ABSTRACT
Chapter Three investigates the emergence of systems thinking in the historical development of television around the turn of the 20th century. This chapter elucidates the continuities and discontinuities linking the Victorian conception of ‘seeing by electricity’ and the Machine-Age construction of electronic screens. The scientific developments that facilitated electronic technology and the sociopolitical philosophy of efficiency contributed to a new conception of television. The rhetoric of the annihilation of space that had propelled nineteenth-century progress was displaced by a belief that human beings should adapt to these new, artificial environments. Comparing and contrasting extension theory and systems thinking shows how this new philosophy of technology contributed to a new way of thinking about ‘distant electric vision’.
