THE SOMA MEDIUM: REFLECTIONS ON ITS ATTRIBUTES AND COMMERCIAL USE
Because television is one of the primary media through which we conceptualize reality, its messages profoundly influence the nature of public awareness and discussion of important issues. As Professor Postman observed: "[T]here is no subject of public interestpolitics, news, education, religion, science, sportsthat does not find its way to television."' 35 Furthermore, television "has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. . . . To say it still another way: Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on television."' 36 The medium's entertainment biases derive primarily from two combined forces: first, the attributes of television's technology; 37 and second, the commercialization of television as a profitoriented enterprise. These two forces create a communicative environment that favors trivial and entertaining programming. Both television's technological nature and commercial use disfavor sustained concentration, as attention is grabbed by a dynamic, fastmoving, and everchanging series of images. 38 Television, as we have come to know it, 39 loses a key ingredient of its mass appeal when divorced from the visually 40 dramatic pleasure programsfor example, rock videos, sports events, "action"' news. Where sustained concentration is the concern, neither Thomas Paine's Common Sense 41 nor The Federalist Papers 42 would play well on network television. The same holds true, in television vernacular, for "'talking heads"' programs. 43
