The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science current issue

The End of Television?

Katz, E. — 2009-08-20

Sharing and Showing: Television as Monstration

Dayan, D. — 2009-08-20

This article presents a comparison between two models of publicness (one based on a type of television firmly anchored in the center, another depending on media that blur all distinctions between centers and peripheries) and asks what sort of sharedness do these two models allow? The article also explores the notion of "monstration." Through what sorts of displays do contending media call on public attention? Can one speak of "acts of showing" the way one speaks of speech acts? What is the impact of such acts on a sociology of collective attention? Third, the article examines the coexistence between television of the center and new digital media. Is their relation agonistic or, paradoxically, cooperative? The present situation may echo many earlier cases in which old media learned to coexist with new media by starting unexpected dialogues and practicing a division of labor. Today’s situation might be a (reluctant) partnership in a multitiered public sphere.

We Liked to Watch: Television as Progenitor of the Surveillance Society

Meyrowitz, J. — 2009-08-20

The rise of mass television allowed hundreds of millions of people to closely watch other people and places on a regular basis, anonymously and from afar. Television watching altered the balance of what different types of people knew about each other and relative to each other, blurred the dividing line between public and private behaviors, and weakened the link between physical location and access to social experience. In these ways, television contributed to the reshuffling of previously taken-for-granted reciprocal social roles, including those related to age, gender, and authority. In cultivating its viewers into the normalcy of the acts of watching and of being watched, television experience also stimulated the widespread use of more recent interactive visual media, including the displays of self on social networking sites. Moreover, familiarity with television as a watching machine has fostered the otherwise surprising level of tolerance for increasingly pervasive government, corporate, and populace surveillance.

What Is U.S. Television Now?

Lotz, A. D. — 2009-08-20

This article explores the institutional adjustments that have altered the operation of the U.S. television industry over the past twenty years. The author first chronicles those industrial norms that characterized television during its "network era" (1952 to mid-1980s) and upon which most ideas about the role of television in society are based. She then explores the ways in which adjustments in technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies, practices of looking, and textual formations have redefined the norms of television in the United States since the mid-1980s. Analysis of the shifts in the institutional and cultural functions of television reveals the articulations between the dominant industrial practices and the forms, texts, and cultural role of the medium. Such a conception of shifts of the medium allows us to understand recent changes as an evolution of this central cultural medium rather than its demise.

Contextualizing the Broadcast Era: Nation, Commerce, and Constraint

Uricchio, W. — 2009-08-20

Programming scarcity that characterized the broadcast era, or what this article refers to as constraint , served very different goals. Often intertwined, these goals ranged from the formation of an ideologically coherent national public, to the protection of economic self-interest, to the explicit promotion of products and messages. They were deployed rather differently in the commercial American and state/public European spaces of television. The article explores a number of assumptions regarding the institution and medium of television that have persisted from the broadcast era into our own and that might well, given the very different structures of contemporary television, be repositioned. It outlines the contours of that repositioning, sketching the implications for some of our theoretical and methodological defaults.

Of Time and Television

Robinson, J. P., Martin, S. — 2009-08-20

Analysis of early time-diary studies suggests that television has had more impact on daily time than any other household technology in the past century. In the United States, viewing time has steadily increased from roughly ten weekly hours in the 1960s to sixteen hours today, encompassing almost half of all "free time" reported in the diaries. A prominent recent TV casualty has been time spent reading the newspaper, providing further support for the functional equivalence argument. This article shows that, so far at least, viewing time seems little affected by the Internet and other recent new technologies. Studies of the public’s satisfaction with various activities suggest that viewers find TV to be more enjoyable in the doing rather than in general, even though it may not be particularly challenging or demanding of concentration. Viewing time is also shown to be significantly related to long-term personal unhappiness.

The Face of Television

Frosh, P. — 2009-08-20

This article proposes some physiognomic speculations regarding three visual characteristics of television in its pre-digital-broadcasting form: (1) the importance of the head shot as a staple technique for representing the human figure and, hence, the primacy of the human face as a televisual image; (2) the mirrorlike reflective surface of the cathode-ray tube television screen, which makes the viewer’s reflected image appear to emanate from the depths of the television set; and (3) the box-like design of television sets that turns them into miniature containers of the pictures they show. It argues that these three characteristics amounted to an integrated communicative structure that made television a key mechanism for the social construction of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century, a mechanism whose future is uncertain in the age of new digital platforms.

The Performance on Television of Sincerely Felt Emotion

Ellis, J. — 2009-08-20

The self-presentation of ordinary people on TV took some time to develop. An early game show from British ITV demonstrates the many pitfalls encountered in developing even the most basic of self-presentational codes. So the presentation of sincerely felt emotions did not develop as a style until the late 1980s with the changes in daytime talk and the growth of reality TV. The cult of sincerity, however, has had profound cultural effects, reaching into the political sphere.

