TV, Literature- Ecological and Critical Medium

Reading the fascinating case between Oprah Winfrey and the author Frantzen, as well as Don De Lillo's conception of 'The Barn' teases out important critical moments of relations between media, the media industry, the publishing industry, the questions of gender, race. The frivolities manifested through the Oprah Winfrey TV Show and other elements epitomize a dynamic interplay within two sub strata, the show itself and what goes underneath the Medium.Media ecological and critical insights are helpful to subvert the manifest argument by providing the context and critical focus on the modus operandi of the TV production. The Oprah Winfrey Show is the facade camouflaging layers of technologies, TV network corporate philosophy, publishing industry philosophy, the domination of race, gender political power in the 21st Century both overt and covert, and the programme itself with its interactive TV audience. Thus the TV is a Medium in the McLuhanian sense in which the social dynamics of race, gender, literature and power although seen as a public domain is actually a TV Medium.Adorno's aesthetic theory suggests how aspects of culture e.g. literature and music are experienced through aesthetic modes and the Text, all provide a critical mediation between a subject and the object. His idea of the High and Low cultural artefacts are an ideological critique of the corporate publishing whose guiding force is profits. The authors of the Novel who stake the ground of a High culture and imply the subservient order of the ordinary mass of audience, hold a moral and semiotic presumptuousness of a higher ground.Can a writer fix meaning or elevate his creative Text to a ‘high ground’ obey the rule of hermeneutics? Don De Lillo aptly demonstrates, in a post modern American society, meanings lose their significations about 'The Barn' through post structural semiotics. Baudrillard argues that the cultural signifiers are vastly abundant and absurd in the sense of a ‘hyperreality’, which are employed by corporations and the culture industry to the degree that the relation between the signifiers and the signified is rendered meaningless leaving empty signifiers without referants.In the post structural world combined with 'layers' of technology, corporate media and publishing industries and their ideologically vested interests, power plays through race, gender and the individual herself through the TV culture employing media ecological perspectives. The TV is simply one of the myriad metaphors which demonstrate all the critical fields that form the undercurrents of American culture in which both Oprah and Frantzen are specks.