ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how science and technology are generally made known through the rhetoric of programs such as Beyond 2000 and Quantum. It argues that such programs translate into the vernacular idiom of television the more abstract discourses of science to produce a limited, present-minded and instrumental view of the world in which the equation of technology with progress is made, divorced from any human political context. In surveying the general field of televised science and technology, Gardner and Young point to a number of similar, common characteristics. Indeed, ‘science’ seems to be utterly independent of history: Horizon increasingly attempts to address questions which go beyond the exposition of the content of science but does so in an uncritical fashion. Gardner and Young illustrate the ‘fundamentally celebratory’ presentation of science as a spectacle of progress which television audiences merely consume. The critical examination of science and technology is rare in the contemporary media.
