The Dialectic of Time and Television

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The Dialectic of Time and Television Author(s): Paddy Scannell Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 625, The End of

Television? Its Impact on the World (So Far) (Sep., 2009), pp. 219-235Published by: in association with the Sage Publications, Inc. American Academy of Political and

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The Dialectic of Time and Television

PADDY SCANNELL

The article reviews the key question of the effects of television as proposed by Elihu Katz in his introduction and the various responses to it in the contributions to this volume. It argues that the question is a proper concern of sociology, engaged as it is with the politics of the present and immediate, short-term effects. The question of long-term effects, however, is beyond the scope of a social science methodology concerned with the impact of the new. Long-term effects only show up with the passing of time and are the concern of historical studies. As television begins to have a history, it begins to be possible to examine its historical record to try to tease out its long-term impact on the world - so far!

Keywords: short term; long term; television; effects; history

I

For nothing is more important, nothing comes closer to the crux of social reality than this living, intimate, infinitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly. Whether it is a question of the past or of the present, a clear awareness of this plural- ity of social time is indispensable to the communal methodology of the human sciences. (Braudel 1980, 26)

In the late 1950s, French historian Fernand Braudel drew a distinction between two different orders of time: the short and the long term. The former he called histoire evenementielle and the latter the longue duree. The short term is the time of everyday life, the life and times of the present, full of noise and bustle, movement

Faddy Scannell is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, which he joined in fall 2006. Before that, he worked at The Polytechnic (which later became the University of Westminster). He is a founding editor of Media. Culture & Society and author (with David Cardiff) of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1923-1939 (Blackwell 1991), Radio, Television and Modern Life (Blackwell 1996), and Media and Communication (Sage 2007).

DOI: 10.1177/0002716209339153

ANNALS, AAPSS, 625, September 2009 219



220 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

and activity. The long term is the past, receding back, further and further, into remote, inaccessible prehistoric time. In sharp contrast with the noisy, changing present, it becomes increasingly silent, unchanging, motionless, and fath- omless. How are the two connected? It is rather like the surface and depths of the sea. The surface, endlessly ruffled by wind and weather, is in perpetual, restless motion. But beneath it lies the deep, and the more you descend into it, the more you encounter its dark and motionless silence. Braudel thought the longue duree was the proper object of historical enquiry. He dismissively compared histoire evenementielle with a candle flame whose "delusive smoke, fills the minds of contempo- raries" but that quickly flickers and dies, leaving no lasting trace (Braudel 1980, 27). For Braudel, as for many intellectuals of the past century, the eventful time of everyday life was the sphere of illusion, deception, and ideology. The historian s proper concern was with the unchanging, underlying, structural determi- nants of the everyday, for these were what shaped and defined it. This "structuralist turn" was by no means confined to historians at the time. In France and elsewhere, structuralism was becoming the new big idea in the humanities and social sciences of the 1960s and 1970s.

BraudePs era was a long time ago, and the tide has gone out on the moment of structuralism. But the distinction Braudel drew helps us understand the question addressed by this collection of essays on "the end" of television and clarifies its central problematic - the question of "effects." Accepting as valid the distinction between the short and the long term is not a matter of preferring one to the other. Rather, it is a question of how the two are inextricably interconnected. The endless interplay between past and present, properly understood, is the dialectic of history: the play of the past as it acts upon the present and of the present as it acts upon the past in order to bring on the future. History is indeed "made" in the present (where else?) but is not visible as such to those who dwell in it, the generations of the living in any present time. History only appears as history as it exits from the restless, noisy present and enters the silent and unchanging past. The present, in which we live, is indeed the time and place of action, in which decisions are made and courses of action committed to with fateful consequences for a future made possible only by what is done in the here and now. But we, who are caught up in the present, can never foresee, in spite of our best efforts, the actual long-term consequences of what we do. These only become apparent with the wisdom of hindsight, which is the effect of the passing of time from the present into the past. The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.

Academic engagement with media has always been concerned with the shock of the new; successive generations have grappled with the impact of new media in their times. In the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, the then very new medium of radio provoked high anxiety. It could stimulate widespread panic (Cantril, Gaudet, and Herzog 1941); persuade the masses to part with their money (Merton [1946] 2004); and was, as someone put it at a conference attended by Paul Lazarsfeld, "as powerful as the atomic bomb" (Lazarsfeld and Merton [1948] 2004). Forty years ago, when the new medium of television became the focus of study for an emergent "media studies," it too was seen as a



THE DIALECTIC OF TIME AND TELEVISION 221

powerful "ideological state apparatus." Nowadays, radio and television are thought of by those who pursue todays "new media" as "old" or "traditional" compared with shiny new things like the Internet, cell phones, iPods, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth. In all three moments, academic engagement with the new media of the day has been absorbed in and by the politics of the present, which always attends to significant events in the contemporary world and to upcoming phenomena as they emerge in the here and now.

