There are three types of TV: Educating, Entertaining, and Involving TV. Every show exists somewhere with correlation to this triangle, but appeals to a specific individual within those groups.
The first, Educating, is composed of the two parts: Non-profit networks like PBS and C-SPAN, and for-profit networks such as the National Geographic network, Animal Planet, and Discovery networks. Pels in the spectrum of these channels are more green than others, and broadcast networks will often cater to this point of the triangle with doctor shows, quiz shows, film, and art/indie culture.
Entertaining is the masculine tip of the triangle. It's pels are more often blue, and the networks it encompasses are the sports channels, Comedy Central, kids networks, movie networks, USA, and MTV channels. Broadcast networks air shows about cops, criminals, and rebels- as well as music, movies, and nightly comedy.
Involving is feminine. This tip has red pels, and includes the news networks, Food and HGTV networks, politics and soap operas. The broadcast shows are dramas: both familial and social. Also, reality programming and contests are popular more on broadcast networks than on any one cable network.
More important the the shows and networks (at least in the eyes of TV's content creators) is the commercial. A media defined by it's limitations. The parameters of a commercial are simple- it has to be short, and it has to make customers want to buy a product. Today's TV features the product in an unrealistic emotional connection with the consumer. When you buy the object, or moreover the brand, you also buy what the object represents via the fabricator's advertising campaign: the champion of which remains the TV commercial.
Educating TV is owned by banking, pharmaceuticals, and political advertisers. The emotional contingents are about prestige, normalcy, health, social awareness, and age. Entertaining TV is owned by deodorant, junk food, consumer electronic, other media, cars/trucks, and toy advertisers. Emotional contingents are about fun, attractiveness, sex, individuality, trickster or chase plots, and product lust. Involving TV is owned by weight loss, security, credit, make-up and cosmetics, and minivans. The emotional contingents are about belonging, romance, love, family, safety, an us-vs-them dynamic, responsibility, convenience, and self-improvement.
Ultimately, the shape of the TV triangle, and what it represents can easily be modeled onto other media. The internet functions as an appropriations media today, which allows it to include all historical media environments. In doing so it actively adopts the ground rules of the past, only to mutate and reject them.
The TV triangle is based on a geometric approach to psychology that I first notated about in December. Simply put: emotion+inspiration=communication which accounts for the internal and external forces at play in thought. All behavior is communication- and thinking is not so much talking to oneself as it is listening to ones self. The communicative thought remains in the mind as a form of feedback (similar to a mic and amp) which is re-synthesized only with new emotions and inspirations in recombinant thought.
But what defines an event as memorable isn't the event itself- so much as the other events that are forgotten in the repressive mundane. A movie seen once is more memorable than a commercial seen dozens of times- likewise a tour of another city is only memorable in the context of the boring routes of your hometown. The body of a memory exists only in it's survival over time.
Stay tuned for more pages of my psychologia. Next time: How do we forget?
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