The Age of Television

Experiences and Theories

Milly Buonanno

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781841509990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

At a stage of major change in the world of television (the coming of digital TV, multiple channels, mobile TV on cellphones) this book seeks to take stock of the impact of the advent and presence of television on daily life over the past fifty years, or slightly longer. The author takes as her standpoint, or rather places at the centre of her analysis and considerations, the human experience and the way in which the medium of television has radically changed it. Connection; mobility; plurality. The discourse developed in the various chapters of the book focus on this triad of conceptual categories, which govern the most important ways in which television can effect a transformation at the level of experience. It can establish connections between individuals and distant events; encourage the formation of 'imagined communities' on a varying scale (worldwide, national, local or based on a common identity); create enabling conditions for travel to distant places and for vicarious and 'imaginary' journeys; and function as a genuine multiplier of opportunities and of forms of indirect social experience, in the sense of 'pluralising' the worlds of an imaginary life. The three categories in turn flow into the category of 'imagination', perceived as the big engine that drives modern mediatized society – television supplying ample fuel for this purpose. 'The Age of Television: Experiences and theories', is in its own special way a book of theory. Each chapter draws on classic concepts and theories from international television studies – from the flow to televised ceremonies and cultural imperialism – but without any undue reverence. The book is written with students in mind and thus undeniably conveys a pedagogic message: the author seeks to demonstrate how theories are a means of learning that is at the same time indispensable and flexible, open to criticism and to reworking in a new context. The logical and coherent structure of the book and its systematic articulation around a central nucleus of well defined concepts make it a very useful text for university courses. Yet it is written not in the style of a manual, but rather as a critical essay; and its original approach makes it also interesting and appealing to a scholarly readership and the cultivated general audience.

1

THE AGE OF TELEVISION

SEEING FAR, GOING FAR

1. Transitions

A mighty maze of mystic, magic rays

Is all about us in the blue

And in sight and sound they trace

Living pictures out of space

To bring a new wonder to you.

...

The world is at your door,

It’s here to pass you in review

Conjured up in sound and sight

By the magic rays of light

That bring television to you.¹

BBC television was transmitted for the first time in November 1936, introduced by the words and music of a celebration piece specially composed for the occasion. This was performed in a romantic interpretation by the singer Adele Dixon (Smith 1995, p. 83). British television was the first in the world to introduce a regular daily television service, even if only for two short hours per day.

The dream-like magic evoked by the inaugural song offers a vivid flavour of the vibrant climate of promise and hopes, hovering between excitement and innocence, in which the new electronic medium made its debut on the world stage in the first half of the twentieth century. Two more decades were to run their course before television, the newest arrival in the era of mass communication, deployed rapidly and on the widest imaginable scale the stunningly magical powers of a ‘technology and cultural form’ (Williams 1974) that was capable of effecting a profound transformation of human experience. We can accordingly speak of an ‘age of television’ coinciding with the second half of the twentieth century.

‘Age of television’ is by no means a misnomer. It is a well-known fact that evolution and the history of the human kind are customarily classified in accordance with time periods; these identify the distinctive characteristics of each epoch by means of a pre-determined factor or a combination of historical and social co-ordinates. Thus we have the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the classical era and the modern age. The growing development of media of information and communication, together with awareness of the crucial role played by their presence and far-ranging influence in society, has prompted scholars more recently to regard communication itself as an important factor in defining epochs and in distinguishing one from another. ‘The history of human existence’, Melvin DeFleur and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach have said in this connection, ‘should therefore be more properly explained by a theory of transitions, that is to say in terms of distinct phases in the development of human communication’ (1995, p. 19).² According to the same authors, these distinctive phases can be identified in the transitions from an ‘age of signs and signals’, going back to the pre-hominids, to an ‘age of the spoken word’, to the successive ages ‘of the written word’ and ‘of the press’, right up to the ‘age of mass communications’, still running its course while the ‘age of computers’ is making big strides.

