ABSTRACT
In his seminal work Television: Technology and cultural form (1974), Raymond Williams described television as a medium to be understood in its various dimensions: as a technology (‘broadcasting’), as a social practice (‘watching television’) and as a cultural form (‘programmes’). Williams deployed this multiple view of television to scaffold two broader concepts: the concept of ‘flow’ – an endless stream of concatenated programmes that glued the viewer to the screen – and the concept of ‘mobile privatization’ – referring to the way in which mass media makes mobility an endeavour that can be pursued in the privacy of one’s own home, allowing people to see what happens in the world without having to leave their living room. Williams’ theory has long been held up as a model of nuanced thinking: his perspective accounted for television’s technology, in both its institutional and commercial manifestations, for its social use, regarding viewers as both active and passive subjects, and he connected these two aspects to the specific forms of audiovisual content. Albeit implicitly, Williams also tied in these developments to television’s regulatory, hence political, context, as he compared American commercial television to British public broadcasting service (the BBC).
