ABSTRACT
We have probably all seen images like this, in old advertisements and early press reports proclaiming the arrival of TV. The family is gathered in the living room, children sprawled on the floor, mother seated on the couch, all turned expectantly towards the TV. The father is standing next to it, often with his hand on a dial or a knob, taking a proprietor’s role in delivering to the family the benefits of modernity. A little later on in its history, we didn’t even need to see the TV itself. Instead, typically, the images would just depict the family seated on the couch, rapt faces bathed in the light projected by the screen. TV had become the hearth of modernity. Even when later representations took us beyond the living rooms of the West to less-developed countries where whole communities were gathered around the one TV in the village, their faces were similarly lit by that magically luminous screen. TV’s promise of injecting domestic space with ‘space age’ modernity was reiterated over and over again. When TV was represented like this, it was a broadcast technology. It was
consumed within the home, addressed to a national audience, universally available, articulated to the democratic state as part of its communications infrastructure, and a leading edge in post-war representations of the consumer society. Now, much of this has changed. At varying points, depending on the location but certainly increasingly from the mid-1970s onwards, TV escaped the confines of domestic space: platforms of delivery proliferated, and TV screens began to appear everywhere – in shops, in malls, in subway cars, in cars, buses, trains, and on the sides of buildings. Giant TV screens became an everyday component of the spectacle of urban public space. Later on, still more screens became smaller, radically privatized, as they shrank to fit the mobile phone, the portable DVD player, or the dashboard of the car. As TV mutated, its solid normativity – probably one of its most fundamental original attributes – began to unravel. For television studies, too, some of its certainties about the histories and understandings of television unravelled as well. It is to this situation, the situation of contemporary television studies, that the contributions in this collection primarily address themselves.
