3520 TV Theory Lecture 4: Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form

What is new about television? That the means of communication (distribution and continuity) have preceded the medium’s content Result II: extensive borrowing from pre-exiting genres like drama, film, documentary, news, variety, sport Result II: the tension between a unit principle (“items”) and a continuity principle (“flow”)

Defining the flow concept Ch. 4: “What is offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real “broadcasting”.

Levels of flow analysis Teleision as cause, Long-range analysis: Grouping of programme categories, quantitatively sorted. Finding: different programming policies, commercial/public Medium-range analysis: The succession of items within and between programmes, qualitatively analysed. Finding: suppression of connection and contrasts Close-range analysis: The succession of words and images, qualitatively analysed. Finding: effects of repetition and instantaneousness

Williams’ flow experience, quote Ch. 4B: “One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began to watch a film and first had difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial “breaks”. (…) I can still not be sure what I took from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some of the characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem - for all the occasional bizarre disparities - a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.”

Williams’ flow experience, commentary Localises the flow experience partly as a feature of technology, partly as a mode of experience Description of an experience that is “unfinished and tentative” has become a canonical statement Analysis seems more on the out for the definitory experience than on the lookout for methods or analytical procedures

Critique of technoogical determinism Formulated in opposition to mass communication effects research and to McLuhan’s medium theory position (“unhistorical and asocial”) Technology is not a cause of effects in society Technology is not a mere symptom of processes/structures in society Technology cannot be isolated from society; it both shapes society and is shaped by it

The concept of intention All technology is used with a certain intention Intention is collective and societal Societal developments (mobility, extension of large organisations) intend communication media with a corresponding distribution and reach (broadcasting) Broadcasting then becomes an instrument for social integration and control

Mobile privatisation Consumer capitalism from the 1920s/30s: consumer appliances for the modern home Key moment in the development of TV technology: small, simple domestic receivers Dispersed and domestic reception matches the privatisation and mobility of advanced industrial capitalism Corresponding mentality: TV as the family unit’s window on the outside world

Developments after Williams The analysis of items/segments The analysis of schedules (units, sequences, styles) Theories of flow aesthetics: repetition, seriality, modes of address Theories of the flow as connecting point between the individual work and society: “a structure of feeling”

Criticisms of Williams Ignores sound Says little on talk and modes of address Essentialises the medium despite of himself Tied to a generational experience of commercial television More concerned with the work/society connection than with television itself