Relocating Television

Television in the Digital Context

Jostein Gripsrud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415564526
• eBook ISBN: 9781136968976
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

For over half a century, television has been the most central medium in Western democracies – the political, social and cultural centrepiece of the public sphere. Television has therefore rarely been studied in isolation from its socio-cultural and political context; there is always something important at stake when the forms and functions of television are on the agenda. The digitisation of television concerns the production, contents, distribution and reception of the medium, but also its position in the overall, largely digitised media system and public sphere where the internet plays a decisive role.

The articles in this comprehensive collection are written by some of the world's most prominent scholars in the field of media, communication and cultural studies, including critical film and television studies.

Relocating Television offers readers an insight into studying television alongside the internet, participatory media and other technocultural phenomena such as DVDs, user-generated content and everyday digital media production. It also focuses on more specific programmes and phenomena, including The Wire, MSN, amateur footage in TV news, Bollywoodization of TV news, YouTube, fan sites tied to e.g. Grey's Anatomy and X Factor. Relocating Television will be highly beneficial to both students and academics across a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses including media, communication and cultural studies, and television and film studies.

Part I

THE MEDIUM OF TELEVISION

Changes and continuities

1

TELEVISION IN THE DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE

Jostein Gripsrud

Introduction

The digitization of media and communication is part of the digitization of society, i.e. the introduction of digital technology in all parts and sectors of society, from global stock markets to local health care. It is a very complex process which affects all levels and parts of the industries, institutions, arenas and actors that sustain public life in democratic societies, as well as the everyday lives and living conditions of all. The consequences are bewilderingly diverse and difficult to describe and understand in a comprehensive way – as once demonstrated by Manuel Castells (1996).

The digitization of television is of special importance. Television was the central element in the media-based public sphere in the last half of the twentieth century. It gathered by far the largest audience; it was the medium that all other forms of public communication had to relate to. Television was the key link between society’s public life and the private lives of citizens. Peter Dahlgren has talked about an ‘integration of television and political culture’ and claimed that ‘to a significant extent, the official political system exists as a televisual phenomenon’ (Dahlgren 1995: 45). If digitization radically changes television, then the political, social and cultural features of our societies are undergoing changes of considerable importance. This chapter and this entire book are intended as material for further reflection on the issue.

The metaphor of a ‘relocation’ of television assumes a spatial way of thinking, and the metaphorical space thus indirectly referred to in the book’s title is that which is now commonly referred to as the public sphere. In the following, I will first try to sketch the historical development of the public sphere and show why and how it is important to the understanding of the socio-cultural role of television (and other media) and its destiny in digital times. I will then try to define key terms such as ‘broadcasting’ and ‘television’ in order to say something about broadcast television’s position and characteristics in a digitized public sphere. I discuss features such as interactivity and TV’s relations with the internet, before going into how the structure of the public sphere changes as the internet and the multitudes of channels in digital television establish new possibilities for various kinds of minorities. Finally, I attempt to conclude – and point to the issue of social class and a ‘digital divide’ along the lines of class divisions as a major concern in the era of a digitized public sphere.

The public sphere

In historical terms, Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere, a key element in modern democracy, as follows:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason ( öffentliches Räsonnement ).

(Habermas [1962]1989: 27)

The empirical version of the ‘classic’ bourgeois public sphere from around 1750 onwards was not least characterized by there being few participants. The three criteria for full participation were male gender, property and education in the sense of Bildung. Women, servants and certain other people considered to be of a lower class could participate to some extent in the cultural or literary part of the public sphere if they were literate, but they were not allowed entry into the political public sphere. The establishment of public school systems, the spread of literacy, the growth of industries and the emergence of organizations characteristic of industrial capitalism greatly increased the number of participants. The introduction of universal suffrage marks the transition to a democratic society where all adults are recognized as, in principle, autonomous equals.

But this reform was also part of the public sphere’s structural change – what Habermas called its ‘re-feudalisation’. First, it was invaded by organized movements based in the (private) economic sphere (organizations for labour and capital that openly declared they defended certain interests instead of debating the common good). The political outcome of that was, in Europe and elsewhere, a welfare state which interfered much more directly in the private realm. So the public sphere was squeezed between this active state and the forces based in the economic sphere. It became a space for the proclamation of truths and decisions arrived at behind closed doors (as in feudal societies) instead of being a space where truths and decisions emerged from open deliberation. With the development of mass media as commercial enterprises driven more by financial interests than convictions, public life turned into staged entertainment. Citizens largely stopped being participants. Instead they became consumers of the spectacles organized by media and the political establishment.

