasting began in 16:9, but people were still actively using 4:3 televisions, broadcasters would commonly either letterbox the content or expect the left and right edges to be cropped. This led to a period where television series direction avoided putting anything too important at the horizontal edges of the frame. Cinema faced similar challenges, and either embraced pan-and-scan, letterboxing, or careful reframing from a wider image.

The Impending Golden Age of Interactive Entertainment

The best is yet to come for the interactive entertainment industry. This is the message I’ve been shouting from the rooftops over the past…

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work | I Done This

Whether you fear its impersonal nature or thinks its the best thing since streaming television, asynchronous communication is here to stay Remote work is rising and online education is becoming more accepted and commonplace, both due to changing attitudes and the pandemic. These factors are only going to increase the…

The Birth of the Attention Economy

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.

The attention market—and what is wrong with it

Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today.