ABSTRACT
Television is the mass medium par excellence: consumed by a vast number of people in large quantities and requiring a vast supply of material for diffusion. The availability of more channels in a commercially operated system, like the American one, seems rather to restrict than to increase the choice for the viewer. The main consequence of the continuous stream of material which television provides—continuousness being a quantitative aspect—is that it juxtaposes, and tends to reduce to the same level in the consumer's mind, very different kinds and categories of viewing matter, different not only in the superficial qualitative sense that some of it is better, some worse—and these terms will have to be more closely defined later—but in a far more basic regard. The effect of the continuousness with which this material is presented for entertainment is that it tends to blur the qualitative distinctions between the different kinds of material.