This gloomy diagnosis was not quite adequate, as Habermas himself later conceded (Habermas 1992). Another problem with Habermas’ 1962 version of public-sphere theory was its emphasis on the unity of the public sphere. From the beginning there was not only the differentiation between a political and a cultural (‘literary’) public sphere. While the government, the parliamentary assembly and institutions such as national theatres continued to constitute central arenas in the public sphere, industrialization brought a new social complexity. Multitudes of new informal social spaces and formalized organizations constituted a new, similarly multifarious set of public spheres with genres of discourse ranging from drama and poetry to educational prose and political propaganda. Some of these would qualify as what Nancy Fraser has called ‘subaltern counterpublics’, i.e. ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of the identities, interests and needs’ (Fraser 1992: 123). To the extent that their participants or members were historically excluded from full participation in the central political and/or cultural public sphere, through suffrage laws in the political and sheer social prejudice in the cultural realm, these counterpublics would often tend to regard themselves as training camps and waiting rooms for aspiring future participants in the ‘proper’, national public sphere (cf. Gripsrud 1981 and 1997).

The general public sphere still has a politically central arena, at the centre of which one finds what Fraser (1992: 134) calls ‘strong publics’, i.e. ‘publics whose discourse encompasses both opinion formation and decision making’, such as sovereign parliaments and the Supreme Court. These are few, and have few participants. The ‘weak publics’ (ibid.) that are ‘only’ involved in the formation of a public opinion that may influence the strong publics, are innumerable and have all citizens as participants. The structure of the public sphere is now described by Habermas (1996) as a complex network that ‘branches out into a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional, local, and sub cultural arenas’ (1996: 373), exemplified by public spheres within popular sciences, religion, art and literature, feminism and other ‘alternative’ political orientations. Parts of the mass media operate close to the strong publics, but for the most part they belong in what Habermas likes to call the ‘wild’ part of the public sphere: ‘At the periphery of the political system, the public sphere is rooted in networks for wild flows of messages – news, reports, commentaries, talks, scenes and images, and shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, or entertaining content’ (Habermas 2006: 415). The Public Sphere is further differentiated into different levels based on the ‘density’ of communication, and the complexity and scope of organization – ‘from the episodic publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through the occasional “arranged” publics of particular presentations and events, such as theatre performances, rock concerts, party assemblies, or church congresses; up to the abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographic areas, or even around the globe, and brought together only through the mass media’ (1996: 374). All of these public spheres remain ‘porous’ in their relation to one another, and so discourses circulate even if they also are changed in accordance with shifting contexts.

Digitization adds considerably to this complexity by offering plentiful opportunities for further differentiation between special interest groups and an endless number of minorities (we all belong to some). On this background we might ask: What is the role of broadcasting?

Broadcasting, modernization and democracy

In his Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1975) Raymond Williams argues that broadcasting media arrived at a time when political and economic power and resources were concentrated and centralized more than ever before, while on the other hand the population at large was marked by modernization processes Williams summed up in the term mobile privatisation. Mobility was

only in part the impulse of an independent curiosity: the wish to go out and see new places. It was essentially an impulse formed in the breakdown and dissolution of older and smaller kinds of settlements and productive labour. The new and larger settlements and industrial organisations required major internal mobility, at a primary level, and this was joined by secondary consequences in the dispersal of extended families and in the needs of new kinds of social organisation.

(Williams 1975: 26)

People were experiencing dissolution of older, more stable communities and a much higher degree of both social and geographical mobility. They were increasingly living in nuclear families or as singles, without strong ties to their neighbourhoods, more closed-off in relation to their surroundings, i.e. more private, in ‘the apparently self-sufficient family home’ (Williams 1975).