Compared to previous ‘ages’, the age of mass communications is the shortest so far. It dates from the first decades of the nineteenth century and has thus lasted barely two centuries; yet in that time we have seen four major means of communication come successively into being: the press, the cinema, radio and television. The fact that all four modern forms of mass communication are present and well established in the world of today, alongside more traditional forms of communication (as well as the newest arrivals, the computer and the Internet) clearly demonstrates that these different forms are not substitutes for, but additions to, each other: they co-exist. This cumulative rather than substitutive quality of the course taken by the history of communication is the fundamental lesson imparted by the transitions theory. I am compelled to acknowledge at this point that what I define later on as the ‘connective approach’ is in large measure a tribute to this lesson, and more generally to a cognitive style that prefers to take co-existence and combinations into consideration (the form ‘both…and’ or the inclusive distinction) in preference to substitutions or dichotomies (the form ‘either…or’, or the exclusive distinction; both definitions are taken from Ulrich Beck, 2003, pp. 12–15).

Nevertheless, a new medium tends to edge its predecessors out and install itself in centre stage, since it does not merely join the pre-existing media but reorders the field of play and shakes up existing reciprocal relationships. From this perspective, the epoch of mass communications lends itself to being further subdivided into ages – those of the press, cinema, radio, television – which correspond to the phases when each of the large media assumed a pre-eminent role in the communication system.

As far as television is concerned, its advent and rapid ascent to a leading position in the sphere of information and popular entertainment took place in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘Watching TV’ then became the main leisure activity for the greater part of the population of the West and ranked third in the order of daily activities, after working and sleeping.

In a relatively limited space of time in terms of the span of history – little more than fifty years – the evolution of the medium has already passed through two clearly distinguishable phases and in recent years has entered a third phase that promises to trigger a major transformation in the world of television as we have hitherto known it. We have all the elements in the brief history of the medium to enable us to further articulate the theory of transitions. I shall dedicate the last part of this chapter to the analysis of the phases of television’s development, looked at from a phenomenological and human-centric perspective – a perspective that concentrates on human experience of the medium and, through it, of the world. I shall order my arguments by considering television initially from another starting point: that of the home, this being the environment where television – or rather the object in which it takes shape for public use, namely the apparatus or television set – is firmly ensconced and ‘naturalized’.

2. A domesticated medium

Other verses of the song dedicated to television, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, go as follows:

The stars have open eyes that scan us from the skies

And ears that catch the music of the view

They are going to let us share

What they see and hear up there

And show us living pictures from the blue.

In Great Britain, as in the United States, the promotional and advertising material that preceded and accompanied the still experimental beginnings of the new electronic medium from the early part of the twentieth century made great play with its ability to ‘bring the world into your own home’. The inaugural song for the BBC transmissions embraced this belief, which from an early stage contributed to the portrayal of television as a medium that was preordained and destined by its nature to be installed and used in the home. ‘Television is a domestic medium. It is watched at home. Ignored at home. Discussed at home’, claims Roger Silverstone (1994, p. 24). One is unlikely to be mistaken in suggesting that a statement of this kind sounds to most ears so incontrovertible as to risk appearing like a truism – and thus worthy of neither serious discussion nor refutation.

The domestic nature of television, then, is a concept that is taken for granted. It is a given whose presence in various public discussion forums can be traced throughout the historical development of the medium, in diverse formulations according to the events of the moment: the announcement, or forecast, of a transfiguration of the home that is soon to come (the world is at our door, it’s here to pass you in review), when television was still far from being widely installed in people’s homes; the assertion of a fait accompli (‘Television is a domestic medium’), when television sets have come to be present in nearly all dwellings throughout the planet.

The announcement predates the empirically verifiable and verified reality and therefore takes no account of it. Yet the incontrovertibility of the statement is predicated on this reality. However the announcement and the statement of a fait accompli converge in conceiving and asserting this domesticity as an essential prerogative of television, a sort of intangible ontological characteristic.

I intend to question this assumption, not in order to deny the evidence of what is in all senses in front of everyone’s eyes – that is to say, the mainly domestic location and use of the television set – but rather to bring back the presumed ‘given’ of its domestic nature to its true connotation of the ‘outcome’ of a process. ‘Nothing in television’s technology determined that it should be a domestic medium’, as John Ellis quite rightly observes (2000, p. 31). If television has indeed become a domestic medium, although less exclusively (and probably less definitively) than is believed, this is not because of an imperative that is ineluctably inscribed in the technological nature of the medium, but in consequence of a complex process of installation/incorporation in private living spaces, conceived and adopted from the start as the ideal destination for the television set.

