Defining Television
The industrial changes that developed during the multi-channel transition made uncertain the object called “television” as new forms and ways of using the device required us to reconsider how we determine “what is television?” The term “television” has been broadly used to refer to a singular technology—a box with a screen—though it has enabled a range of experiences since the network era. But television is more than just a technology—more than a composite of wires, metal, and glass. It possesses an essence that is bound up in its context, in how the screen is most commonly used, in where it is located, in what streams through it, and in how most use it, despite the possibility for broad variation in all the factors. It is primarily this essence—derived from existing use—that distinguishes a television from a computer monitor, particularly in the context of contemporary technological convergence and the manufacturing of digital “televisions” that have no tuning capability—that is, the ability to receive signals over the air.
Lisa Gitelman argues for a definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols.”30 Protocols include “normative rules and default conditions,” such as the greeting “Hello,” monthly billing cycles, and a system of wires and cable for the U.S. phone service. Understanding that the protocols of television contribute to distinguishing the medium helps us rectify some of the inadequacy of defining the medium only in terms of the piece of equipment and to address how the technology becomes a television when it receives signals via broadcast, cable, or satellite transmission. A television is not just a machine, but also the set of behaviors and practices associated with its use. The media scholar James Bennett has helped in the retheorization of television’s scope through his distinction of “digital television”:
Television as digital media must be understood as a non–site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across multiple platforms as diverse as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and on-line video services such as YouTube, Hulu, Joost, and the BBC’s iPlayer, as well as computer-based mediaplayers such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and Apple TV.31
Like Bennett, I find it useful to allow “television” to expand the narrow confines of its network-era operation. This new stage—what Bennett terms digital television and I distinguish as post-network television—doesn’t mark an end of television, but the beginning of a new era.
I approach television with the presumption that our cultural understanding of this medium does indeed conceive of it as more than a monitor, piece of hardware, or gateway to programming, and that television is less defined by how the content gets to us and what we view it on than by the set of experiences and practices we’ve long associated with the activity of viewing. All of these technical attributes unquestionably contribute to how a culture uses and understands television, yet inherited meanings, expectations, and habits also circumscribe it in particular ways. New technologies and industrial practices have introduced radical changes in technological aspects of television, its use, and its consequent cultural significance, but various aspects of sociocultural experience still define television in our minds in specific and meaningful ways, particularly for those generations who knew television in the network era.
Television may not be dying, but changes in its content and how and where we view have complicated how we think about and understand its role in the culture. The transition of radio in the 1940s provides an illustrative parallel. As television first entered homes, radio had to fundamentally redefine itself—both in its programming and in the ways and places that listeners used it. Before television, radio was primarily a domestic-bound technology that played particular programs on a known schedule; after television usurped the captive home audience, radio became a portable medium and shifted to emphasize ongoing music or talk formats. Nonetheless, after television, the technology remained commonly understood as “radio” despite the substantial difference in the medium and adjustments to its role as a cultural institution. In truth, “video” provides the more accurate term for the cross-platform circulation of “television” content, but as the television experience has encompassed new capabilities and spread to additional screens in recent years, established cultural understandings have shifted accordingly so that we still continue to comprehend different experiences as watching “television.”
In introducing a collection of essays that consider various aspects of the wide-ranging transitions that occurred by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Lynn Spigel reflects on the title of the anthology—Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. “Indeed,” she notes, “if TV refers to the technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears we are now entering a new phase of television—the phase that comes after ‘TV.’”32 Although the title of the collection is eye-catching and provocative, it suggests a far more absolute rupture than that which occurred; it is also arbitrary in affording the norms of the network era such eminence as determinant of the medium. Still, attention to transition and uncertainty about the present status and likely future of television evident in the anthology and its title were not uncommon by late in the multi-channel transition. The title of another important article queries, “What is the ‘television’ of television studies?”—a question that similarly asserts concern about ambiguity regarding the fundamental attributes of television.33 Those who write about television have never adequately addressed which of the “technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking,” to borrow from Spigel, might particularly establish the ontological boundaries of the medium—the things that make television “television.” We err in allowing those norms established first to “determine” the medium; they are as arbitrary as any subsequent formation.34
Thinking about Network-Era Television
Scholars in fields as diverse as literature, film studies, political science, sociology, psychology, and communication developed different ways of thinking about television and its role in culture. Those in the area of “media studies” have attended most closely to the ways programs, audiences, industries, and sociocultural contexts intertwine in the creation and circulation of television, and their ideas are most relevant here. Scholars of media studies—and critical television studies in particular—have developed detailed theories and empirical studies that examine the multifaceted nature of cultural production common to television. But in the network era, there was no need for esoteric discussions of what television is, as it was assumed to be a simple technology whose variation spanned little more than screen size and color or black and white.35 Much television theory continues to presume network-era norms in explaining the cultural and institutional functions of television, and draws from distinctive national experiences with the medium. This book and the conditions of the post-network era call many of these assumptions into question.
Foundational understandings of television view it as a—if not the—central communicative and cultural force in society. Its centrality derived from its availability and ubiquity; as early as 1960 more than 87 percent of U.S. households had televisions, and the technology increasingly was available in spaces outside the home, such as taverns and hospitals.36 The accessibility of television was in many ways enabled by the low cost of acquiring its programming. Either as a result of advertising support in the United States or public funding in most other countries, viewing television programs did not require the same type of per-use fee associated with most other entertainment and informational media such as films, newspapers, and magazines. To be sure, commercial media “cost” societies in