Broadcasting appeared as a communication technology perfectly suited to this sort of society, at a time when class cleavages and class struggle were very pronounced features. According to Williams, it was ‘a new and powerful form of social integration and control’ (1975: 23). It could secure the communication of socially essential information from the centre to the periphery while also producing a common socio-cultural identity in nation states, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson [1983]1991) based in shared experiences that were also more simultaneous than the experience of newspapers had been, even if they were also doing the same thing: ‘Day in day out radio, television and newspapers link these two incommensurate human temporalities: the historical life of societies and the lifetimes of individuals’ (Scannell 2000: 21). Thus broadcasting also, and not least, produced the cultural conditions for a civic culture, i.e. semiotic and emotional conditions for citizens’ active, informed participation in democratic processes. In other words, as I have argued elsewhere (Gripsrud 1998), broadcasting was not just about top-down control and ideological manipulation. It was also a socio-cultural form suitable for democracy, i.e. for the benefit of citizens as much as for Government or Capital.

A brief analysis of the meanings of the word ‘broadcasting’ is useful here. It clearly reflects a centre–periphery structure. It originally meant sowing by hand, in the widest possible (half) circles. But ‘broadcasting’ is thus as a metaphor also tied to optimistic modernism. It is about an effort to produce growth in the widest possible circles, the production, if the conditions are right, of a rich harvest. The metaphor presupposes a bucket of seeds, i.e. the existence of centralized resources intended and suited for spreading. In the formulation of broadcasting policies between the World Wars, the interest in broadcasting as a means of securing equal access to resources necessary for informed and therefore autonomous participation in political, social and cultural life played a very important role in many countries. It underlies the formula of the first Director General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, for the BBC’s mission – ‘to inform, educate and entertain’, and we find some of the same in the US, for instance in the 1927 Radio Act, which was to regulate the Federal Radio Commission’s allocation of frequencies. It contained a formulation which has lived on: all broadcasters must operate in accordance with ‘the public interest, convenience, and necessity’. The phrase was elaborated on by the commission in a 1928 statement, in which it was said that

broadcasters are not given these great privileges by the United States Government for the primary benefit of advertisers. Such benefit as is derived by advertisers must be incidental and entirely secondary to the interest of the public … the emphasis must be on the interest, the convenience, and the necessity of the listening public, and not on the interest, convenience or necessity of the individual broadcaster or advertiser.

(Hoynes 1994: 38)

In other words, the democratic potential of broadcasting was also perceived from the beginning in the US. An explanation of why something in the way of European-style public-service broadcasting never happened in the US would not be about the idea being so strange. It would rather be about cultural reasons for resisting the model – and class reasons: the distribution of social and political power.

A critique of broadcasting as a top-down socio-cultural integration in service of the ruling powers is related to a critique which takes for granted that two-way communication, dialogue, is more democratic than a basically oneway form such as broadcasting (for important modifications of its monologue nature, see the section on interactive TV below). But as argued by John Durham Peters in his Speaking into the Air (1999), it is not necessarily so: broadcasting (along with other ‘one-way’ forms of mass communication) is about dissemination, about speaking ‘into the air’, aiming for anyone and no one in particular, like Jesus: ‘The practice of the sower is wasteful. He lets the seeds fall where they may, not knowing in advance who will be receptive ground, leaving the crucial matter of choice and interpretation to the hearer, not the master … ’ (Peters 1999: 5). Broadcasting thus allows a freedom for its public which strictly ‘dialogical’ forms of communication deny. Moreover, they address people in a certain way. Their schedules and programme output are constructed so that they ‘appear to speak to each one of us personally … and yet, at the same time, are available in the same way to anyone who cares to watch or listen’ (Scannell 2000: 22).

The democratic potential of broadcasting is enhanced when it operates as a public service, and diminishes with its degree of commercialization. This has been argued or regarded as an a priori fact in a large number of scholarly publications over the last few decades (e.g. Garnham 1983; Murdock 2005). But it has recently also been argued on the basis of hard data from a largescale, comparative study of media and broadcasting systems in four different countries – the US, the UK, Denmark and Finland (Curran et al. 2009). The study convincingly shows that (1) the overall levels of public knowledge are higher and (2) the difference in knowledge between people with different levels of education is very significantly smaller in countries where publicservice broadcasting is quite strictly regulated and not funded by advertising (Finland and Denmark) than in countries with very lax regulation of commercial forces in b...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Relocating Television
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Part I The medium of television: changes and continuities
• Part II Changing genres
• Part III Reception: figures, experience, significance
• Part IV Critical perspectives
• Index