Cultural and Moral Authority: The Presumption of Television

Morrison, D. E. — 2009-08-20

This article shows how British television has lost cultural authority due to social shifts in British society whereby no single moral voice can expect to find an audience. The author argues that there is no longer a moral language by which to address moral issues nor any common agreement about the rightful constitution of the cultural and moral universe. The central point is that technological development leading to increase in television channel proliferation did not fragment the audience, as is often assumed, but that it was the fragmentation of the audience that allowed the uptake of the varied and various channels.

Television, Public Participation, and Public Service: From Value Consensus to the Politics of Identity

Lunt, P. — 2009-08-20

The proliferation of popular television genres in which the public are key participants (talk shows, reality TV, and makeover and lifestyle television) on the surface may seem less to do with engagement and more to do with entertainment and voyeurism. However, this article explores an alternative to the idea that popular television based on personal experience is a marker of the end of television in general and the weakening of the public service tradition in particular. Two programs, Oprah! and Little Angels, are shown to address the agendas of reflexive modernity and governmentality and potentially to contribute to a normative social order based on the project of the self. The fact that both traditional public service providers and commercial channels are engaging with these social issues suggests that new ways of legitimizing television in the public interest are emerging, with implications for the character of public service television.

Gender and Family in Television's Golden Age and Beyond

Press, A. — 2009-08-20

Images of women, work, and family on television have changed enormously since the heyday of the network era. Early television confined women to the home and family setting. The increase in working women in the 1960s and 1970s was reflected in television’s images of women working and living nontraditional family lives. These images gave way, in the postnetwork era, to a form of postfeminist television in the 1990s when television undercut the ideals of liberal feminism with a series of ambiguous images challenging its gains. Women’s roles in the workplace, increasingly shown, were undercut by a sense of nostalgic yearning for the love and family life that they were seen to have displaced. Current television presents a third-wave-influenced feminism that picks up where postfeminism left off, introducing important representations more varied in race, sexuality, and the choices women are seen to make between work and family.

Half a Century of Television in the Lives of Our Children

Livingstone, S. — 2009-08-20

The quintessential image of the television audience is of the family viewing at home—sitting together comfortably in front of the lively set. Accompanying this happy image is its negative—a child viewing alone while real life goes on elsewhere. This article reviews evidence over five decades regarding the changing place of television in children’s lives. It argues that, notwithstanding postwar trends that have significantly changed adolescence, the family home, and wider consumer society, there was time for the 1950s family experiment to spawn the 1960s and 1970s family television experiment, thereby shaping normative expectations—academic, policy, and popular—regarding television audiences for years to come. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we must recognize that it was the underlying long-term trend of individualization, and its associated trends of consumerism, globalization, and democratization, that, historically and now, more profoundly frame the place of television in the family.

Political Communication --Old and New Media Relationships

Gurevitch, M., Coleman, S., Blumler, J. G. — 2009-08-20

This article reflects upon the ways television changed the political landscape and considers how far new media, such as the Internet, are displacing television or reconfiguring the political communications ecology. The analysis explores opportunities and challenges facing media producers, politicians, and citizens. The authors conclude by suggesting that the television-politics relationship that emerged in the 1960s still prevails to some extent in the digital era but faces new pressures that weaken the primacy of the broadcast-centered model of political communication. The authors identify five new features of political communication that present formidable challenges for media policy makers. They suggest that these are best addressed through an imaginative, democratic approach to nurturing the emancipatory potential of the new media ecology by carving out within it a trusted online space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations, and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance.

Television News and the Nation: The End?

Blondheim, M., Liebes, T. — 2009-08-20

The golden age of television news gave a large majority of otherwise diverse Americans a unified, seamless, and clear-cut image of their nation, its central players, and its agenda. Carefully scheduled, edited, sequenced, and branded, heard and seen simultaneously across America, it provided a pretense of order to the chaos that is news. The permanence and stability of the nation, as expressed in a complex way by TV news, provided Americans with an all-important sense of existential security experienced on an unarticulated emotional level. Today, a disjointed news environment is crushing the nature of network news as a transitional object. Television news no longer reassures viewers by connecting them to a surmountable world out there but carries them on a loop from themselves to themselves.

End of Television and Foreign Policy

Price, M. E. — 2009-08-20

The transformation of television has altered the capacity of the state to control the agenda for making war, convening peace, and otherwise exercising its foreign policy options. In the age of the state gatekeeper, there was at least the illusion (and often the reality) that the government could substantially control the flow of images within its borders. With transformations in television systems, national systems of broadcast regulation have declined, replaced by transnational flows of information where local gatekeepers are not so salient. The rise of satellites with regional footprints and the spread of the Internet give governments the ability to reach over the heads of the state and speak directly to populations. Both receiving and sending states will have foreign policies about the meaning of the right to receive and impart information and the extent to which satellite signals can be regulated or channeled.

Television and the Transformation of Sport

Whannel, G. — 2009-08-20

Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.

The Dialectic of Time and Television

Scannell, P. — 2009-08-20

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!