The recurring, unavoidable question of the present concerns the effect, the impact of the new; and whether we are talking about radio, television, or the Internet, that question has two parts: what is the new thing doing to us, and what are we doing with it? In the sociology of mass communication, the so-called effects tradition, the initial question addressed was radio s impact on the masses. That it had a direct and powerful effect seemed self-evident in the light of the first notorious "media event" - Orson Welles s spoof Halloween radio play based on War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. If, as was estimated, a million or so listeners were seriously frightened by the broadcast on October 31, 1938, its effect was obvious. The question to investigate concerned what made some listeners sus- ceptible and others not to the power of the new medium. The study of media effects is necessarily concerned with the short term, with the immediate impact of broadcast output on its audiences. It must treat this as a matter for empirical investigation by trying to find out how real people, one way or another, respond to media and how they use them. Media studies and the sociology of mass communication confront the politics of the present, the play of histoire evenementielle (of "media events") while being themselves caught up in the historical process whose lineaments they struggle to perceive.

But how can this be done? How do we know that a short-term effect is anything more than that? And if a short-term effect is no more than that, then indeed it has, as Braudel thought, no lasting significance. The question of the long term has to be posed as the solution to the study of the short term if its research is to have any claim to any long-lasting relevance and significance. But how is the long term available for study? The new, by definition, has no history as it enters into the life of the present. Its newness is its strangeness. What is it? Who can say? The long-term effects of new media can only be a matter of conjecture, for all of us caught up in the immediate present and its politics, for their long-term effects are yet to come. The only prophet media studies has produced thus far is Marshall McLuhan, who quickly became famous for his divinations of the new electronic era and was equally quickly assigned to oblivion (Meyrowitz 2003). By the 1980s, McLuhan had become, as Anthony Giddens (1991) put it, "the forgotten prophet of the electronic global village." Not until the 1990s, years after his death, was McLuhan hailed as the one true prophet of the Internet, the one who had foreseen, decades ahead of his time, the full potential impact of the emerging global telecommunications infrastructure that under- pins the world we inhabit today.

McLuhan remains a quirky, isolated figure in the history of media and communication studies; his attempts to read the future could only be confirmed




retrospectively as the future entered into the present and moved on to become the past. Long-term effects, which arise in the present, only become visible as such in the journey into the darkness and silence of the tongue duree. In this transitional passage of time, the essence of history is disclosed, for it contains the dialectic of long-term temporal continuity and short-term temporal change. How then does this process work - more exactly, when does the present become the past? What is the transitional order of time in which the long term begins to appear out of the short-term present? The answer to this question is in one way or another in many of the contributions to this collective effort at understanding the effect of television. Let us call it generational time, the time of generations, in which the fundamental historical work of regeneration (of change and renewal from one generation to the next) is enacted.

A Kenyan friend once told me that the Kikuyu perform a ceremony every twenty-five years or so in which the elders hand over their authority to the younger generation, who take over and become the elders. Here we see the wise acknowledgement of generational time and the work of regeneration made ritu- ally explicit. But for modern societies, which have uncoupled the present from the past, generational time is invisible from the short-term perspective of 24/7 time, a perpetual here and now without a past or future. The question of effects belongs to the present. It is perhaps the question that confronts the living: What will be the effects and consequences of our actions? Will their outcomes be as we hoped? Will they be good? Will they last? Or not? Long-term answers to the questions of the present only become apparent in the past. Thus, it is observable, with the wisdom of hindsight, that it took a generation of work in the sociology of mass communication to answer its initial question and hypothesis concerning the direct effect of powerful media on powerless, vulnerable individuals. This was the "original position" of the field as it got going in the 1930s. Gradually, incre- mentally, it began to be turned around. By the mid-1950s, when Personal Influence was eventually published, the media were found to have, at best, an indirect effect on individuals who were more immediately responsive to the personal influence of other people in the interpersonal networks of everyday life (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). Over a span of twenty years or so, we see the regen- erative working through of generational time and societal change. America in the mid-1950s was a very different place from America in the mid- 1930s. Social science, always situated in and confronting the present, imperceptibly adjusts and readjusts to change taking place at the time. That change, within sociology, only becomes apparent as the discipline itself begins to have a history, thereby becoming historical in the working through of its own institutional time.