The domesticity of television, in other words, is the product of a ‘domestication’ of the medium: a domestication that has happened in a relatively short time but not without fears and controversy, nor without a considerable yet barely considered residuum of the small screen’s extra-domestic presence. This phase of domestication is very much a thing of the past, largely forgotten by those who witnessed it and unknown to ‘television’s children’, who are too young to remember it and who have grown up in homes where one or more television sets are part of the furniture. Yet this fact should not tempt us to consign this phase to the store-cupboard of things that are superseded and therefore neglected – still less at the present time, when the LCDs of mobile phones seem to bear witness to the avant-garde stage of televisual evolution, opening up the prospect of a television ‘set’ that can at last be enjoyed away from the domestic space, in public, in the open air, everywhere.

Well, not exactly everywhere; but in public places, not infrequently out of doors in squares, on street corners, in the windows of domestic appliance shops: away from the home is where people all over the world started to enjoy television in the first years of its appearance on the mass media scene. ‘In Japan many of the early TV sets were placed not in the home, but on street corners, in front of railway stations and in parks, where large numbers of people gathered. Thus, TV in the mid-1950s was something like an open-air theatre’ (Yoshimi 2003, p. 463). In those same years, two-thirds of American families already possessed their own television set, but for the most part ‘television was mainly exhibited in public establishments such as taverns, department stores, and even on buses’ (Spigel 1992, p.32). In Italy, where a regular transmission service started up in 1954, over ten years were to elapse before half of all families possessed a set; meanwhile bars, taverns, wine bars, clubs, churches and even cinemas were equipped to welcome customers attracted by the new medium. Some viewers, like the peasants of Basilicata observed by Lidia De Rita in a ground-breaking research project into audience ethnography (De Rita 1964), would travel on foot or by bicycle for several miles every evening to get to the only place in their area that had a television set.

So television, in the first phase of its introduction, functioned and was perceived ‘as means of encouraging people to get out at night (my italics) (Saraceno 2003, p. 2). This offered women in particular unprecedented opportunities for desegregation of domestic spaces and access to company in public places where men spent their free time. Wherever it is found, whether indoors or in open spaces, the enjoyment of television is always a collective experience; one watches it in a group or a small crowd. The news reports at that time described how ‘entire families who were previously accustomed to spend their evenings at home now go out: they crowd into the bars and the corner cafés where there is a television set. These places are transformed into little cinemas, little theatres offering both plays and variety shows with chairs arranged informally around the set...’ (Dallamano 1955, p. 8, quoted in Sorice 2002, pp. 45–46) In 1958, four years after the arrival of television, it was estimated that there were on average thirty viewers for each television set throughout Italy.

Furthermore the public and collective viewing of television remained a fact even after the small screen arrived in domestic spaces. Particularly at the beginning, but for a number of years so long as having a television set was the exception rather than the rule, families with a set would throw their homes open to relatives, friends and neighbours, welcoming them into the rooms of the home – sitting room, parlour, dining room, breakfast room – where the furniture would be rearranged so as to make room for small seats and ‘theatres’ with the chairs (sometimes brought along by the guests themselves) arranged in a row or a semi-circle. Television presented its first consumers with an experience of sociability, which was linked in one way or another to a relationship with the outside world. Going to another person’s house to watch television in any case means going outside one’s (own) home, while for the hostess it means allowing a slice of the outside world to come into one’s own home in the guise of relative, circle of friends or neighbour. The promise that television ‘brings the world into your home’ is thus doubly maintained, since the world is brought in not only symbolically through the mediation of the screen but concretely through the open door that welcomes people and things coming from outside.

