The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age

216 Pages·2007·0.64 MB·English

by  Brian L. Ott

The Small Screen
How Television Equips Us to Live
in the Information Age
Brian L. Ott
The Small Screen
This book is dedicated to
Harold and Barbara,
in gratitude for their love and support,
as well as my first television set.
The Small Screen
How Television Equips Us to Live
in the Information Age
Brian L. Ott
ß 2007 by Brian L. Ott
In Chapter 1, ‘‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’’ composed by Bob Dylan. Copyright 1963
by Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
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First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ott, Brian L.
The small screen : how television equips us to live in the information age / Brian L. Ott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-6154-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-6155-8 (pbk. : alk.
paper) 1. Television broadcasting—Social aspects. I. Title.
PN1992.6.O88 2007
302.23’45—dc22
2007005637
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Television and Social Change 1
The Times They Are a-Changin’ 1
Television as Public Discourse 6
2 Life in the Information Age 27
The Information Explosion 27
Society through the Lens of Technocapitalism 32
Social Anxieties in the Information Age 47
3 Hyperconscious Television 57
Embracing ‘the Future’: The Attitude of Yes 57
The Simpsons as Exemplar 76
Symbolic Equipments in Hyperconscious TV 91
4 Nostalgia Television 104
Celebrating ‘the Past’: The Attitude of No 104
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Exemplar 124
Symbolic Equipments in Nostalgia TV 138
5 Television and the Future 149
(Re)Viewing the Small Screen 149
Life and Television in the Twenty-First Century 162
The Next Great Paradigm Shift? 169
References 172
Index 189
Preface
As a communication technology, television is still in its infancy. Unlike
mechanical print technology, for instance, which dates back hundreds
of years, television did not seriously begin to impact US culture until
about the mid-1950s (see Spigel 1992). Although the technical com-
ponents of television had been developed and patented two decades
earlier, only 9 percent of US homes were equipped with television sets
in 1950. But that number grew quickly, and by the decade’s end the
percentage of US households with television sets exceeded the per-
centage of households with telephone service. In just 20 years (from
1950 to 1970), television adoption had swelled from less than 10
percent to over 95 percent. So, despite its relative youth, television’s
spread and influence has been swift. In fact, television’s invasion of our
lives happened so rapidly that there was little opportunity for careful
reflection about the character and social function of this new technol-
ogy as it was developing and being adopted. Thus, when Newton
N. Minow, President Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communi-
cations Commission, declared television to be a ‘‘vast wasteland’’
(Minow 1995: 188) in an address to the National Association of
Broadcasters on May 9, 1961, his sentiment quickly hardened into
the prevailing wisdom (see Schement & Curtis 1995: 113).
The dominance of this view has had at least two notable conse-
quences. First, it delayed television’s entry into the academy as a
serious object of study. The early view of television as little more
than trash culture, commercial fluff, and popular entertainment all
suggested that it was unworthy of sustained critical scrutiny and
attention (Allen 1992: 4). As a result, television came to play a vital
role in our lives long before we understood or had begun to system-
atically investigate what its role was. Few universities had television
viii
studies courses prior to the mid-1980s, and few researchers were
exclusively or even principally television scholars. Most of the individ-
uals writing about television prior to the 1980s were journalists,
literary critics, or social scientists. Though individual academic studies
of television date back to the 1950s and include such famous studies as
Theodor Adorno’s (1954) ‘‘How To Look at Television,’’ nothing
approaching a discipline or field of ‘‘television studies’’ took shape
until the 1990s (Brunsdon 2006). In 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary
of its first broadcast of a television signal to the American public, David
Marc, one of the nation’s first professional television critics, recounts,
‘‘I was apparently the only person teaching at a major accredited
college in the United States unconcerned enough about my personal
status to acknowledge it’’ (1995: 137). Subsequently, Marc appeared
on 60 Minutes, The Today Show, and The CBS Evening News with Dan
Rather (via a pretaped interview by Bernard Goldberg), where he
challenged the notion that television is just entertainment.
By the time television became a legitimate object of academic study,
it faced a second challenge, namely that it had already been judged ‘‘as
both origin and symptom of social ills’’ (Brunsdon 2006). According
to John Corner, ‘‘The overwhelming rationale for most research into
television has undoubtedly been anxiety about its influence. This was
true of the earliest studies and remains the case today, despite there
now being many different kinds of research questions concerning
influence’’ (1999: 4). Corner goes on to suggest that studies of
television can loosely be grouped into two categories: those that
concern its broad political impact and especially the erosion of dem-
ocracy, and those that examine its broad social influences, particularly
with regard to violence, education, and socialization. Many of the
studies that fall into the first category are informed by the Marxist
tradition of the Frankfurt School and explore the industry of television
and its operation within a capitalist economic system. Books such as
Todd Gitlin’s (1983) Inside Prime Time and Douglas Kellner’s (1990)
Television and the Crisis of Democracy are illustrative of this intellectual
current. Studies of the second stripe were shaped by two distinct
intellectual traditions: social-scientific research and cultural studies.
Despite their methodological differences, however, both camps were
concerned largely with the social effects and/or functions of television.
Social scientists sought to quantify, for instance, the effects of
exposure to television on the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of
PREFACE