ii These general considerations are implicated in the particular question of televi-

sion addressed by our collective efforts. We can note, for a start, that "television" has been part of the world long enough to have accumulated a history - not a very




long one, of course, but increasingly evident and mappable as several of our contributors show. The time span under discussion is not much more than sixty years, although, as William Uricchio, Menahem Blondheim, and Tamar Liebes all perti- nently remind us, television has a longer back story that reaches well into the nineteenth century. Television as we know it is a social, political, and cultural phenomenon of the postwar world, and the 1950s is commonly taken as the point of departure for our varied narratives of television, since in the 1950s people began to have time for television. Television, like radio, is a time-based medium. Time is what it consumes (eats up). John Robinson s study of time budgets (what people do with time) is a fundamental contribution to understanding the basic temporal considerations that underpin the supply and demand sides of television (Robinson and Martin, 2009 [this issue]). On the supply side, the industry needs to have basic information about who is available for viewing at any time and who is not (and why) to adjust programming to correspond with potential usage. On the demand side, what viewers find when they turn on the TV set had better be broadly attuned to their moods and requirements, which are always in part determined by time of day and the day itself within the temporal rhythms of the week and the seasons. Thus, Saturday afternoon in the fall is college football time in America and soccer time everywhere else, when everyone turns on in the expectation of watching the game. But the times of television presuppose that people in large numbers do, in fact, have time for it; those social and economic conditions only became generally available in North America and Britain in the 1950s, in Northern Europe in the 1960s, in Southern Europe and elsewhere in the 1970s, and today most evidently in India and China. The preconditions that give the possibility of TV ownership do not yet exist in large parts of Africa.

The starting point for thinking about television must be the TV set, whose purchase presupposes a marginal surplus of disposable income and time on the part of purchasers. Those general economic conditions only became prevalent in the advanced economies of North America and Europe after the Second World War. The TV set in the 1950s is one significant index of an emerging economy of abundance and a culture of everyday life to which it gives rise (Scannell 2008). It is a new kind of domestic appliance whose utility is inseparable from the things that accompany it, all of which presuppose the wired household as the condition of their usage. The use of television has "free time" as its essential precondition, time freed from other things, time for watching television. But without all the other time- and labor-saving appliances in the home - vacuum cleaners, cook- ers, fridges, freezers, dish and clothes wash-and-dry machines - television is no use for there is no time for it. A major new study of "discretionary time" takes it as a fundamental measure of individual freedom. We may be materially rich and yet still "time-poor" if we have to work long hours to sustain our material lifestyle or if our time is taken up by housework, child care, and so on. In their remarkable survey of time pressures on individuals and households in Australia, Europe, and the United States today, Robert Goodin and his colleagues calibrate how much control people have over their time and how much they could have under alter- native welfare, gender, or household arrangements (Goodin et al. 2008). The




availability of a significant amount of free time, time at the personal disposal of individuals, is the precondition of a society oriented toward leisure. It is not for nothing that television became, as Robinsons (2009, this issue) data show, the major leisure-time activity for the majority of Americans in the 1950s and remains so to this day.

The entry of the TV set into everyday life back in the 1950s has been wonder- fully examined by Lynn Spigel (1992). It was from the start a source of pleasure and anxiety. It was a new way of relaxing and of sharing "family time," but was it good for children or not? Sonia Livingstone (2009, this issue) shows how that question became an academic object of inquiry in the 1950s and has remained an important issue ever since. Worries about the young point to a more general anxiety that watching television is a waste of time for grown-ups, too, who, like their children, could (and should) be spending their time on better things. Robert Putnam blames television for the decline in social capital. People, in his view, are shirking their civic responsibilities. They ought to spend more time involved in their communities and less time involved in watching television (Putnam 2000). In this widespread, commonsense (and misleading) view, watching TV is a solitary, passive, indoors thing in contrast with outdoors social and communal activity.

What we get to watch when we turn on the set are mainly talking heads - the faces of people as they face us and address us directly (in news and studio-based talk shows of various kinds) and as they interact with each other on camera. What we get to see, Paul Frosh (2009, this issue) argues, is determined in part by the form of the technology. TV is good for showing faces, but not much more. It is not a richly visual experience, like the movies, or, rather, not when it got going back in the 1950s. Frosh reminds us how the TV set has changed over the years. In its beginning it was a bulky box with a squarish screen that lit up to produce low-definition moving images in various shades of gray. Today, the bulky box has been displaced by larger, flat, rectangular screens with the same aspect ratio as wide-screen cinema and a high-definition moving image in full color. But the functions of the technology remain unchanged: it is a device for the display of audiovisual material live and in real time or recorded (or both), and we still face it as it faces us.

