Dystopia In The Tv Industry Essay

Dystopia in the Television Industry: Silence or Death by Technology In 2048, the television industry has fully centralized. By centralized, this means that the government completely controls the production and distribution of television content online and offline. Many new (i.e., online or Internet companies) and old media TV networks (i.e., traditional TV companies) are private but they cannot produce and distribute anything that the state has not explicitly approved. If they do, the executives and producers, including the directors, will either be imprisoned for at least forty years or decapitated with public viewing. The execution-versus-imprisonment decision depends solely on President Mark and his changing moods. The state also owns a

Central to all social groups is the concept of "interpretative flexibility" or "flexibility in how artifacts are designed" (Pinch and Biker 40). An authoritarian state wants to design and use technology to ensure control over media content. Knowing that people prefer the TV over radio, it focuses on the TV industry. As a result, the state hired the best hackers who can find out TV content that can be considered as against the state or its interests. The main interest is to continue one line of thinking in all media products- that the state is the best parent for its children, the citizens and the capitalist system is the best social and economic system to ensure wealth and security. Any technology that undermines state power makes it subversive and so the reaction is to apply total control of its ownership and distribution. Contrarily, TV industry workers are not totally in favor of this control. Some have formed a secret group where they can at least talk about their conditions and how to change them. One of them noted that they cannot do anything to change how the industry is being run because the whole political system itself is the problem. Another suggested contacting other TV workers for mobilization and unionization. Pat noted, “How can we do this if we lack communication tools? Everything is under surveillance. Our cellphones, our work intranet systems. We’re lucky that the patrol in our

In "Do Artifacts Have Politics," in A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Langdon Winner explores the idea that technology "can embody specific forms of power and authority" (19). He refers to Lewis Mumford's 1960s writing that technologies can be categorized as either authoritarian or democratic. Winner adds Hayes who notes that deploying nuclear power facilities will result in an authoritarian society because he prefers solar sources that are better than the former's centralized technologies (19). Despite these views, Winner asserts that, using the theory of technological politics, the social and economic systems of technologies are the ones with political qualities, not technical artifacts per se (Winner 20). In this case, the state uses its political qualities and imbues them into the technical artifacts. In addition, technology also shapes modern societies to complement the social determination of technology through Edmund Husserl's "to the things themselves" (Winner 21). The state perpetuates the political system through the social and psychological conditioning power of TV