Television as popular culture

“Television” refers to “seeing from afar.” It describes a physical device, a cultural system, and a labor process that brings the two together and embeds them in the daily experience of half the world's population (→ Television). “Popular” signifies of, by, and for the people, offering transcendence through pleasure, but doing so by referring to the everyday (→ Popular Communication). “Culture” derives from agriculture (→ Culture: Definitions and Concepts). With the emergence of capitalism, it embodied instrumentalism and abjured it, via the industrialization of farming and the cultivation of taste..