In Froshs essay, and many others, television confronts us as technology. Almost all contributors note the impact of changing technologies on television as well as the changing technologies of television. The question of technology is at the heart of any effort to think about TV, although some of us feel moved to add disclaimers that in dealing with the question, we are not guilty of the sin of technological determinism. As Robert Heilbroner has argued, however, technologies in general do make history: they arise in definite historical moments as sought-for solutions to general social problems and thereby enter into the historical process, the material life of the societies that produced them (Heilbroner 1994). Machines make a difference - of course they do. Would any of us willingly forgo the new postwar electric utilities that freed us from domestic toil (washing clothes by hand) and time-consuming daily activities (lighting coal fires; going on foot each day to different shops for different things and




carrying them back) and in so doing freed up time for other things that television conveniently filled? What is much harder to say with any precision is just what difference they make, what the real and particular effects of television might be and at what level of analysis.

One general effect of television has been the transformation of visibility. Television shows us things. How it does so and with what consequences is the theme of several contributions to this collection. Joshua Meyrowitz has influentially and persuasively argued that television transforms the social geographies of everyday life in private and in public (Meyrowitz 1985). He returns to this theme for this collection, reviewing the "televations" of television: the ways in which, by making visible what hitherto was unseen and private, television elevates the experience of watching and transforms the status of certain classes of people in the eyes of others (parents and men, for instance, in the eyes of women and children) (Meyrowitz 2009, this issue). The impact of television on public life is most evident in politics, where the management of visibility has become, as Meyrowitz shows, a matter of increasing concern for political leaders since the 1950s.

For Daniel Dayan (2009, this issue), classic television (the television that speaks from the center to the periphery of a given nation-state) produces a focused attentiveness to an output simultaneously viewed by millions and thus characterized by "sharedness" - the shared experience of events as defined and distributed by die center. The work of focusing collective attentions is what he means by monstration. But the "solid" media of the center are now surrounded by newer, "liquid" digital media: the media at the margins, on the periphery, that are linked to each other in complex networks no longer constrained by ideas, interests, opinions, and events generated and defined from sociocultural and political centers. If television of the center demonstrates, peripheral media re- monstrate, he argues. Re-monstration means to show again, a second showing that serves as a reproach and critique of what is first shown through the mon- strations of the television of the center. Such is the function of the blogosphere. A similar argument for the evolving impact of television on politics is proposed in the article by Michael Gurevitch, Jay Blumler, and Stephen Coleman. They concur with Meyrowitz that classic television had far-reaching consequences for the management and conduct of politics and political performances on and off camera. The primary definers of political reality continue to be the politicians, subject to the intense scrutiny of traditional media (the news reporters of print, radio, and television). This symbiotic relationship has increasingly been chal- lenged by the emergence of new media and new publics. The Internet is a different public sphere to that constituted by traditional news and comment. The blogosphere is an ever-ready vociferous and critical chorus and commentary not only on the politics of the center but the media of the center as well.

The medium theory approach, as defined by Meyrowitz here (and in Meyrowitz 1994), assumes that the form of the technology has a determinate effect on its content and the uses to which it can be put. One use of television is for monitoring the environment, a technology of surveillance, as Meyrowitz shows. Broadcast television is a technology of communication. As such, it exists




in relation to other, similar technologies: to those that precede it (the telegraph, telephone, and wireless telephony or radio, as Blondheim and Leibes [2009, this issue] remind us) and to those that come later. Technologies can become obso- lete. The typewriter (a technology of the late nineteenth century) was made redundant a century later by the word processor and, more recently, audio and videocassette recordings have been replaced by CDs and DVDs. Is broadcast television becoming redundant? Has it passed its prime?

Such questions began to be posed in die 1990s when it seemed as if (1) the end of channel scarcity brought about by satellite and cable services and (2) the rise of the Internet might combine to render broadcast television superfluous. The first era of television was one in which a small number of content providers delivered a daily program schedule throughout the country in which they were situated. This "national-popular" television began to fade in the 1980s and was arguably eclipsed in the following decade by new "on-demand" TV services. Lotz provides an authoritative account of American television from the 1950s to the present that clearly shows the transition from the network era to the postnetwork present and how change was effected and affected by technological innovation within and outside the industry itself (see Lotz 2007). Uricchio offers a more critical interpre- tation of national popular television as an ideological state apparatus but confirms the general trajectory and force of Lotz s account. But what was the essence of broadcast television, and how is it different from later televisions?

