Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 2

Though the medium and subject matter has changed, both writers have worked within the serialized form to captivate their audience and keep them coming back for more.

The features of a monthly novel installment are more clear when juxtaposed against an ordinary book.

One way to graph a simple plot is to visualize a mountain: the rising action shoots up, reaching a climax or peak, and then the falling action dips back down.

In a show with a large ensemble cast, there will be many characters whose stories “peak” at different moments, coinciding with compelling incidents during an episode or a season.

To liken TV shows to novels suggests an odd ambivalence toward both genres.

If today’s best TV feels Dickensian, that may be because the conventions of filmed storytelling themselves derive from Dickens—who in turn, Eisenstein points out, was influenced by the stage melodramas of his day.

Its visual idiom tends to be conventional even when its subject matter is ostentatiously provocative.

Television is more capacious. Episode after episode, and season after season, a serial drama can uncoil for dozens of hours before reaching its end.

But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change.

In a recent study on dishonesty online, researchers found that while 32% of users on sites like Facebook reported being “always honest” in their posts, the expectations for honesty online are pretty abysmal: “Between 55 and 90 percent of participants believed others were lying at least some of the time about their age, gender, activities, interests, and appearance” (Misener).

Through the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, phone calls, and photos of an acquaintance, Tuiasosopo managed to convince Te’o to fall in love with his imaginative creation, a feat that would have been a cumbersome, formidable challenge, if not impossible, had it been attempted face-to-face.

While this arrangement works for those who stand to make a profit from consumers’ attention, it promotes ambiguity and scandal at the expense of informative, meaningful communication via social media.

Social media, like any other advancement, is not a perfect tool; some people will surely misuse it, but that does not negate its usefulness.

This ubiquity, both the increasing number of people who use the platform and the frequency of their use, is not without consequence: billions of people are using a platform that connects them to other people who know details about their lives, which creates an increasingly large pool of people who are adept at using the internet, including social media, to fact-check a post and catch users in a lie.