The fascinating studies by Cecelia Tichi (1991) and more especially by Lynn Spigel (1992) reconstructed the transformation of the home into a ‘home theatre’ in post-war America, when owning a television set became an integral part of an ideal of family life, built on a complex relationship between privatization and connection of the domestic with the public sphere. ‘The ideology of privacy was not experienced simply as a retreat from the public sphere; it also gave people a sense of belonging to the community’ (Spigel 1992, pp. 100–101). Television, being able to connect the internal with the external, the nuclear family with the extended network of neighbours, home life with social circle, chimes in perfectly with this ideal and is also its precise epitome.

The arrival of television in the home – which, it must be re-stated, did not equate straight away to a loss, still less a final loss, of its collective character of public viewing – nevertheless provoked worry, anxieties and discontent, in Italy as elsewhere. In this connection, Andrea Press has collected the reminiscences of adult American women who, recalling the 1950s, testified to their ambivalent reactions towards the introduction of television into the home: they thought ‘that it was a wonderful thing’ (Press 1991, p. 54) but at the same time they were sorry to have to renounce the nights out and the life away from home that they had previously enjoyed as emancipated young women. In open disagreement with Joshua Meyrowitz’s thesis (1985), which identifies television – since it brought about a symbolic rift with the historical segregation of women in domestic spaces – as one of the key factors in generating feminism, Lynn Spigel records and sustains the fears, echoed by some sectors of the popular media at that time, that women risked being further confined to their homes (Spigel 1992, p. 215).

Other fears were aroused by the friendly and sociable custom of welcoming groups into the home to watch television. The ‘electronic neighbourhood’ that gathered in homes with a television set may on the one hand have helped to strengthen ties within the group – causing that group, furthermore, to be a witness and a beneficiary of the affluence of the proprietors and of their ‘up-to-the-minute’ openness to the latest entertainment technology. But it may possibly on the other hand have constituted an unwelcome and threatening intrusion into intimate family life. The outside world brought in by television, by means of the twofold access through screen and front door, seemed to many to be as much a potential peril as ‘a wonderful thing’.

A few weeks before Italian television came into being, the renowned journalist Arrigo Benedetti published an article in La nuova stampa entitled ‘Television and its ghosts’ (1953, p. 3). The ghosts in this instance were metaphorical and did not allude to anything paranormal: the author was replying to an earlier article by the writer Paolo Monelli, who was very pessimistic about the imminent advent of television. But a strong current of anxiety towards the presence of television in the home was reinforced over a long period by a genuine association of the new electronic medium with occult and extraterrestrial phenomena. Jeffrey Sconce (2000) has carried out a truly original study of ‘electronic ghosts’. This study documents the rise and the manifestation (disseminated in many texts of popular appeal: let Poltergeist by Steven Spielberg be the best example of the genre) of a horrifying and almost paranoid fantasy that attributes to the medium (in itself a word that evokes paranormal phenomena) sinister forces that are inherent in its technology. Television has been demonized and feared on account of a range of horrors, from its malignant ability to observe and control the occupants of the house (already prefigured in George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984) that changes the happy proclamation of the song

The stars have open eyes that scan us from the skies

And ears that catch the music of the view

into an anxiety-inducing alarm call, to the terrifying power to suck the living into a universe of oblivion outside space and time (Poltergeist); to the distressing literal fulfilment of the promise to transport viewers through space and time to the place where what they see on the screen is happening (a fear echoed in 1950s sci-fi and in the more recent film Pleasantville). According to Sconce, ‘television remains, even forty years after its introduction into the American home, a somewhat unsettling and alien technology’ (Sconce 2000, p. 165).

All this did not prevent the spread of the completely opposite belief of a technological object so docile and serviceable (but also inert and passive) that it could be confused with the other electrical appliances in the house: not much more than ‘a toaster with pictures’ (McCarthy 2001, p. 117). Ranking the television set no higher than any domestic appliance is still one of the most self-satisfied and popular clichés; and it is probably the one that emphasizes to the greatest extent – as a statement of the obvious or an irreversible point of no return – television’s ‘domestification’. ‘As far as I know, there’s no climate of cultural criticism directed at the fridge’ was the ironic comment of John Hartley (1999, p. 104), concerning the unlikely equivalence of television set and refrigerator.

In reality, television has never become a completely domesticated mediu...