The early radio and television industries had a dual function; they provided a program content that they produced (or commissioned) and delivered into the households of the owners of receiving sets. This dual process of production and transmission had two crucial characteristics: it was live and it was broadcast (as distinct from narrowcast). Instant live connectivity is the crucial feature of all the new electronic technologies that started with wired telegraphy and developed into wired and then wireless telephony (called the wireless in Britain, radio in America) and lastly television. In all these technologies, distant people and places are connected to each other in the immediate, living, enunciatory now - the now of the speech act, the now of the event. Wired technologies afforded point- to-point connection between two places and two signal transmitter receivers or speakers. Wireless technologies afforded an indiscriminate broadcast scatter. Anyone within range of reception and with an adequate receiver had access to what was transmitted. The scatter of wireless was initially problematic in its pre- broadcast usage for point-to-point contact between the fighting fronts and HQ in the rear during the war of 1914 to 1918. Transmissions were encrypted to avoid giving vital information to an eavesdropping enemy. Broadcast transmission was discovered after the war as a by-product of the technology and a way of creating a market for the sale of radio sets. Broadcasting, first on radio, then on television, created a new kind of general public whose general interests were served by the provision of a range of varied program content on the same channel, a mixed supply of news and entertainment for a large audience whose members all watched the same thing at the same time. This formation was, in large part, an effect of the constraints and the affordances of the technology in its early stages.




Two key technological innovations were developed to overcome some of the constraints of early television. First, and crucially, recording technologies complemented and relieved the initial pressures of continuous live-to-air transmission. Then new delivery systems were developed that overcame the twin problems of spectrum scarcity and its regulation and control by governments for purposes other than broadcasting. From the 1970s onward, satellite and cable services began to put an end to channel scarcity; today, viewers in Europe and North America have access to hundreds of channels from around the world.

These developments were intrinsic to the technology from the start. Electronic media in principle overcome the time-space constraints of older transport and communication systems that Harold Innis had encountered in his historical studies of the Canadian economy. This was McLuhan s key insight, one that was taken up and explored by an emerging theory of postmodernity in the last two decades of the twentieth century as rapid innovation in telecommunications overcame time-space constraints on information flows to produce the global connectivity of a common world forever caught up in an immediate never-ending now (Harvey 1989; Giddens 1991). The 1980s, the pivotal decade in which "new" televisions begin to appear alongside "old" television, was one of those moments that appeared to the living as if they were dwelling in new times. The New Times of the 1980s were marked, so it seemed to the British Left, by a shift in the capital- ist mode of production, from scarcity to plenty, which they characterized as the change from Fordism to post-Fordism (Hall and Jacques 1989). In Fordism (the classic mode of mass-production developed by the auto industry in 1920s America), supply dominates demand. You could have any color Ford you liked, so the old joke went, as long as it was black. In the 1980s, this suddenly seemed to have changed, and an accelerating and increasingly diverse post-Fordist consumer culture at last confirmed what Raymond Williams had remarked on thirty years earlier - namely, the end of the masses and mass culture (Williams [1958] 1962). In the late twentieth century, the balance tipped from the supply side to the demand side, and consumer power seemed increasingly assertive. On-demand television is but one instance of the full transition to an economy of abundance, characterized by seemingly unlimited choice and diversity in the material culture of the late twentieth century, which began in postwar Northern Europe and America in the 1950s.

For most of the twentieth century, the culture of the masses was supplied by the culture industries. The supply side seemed dominant, powerful, and in control of the definition of culture, while there was no demand side to speak of. Rather, the early-twentieth-century consumers of mass culture appeared, to contemporary critics, as isolated, vulnerable individuals, victims of a fraud perpe- trated on them from above by the culture industries (Adorno and Horkheimer [1946] 1986). By the late twentieth century, all this had changed as new technologies enabled individuals increasingly to pick and mix and variously put together their own social and cultural identities. On-demand television, part of a general shift in supply-demand relations at the time, emerged in the 1990s as an effect of two related technological developments: new distribution systems (cable




and satellite) and new time-shifting technologies that began with videocassette recording in the 1980s, now displaced by digital recording technologies (DVD and TiVo). In Britain, BSkyB marketed its on-demand services under the slogan, "Say goodbye to the schedules." Liberated from the constraints of the broadcast schedules, individuals could create their own timetable and watch what they wanted when they wanted it.

