ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the question of how one understands that deeply commonplace thing 'television'. Against the largely unquestioned orthodoxy which characterises television as a visual medium, it begins by addressing a number of aspects of the domestic context of television's usage, which lead to the suggestion that television might, in fact, be better understood as a primarily aural medium. The chapter addresses the troubled history of television's introduction to the home, the better both to denaturalise television's taken-for-granted place within the micro-geography of the home, and to understand some of the mutual interdeterminations that television. It discusses the 'physics' of television, and focuses on the largely unexamined significance of the television set itself, both as a material and as a symbolic, if not totemic, object. The unquestioned assumption that television would have to take its model from the cinema industry — and indeed, would be a form of 'mini-cinema'.
