3520 TV Theory Lecture 5: No Sense of Place and Radio, Television and Modern Life

Meyrowitz’ key theses Television by its nature tears down barriers to information By doing so it also tears down figures of authority Consequently television tends to promote “middle region behaviour”; neither formal nor intimate

Access to information Typographic society promotes systematically limited access to information Electronic media provides general and collective access to information Electronic media have liberal access codes Electronic media establish a place of communication that is a non-place

Transformation of authority Traditional authority depends on the withholding of information Electronic media violate interpersonal codes of distance; we get a “sidestage view” of authorities Adaption I: informal/intimate programming Adaption II: informal/intimate behaviors

Effects on society Weakening of group affiliations and ties Blurring of masculinity and femininity Blurring of childhood and adulthood The informalisation of political authority

Main premises Medium theory: the notion of intrinsic properties (McLuhan) Microsociology: the notion of behaviour as always adapted to the social situation (Goffman’s front/back region dichotomy)

Scannell’s main theses Phenomenological stance: The basic issue of understanding is to account for meaningful being and how it is possible The technology of broadcasting has been shaped so as to make it meaningful in a mundane way This involves the adaptation of broadcasting programmes, production and reception to everyday life

Intentionality Communication must be recognisable as intentional for it to be meaningful The intentionality of broadcasting is not primarily the intention of persons in production Broadcasting’s intention I: a meaning directed to absent audiences Broadcasting’s intention II: a meaning available “for anyone as someone”

Learning doing broadcasting Lesson of history: broadcasting essentially problematic Ordering the output: serialisation, scheduling, continuity Adapting to the everyday context of reception: intimate and personal registers In sum: providing broadcasting with an “event-character”, a time parallelling our own

Sociability Sociability: programming for the sakes of being together A set of genres develop to accommodate sociable talk A set of conventions develop for bridging the sociable occasion and the viewing occasion Result: a mixture between the spontaneous and the manufactured

Main premises Ontological angle: issues of being applied to broadcasting (Heidegger) Basis in interpretive sociology: the meaningfulness of social occasions and interactions (Goffman, Garfinkel) Polemics against critical theory, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the notion of “disenchantment”