These developments provoked alarm in the "old" television industry - the networks in the United States, the public service broadcasters in Europe. The British Broadcasting Corporation is often taken as the original model of public service broadcasting (PSB). David Morrison traces the fading of its moral and cultural authority in Britain from the 1950s through the 1980s, a decline that was part of a wider erosion of power hitherto confidently exercised by the British political and religious establishment. This moral decline was certainly blamed on television in the 1960s by religious conservatives such as Mary Whitehouse, a schoolteacher, who proved to be, for a time, a formidable lobbyist and thorn in the flesh of senior BBC management, accusing it of religious blasphemy, promot- ing sexual promiscuity, and corrupting the young. Was television the cause or more simply the conduit of social change in the 1960s and 1970s? Morrison points out that the so-called fragmentation of national audiences from the 1980s onward was not an effect of technology; rather, the technology gave expression to already existing diversity and difference in society and allowed it new channels of recognition. But this, he argues, was at the expense of a moral and cultural unity and coherence that the old elites had held in place.

Peter Lunt s (2009, this issue) paper picks up where Morrison leaves off. Lunt accepts as fact the erosion, by the end of the past century, of the cultural and moral authority of a top-down public service tradition. He sees, however, the emergence of a new ethic of the personal: a concern with the quality of ones own life and what is good for one s self and those with whom one lives - parents, part- ners, children - an ethics of personal and interpersonal care. And this he finds in the despised category of reality television, which he discusses in relation to an American and British example of the genre. Experts appear in reality TV shows, but less as authoritative and prescriptive voices (as in the older PSB dispensation) and more as life-support systems providing practical therapy for people with problems. Is it, Lunt wonders, negatively, yet another soft form of social regulation and control or, more positively, a sign of the politics of recognition and the care of the self?

Reality TV points to the increasing diversity and individualization of everyday life today in which people tailor their own cultural preferences and pick and mix their own viewing schedules. Does this not imply the end of broadcast television and its fixed schedules? Who needs it anymore? And what of the irresistible rise of the Internet? More time spent in the online world means less time in the off- line world of television and other things. We are still very much caught up in the unavoidable business of working through and working out the implications of these innovations that are still part of the politics of present times. The Internet has, as yet, no history, for it has yet to recede into the past. It is impossible to say




at this point in time whether Facebook and YouTube, for instance, are passing fads or long-term uses and gratifications furnished by the virtual world. But one thing that innovations do, as McLuhan noted, is to shed light on the uses and gratifications of existing things. Television, when it was new, both impacted on cinema-going and illuminated, by its difference, something of the essence of cinema and the cinematic experience. Todays old television is illuminated by new screen-based technologies of communication and the new postnetwork televisions of the 1990s. The new televisions of the late twentieth century do not dis- place the functions of the older television of the mid-twentieth century, but complement them. Taken together, they are formally indicative of long-term historical processes working through the twentieth century and in particular of the transition from modernity to postmodernity, the structural transformation of the world that emerged from the ruin and catastrophe of the Second World War.

in The historians task, Braudel thought, was to be concerned with the silent,

imperceptible movement of slow time, while the sociologist attended to the noise of history in the making, the life and times of the present. The study of television, and of media in general, requires that we attend to both, but it is only now that the historical study of television is becoming possible, for only now do we begin to see its recession into the past and the working through of generational time in its output. Press's narrative, from the 1950s to the present, of changing relations between women and men, of new attitudes to sex and gender, shows this most clearly. The generation that grew up in and was radicalized by the 1960s (in reac- tion to their parent culture of the 1950s) in time became the parent generation to children born in the 1980s. The relationship between older and younger generations, parents and children, mothers and daughters - the politics of re-generation - is vividly apparent in the tensions between second-wave feminism of the 1970s and third-wave feminism or postfeminism of the 1990s. And this is seam- lessly displayed in televisions fictional output, which is naturally and rightly treated by critical feminist television studies as a key historical resource for the exploration of changing social relations within and between the sexes (Douglas 1994; Lotz 2006). Such work has only recently become possible. All the programs discussed by Press (2009, this issue) were produced in and for their own time with no thought for a future in which they would become the past. Only as the programs of today disappear from the schedules do they enter into the past, becoming part of the historical record through recording technologies that preserve them as such. Season by season, year by year, todays output begins to settle as sedimentary time strata silently bedding down, layer by layer, on the ocean floor of the longue duree. Only as these sedimentary deposits build up can we begin to see the long- term effects of the politics of the present. Television shows of the 1990s take for granted what women of an earlier generation had to fight for. They also forget that what they are able to presume is the gift of the politics of the present in the past.




