Word: mediumly
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...technologies meant new audiences--and new relationships between artists and audiences. Movies were the century's first mass medium after print. But although millions of viewers could have the same experience at the movies, they experienced it a few hundred at a time, in individual theaters. Radio was the first entertainment medium to enable a mass audience to have the same experience instantaneously and simultaneously. Even more than movies, radio gave audiences an intensely communal feeling, a sense of being part of something national, as well as a special intimacy with its stars...
...medium's own most distinctive format bears out a theory of its first prophet, Marshall McLuhan. TV discovered that on the whole, amid all its sitcoms and music and dramas, the most entertaining, the most amusing and sometimes the most gripping thing it can show us is people sitting and talking to one another, and to us. McLuhan argued that speech is the richest form of human communication because it involves several of the senses--sight, sound, touch, etc.--and that speech on TV is the nearest equivalent yet to the face-to-face variety. Hence the ubiquitous talk show...
...only provided this century with two of the things it likes best--greater realism and superior fantasies--but also showed how deeply entwined they can be. Circa 1900, ambitious photographers aspired to pictures that resembled paintings. Then came modernism, which taught them to rethink the characteristics of their own medium. Sharp focus, accidental arrangements and the just-the-facts stuff that cameras provide became a new path to the supreme fictions of art. Of the pleasures cameras give us, the transfiguration of plain reality is the most indispensable. It implies that the world is more than it seems--which, after...
...Living (1914), brought him nationwide praise, he was unhappy with the slapstick speed, cop chases and bathing-beauty escapades that were Sennett's specialty. The advent of movies in the late 1890s had brought full visibility to the human personality, to the corporeal self that print, the dominant medium before film, could only describe and abstract. In a Sennett comedy, speechlessness raised itself to a racket, but Chaplin instinctively understood that visibility needs leisure as well as silence to work its most intimate magic...
Ball's dizzy redhead with the elastic face and saucer eyes was the model for scores of comic TV females to follow. She and her show, moreover, helped define a still nascent medium. Before I Love Lucy, TV was feeling its way, adapting forms from other media. Live TV drama was an outgrowth of Broadway theater; game shows were transplanted from radio; variety shows and early comedy stars like Milton Berle came out of vaudeville. I Love Lucy was unmistakably a television show, and Ball the perfect star for the small screen. "I look like everybody's idea...