What then does the emerging historical record that is television tell us about itself and about history? First, the emerging record is the totality of output; everything - news, documentaries, reality shows, quiz programs, sports, and so on. None of these genres have any privileged status over the others. It is not that, say, a documentary program of the 1960s will necessarily be more historical (tell us more, be more revealing of that time) than a soap opera. John Ellis (2009, this issue) finds evidence of an emerging performative requirement for sincere self- presentation from actors on television across a range of genres in fictional and nonfictional settings: whether it is news, a game show, a documentary, a police series, or a soap opera, he argues that actors (real and fictional) must prove themselves, in their speech and body language, to be the genuine article. His discussion of the first commercial game show on British television makes it clear that no one, including the shows host, Hughie Green, quite knew how to do it - how to perform "being oneself on television. It is not a coincidence that a new sociology of interpersonal relations emerged in the 1950s at the same time as television became part of everyone's everyday life in the United States. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman ([1959] 1971) might have been written as a self-help guide for people new to television. One thing that all of us know today is how to perform being a person on TV, since all of us have spent our time since earliest childhood watching and closely scrutinizing other people s self- enactments on television. The historical record that is now emerging thus fur- nishes evidence of social change in the very pores of history, makes available for study hitherto invisible things - micro-histories of looks and gestures (Bremer and Roodenberg 1993), of conversation and silence (Burke 1993), and of talk in all its varieties including those created by broadcasting itself: the commentary, the inter- view, or the panel discussion (Hutchby 2006; Montgomery 2007; Tolson 2006).

Future generations will treat radio and television as prime historical sources of the twentieth century and after. Historians will study this or that televised record at, say, French, Danish, or Japanese television archives to learn something of the historical past of their own countries. But television was not primarily a national thing from the start, even though at first it seemed to be. What all of us have written about is "television" - not British, American, Israeli, or any other national televisions as if they were unique, but as instances of television in the singular, tacitly understood as the universal phenomenon that it is. Technologies are not like languages. When I am in France, Denmark, or Japan, I encounter difficulties because I do not know the languages of these countries. But I do not have similar difficulties with the material environment in these countries or wherever I am in the world. A TV set, a car, a fridge, a washing machine is the same - works in the same way, does the same things - all over the world and, indeed, necessarily so if there is to be a common world in which all of us can be and act, no matter where we are. Thus, the essence of television is to be found not so much in the television industries of different countries and their linguistically encoded outputs, but in the universal form of the technology and its communicative constraints and affordances. The technology, of course, is not some static thing. Nor is it imposed on history from above by the invisible hand of God or the market.




It is never a transcendent supervening necessity but is historical through and through. The history of television-as-technology is, on one hand, as Frosh (2009) has pointed out, the history of innovation in the design of receiving sets; on the other hand, there has been continuous industry-driven innovation in distribution technologies, recording equipment, and television camera design (three crucial and neglected aspects of media studies), and these have had immediate, sought- for, and lasting effects on the scope and scale of program making.

Two areas of television production have consistently taken the lead in technological innovation: news and sport. Both operate in the here and now and depend on and exploit the live immediacy of television. Both are, in different ways, concerned with worldly events, and it is through televised news and sport, as much as anything, that all of us now know and understand that we are living in a common world in which all our lives are interconnected. Garry Whannel (2009, this issue) shows how sport has been transformed by television into what it is today: a truly global phenomenon, with key events in premier sports drawing huge worldwide audiences. And this transformation - from local and amateur to global and professional - was brought about by sought-for innovations in transmission, distribution, and coverage that combined to improve, in seen but unnoticed ways, the experience of sporting events for audiences not present at the event itself.

News was powerfully driven in similar ways by the imperatives of immediacy, and the hidden history of its technological development into the global thing that it is today has much in common with that of innovations in sports transmission and coverage. In both cases it has become increasingly evident that television does not function as an observer and presenter of live events (a mere onlooker with no effect on what is happening) but has become part of the structure of the events themselves, impacting on the ways in which they are managed by those ultimately responsible for them: the national and international governing bodies of various sports and military and political leaders in times of war. The "CNN effect" became something that the American military and political authorities had to take into account in the Gulf War of 1991, adjusting their strategy accord- ingly. This is but one recent instance of the impact of broadcast news on politics and diplomacy, as Monroe Price (2009, this issue) makes clear.

IV

When Elizabeth Eisenstein tried to assess the historical impact of the printed book, she looked back over a time span of five hundred years (Eisenstein 1979; see Baron, lindquist, and Shevlin [2007] for a review of the impact on scholarship of Eisenstein s pioneering study). As we struggle to evaluate the effect of television on the world so far, we are working with a span of seventy years at most. As our collective efforts show, the outputs of television, in all their diversity, have only recently entered into the historical record, thereby becoming historical and retrievable and analyzable as such. We can now begin to look at television of the past fifty or more years, not only country by country but on a comparative




transnational basis to see what the output discloses about the world-historical character of social and cultural life, the politics of everyday life routinely in play in day-to-day output. Television is now revealed, through the whole range of its content, as a prime historical record and a prime historical agent of the late twentieth century. The study of television output begins to disclose the play of the historical process, the work in the present of generational renewal, continuity, and change. It can do so only insofar as the output of television, in all its parts and as a whole, can be taken and trusted as a true and reliable record of what was going on in the world at the time. We have yet to begin to engage with the crucial methodological issues at stake in such an assumption since so far most of the output of television has been treated as part of the present, not the past.

The subtitle of Media Events was "The Live Broadcasting of History" (Dayan and Katz 1992). Most discussion of this canonic text has focused on its ceremonial aspects - the ritual character of media events situated within the framework of Durkheimian sociology. Less attention has been paid to the historical character of events - Braudels histoire evenementielle. But the connection between events and history is fundamental - no events, no history. The uneventful life is unhistorical - there is nothing to be said of it. In the fall of 2008 an event took place that todays media are hailing as historic: the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Election night, November 4, 2008, was and will be remembered as a classic "media event," an unforgettable instance of "the live broadcasting of history." The meaning and significance of this historic moment lies in the future and is, at present, beyond conjecture despite the news channels' attempts. How the Obama presidency will impact American and world history will and can only become apparent several generations from now. Today we talk and hope, but we cannot really say.

To focus on media events is indeed to attend to the live broadcasting of history, history in the making, in the vivid immediacy of the here and now. It does not, however, yield insights into the historicalness of media as such. That question requires a different way of thinking about media effects in which the focus shifts from the historical life of human beings to the historical life of humanly made things. What connects the question of the impact of printing with the impact of television? It is surely to do with the effect of newly invented things, the things that constitute the material culture of the material world, in which, as Madonna succinctly reminded us, you know that we all live. If we ask what print, radio, and television have in common, we might say two things about them - they are technologies of dissemination and record. They broadcast (disseminate, scatter) human knowledge and understanding in the widest sense. They also preserve, for the record, the historically produced and situated knowledge and understandings that they contain. If one definition of the unhistorical is the uneventful, its other definition is the unrecorded. History begins with events but only becomes historical as it is recorded. We read books and watch television for their contents, whose meaning and significance have a never-ending fascination that we endlessly discuss in and out of academia. But questions of the impact of printing or of television require an entirely different focus on the materiality of the things that provide the contents they disclose and the ways we engage with them.




Our collective thinking about television has considered it as such and in relation to other electronic technologies of communication, with similar and different affordances, that come before and after it. Material things cannot be thought of in isolation from the other things with which they coexist and with which they combine to endow the everyday world in which we live. When Raymond Williams tried, in the early 1970s, to consider the material culture of which television was a then very new component part, he looked back fifty years to the emergent consumer culture of the interwar period. He identified the radio set and the small family car as significant indices of a new way of life characterized by what he called "mobile privatization." In Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Williams tried to hold together two distinct ways of thinking about television: as technology and as cultural form. When he addressed, in the opening chapters, the question of television-as-technology, he did so within a long-term framework - television as the terminus ad quern of innovations in electronic technologies going back a hundred years or more. When he addressed television as a cultural form in the following chapters, he tried to capture the forms of television in the present and in terms of their industry-defined genres (news, documentaries, and so on), their distribution and reception as a continuing flow. He then proceeded to the question of the impact and effect of television under both aspects, as a distinctive technology of communication with distinctive applications and uses developed by the television industry. What he crucially tried to retrieve in considering both was a proper balance between structure and agency, between determinate structures and a human intentional- ity inscribed in them.

Williams reminds us that in the history of the development of electronic media of communication, it was always the technology that preceded its cultural forms - its applications and uses. It is simply ingenuous to think of television today as an "old" technology. It would be so only if it had not, since its inception, undergone continuing innovation and change both as a technology and in its applied usage. Of course it is not what it was six decades ago, and our task, in this collection, has been to distinguish between the short and the long term and to try and read the past in the present, the present in the past, in the thus far short life of television. I think we can assume that five hundred years from now there will be television, just as now we have lived through five hundred years of printing. Television is as basic as the book, which it has no more destroyed than the Internet is likely to destroy it, or the book for that matter. The challenge, which we have tried to address, is to think of television not to the exclusion of other technologies with which it coexists but as a central component of a globally connected, communicatively joined-up world that is today routinely disclosed to all of us as such through worldwide television output. As for its impact and effect - while this is experienced and responded to in the present, it only begins to become apparent in the past. This basic historical truth is what television as a technology and cultural form most basi- cally discloses.




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