Although television maintains the technological affordances of a mass medium that, in principle, remains capable of serving as the cultural hearth around which a society shares media events—as we did in cases such as the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger explosion—it increasingly exists as an electronic newsstand through which a diverse and segmented society pursues deliberately targeted interests. The U.S. television audience now can rarely be categorized as a mass audience and is instead more accurately understood as a collection of niche audiences. Television has been reconfigured in recent decades as a medium that most commonly addresses fragmented and specialized audience groups, but no technology emerged to replace its previous norm as a messenger to a mass and heterogeneous audience. The development of broadband distribution substantially affected the circulation of ideas and enabled dissemination to even international audiences, yet the Internet allows us to attend to even more diverse content and provides little commonality in experience.
Television’s transition to a narrowcast medium—one targeted to distinct and isolated subsections of the audience—along with adjustments within the broader media culture in which it exists, significantly altered its industrial logic and has required a fundamental reassessment of how it operates as a cultural institution. For the last sixty years, we have thought about television in certain ways because of how television has been, but the truth is that television has not operated in the way we have assumed for some time now. Few of the norms of television that prevailed from the 1950s into the 1980s remain in place, and such norms were themselves the results of specific industrial, technological, and cultural contexts long since passed. In particular, the presumption that television inherently functions as a mass medium continues to hold great sway, but the mass audiences once characteristic of television were, as the media scholar Michael Curtin notes, an aberration resulting from Fordist principles of “mass production, mass marketing and mass consumption.”5 Consequently, previous norms did not suggest the “proper” functioning of the television industry any more than did subsequent norms; rather, they resulted from a specific industrial, technological, and cultural context no more innate than those that would develop later.
Understanding the transitions occurring in U.S. television at this time is a curious matter relative to conventional approaches to exploring technology and culture. Historically, technological innovation primarily has been a story of replacement, in which a new technology emerged and subsumed the role of the previous technology. This indeed was the case of the transition from radio to television, as television neatly adopted many of the social and cultural functions of radio and added pictures to correspond with the sounds of the previous medium. The supplanted medium did not fade away, but repositioned itself and redefined its primary attributes to serve more of a complementary than competitive function. But it is not a new competitor that now threatens television; it is the medium itself and those who try to retain practices now clearly suboptimal.
The changes in television that have taken place over the past two decades—whether the gross abundance of channel and program options we now select among or our increasing ability to control when and where we watch—are extraordinary and on the scale of the transition from one medium to another, as in the case of the shift from radio to television. And it is not just television that has changed. The field of media in which television is integrated also has evolved profoundly—most directly as a result of digital innovation. The audience’s experiences with computing and the emergence of the mobile phone as a sophisticated portable screen technology better thought of as a “pocket computer” than a “phone” are now as important to understanding television as the legacy behaviors of domestic viewing. Various industrial, technological, and cultural forces have begun to radically redefine television, yet paradoxically, it persists as an entity that most people still understand and identify as “TV.”
This book explores this redefinition of television specifically in the United States, although these changes are also redefining the experience with television in similar ways in many countries around the world. From its beginning, broadcasting has been “ideally suited” technologically to transgress national borders and constructs such as nation-states; however, the early imposition of strict national control and substantially divergent national experiences prevailed over attributes innate to the technology.6 Many different countries experienced similar transitions in their industrial composition, production processes, and use of this thing called television at the same time as the United States, but precise situations diverge enough to make it difficult to speak in transnational generalities and lead to my focus on only the U.S. experience of this transition. As Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay tellingly assessed in 2009, “‘What is television?’ very much depends on where you are.”7 The specific form of the redefinition—as it emerges from a rupture in dominant industrial practices—is particular to each nation, yet similarly industrialized countries are experiencing the transition to digital transmission, the expansion of choice in channel and content options, the increasing conglomeration of the industry among a few global behemoths, and the drive for increased control over when, where, and how audiences view “television programs.” The development of an increasingly global cultural economy also has led the fate and fortune of the U.S. television industry to be determined beyond national confines.
Situating Television circa 2014
During its first forty years, U.S. television remained fairly static in its industrial practices. It maintained modes of production, a standard picture quality, and conventions of genre and schedule, all of which led to a common and regular experience for audiences and lulled those who think about television into certain assumptions. Moments of adjustment occurred, particularly at the end of the 1950s when the “magazine” style of advertising began to take over and networks gained control of their schedules from advertising agencies and sponsors, but once established, the medium remained relatively unchanged until the mid-1980s. First, the “network era” (from approximately 1952 through the mid-1980s) governed industry operations and allowed for a certain experience with television that characterizes much of the medium’s history. The norms of the network era have persisted in the minds of many as distinctive of television, despite the significant changes that have developed over the past twenty years. I identify the period of the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s as that of the “multi-channel transition.” During these years, various developments such as the growing availability of cable service and new cable channels, videocassette recorders (VCRs), and remote controls changed our experience with television, but did so very gradually, in a manner that allowed the industry to continue to operate in much the same way as it did in the network era.
Signs of a subsequent period, a “post-network era,” began to emerge in the early 2000s. Many changes from the norms of the multi-channel transition are readily identifiable, but it remains too early to know the ultimate characteristics and conventions of the post-network era. What separates the post-network era from the multi-channel transition is that the changes in competitive norms and operation of the industry become too pronounced for many of the old practices to be preserved; different industrial practices are becoming dominant and replacing those of the previous eras.
These demarcations in time, which are intentionally general, recognize that all production processes do not shift simultaneously and that people adopt new technologies and ways of using them at varied paces. By the end of 2005, adjustments in how people could access programming—particularly through DVR use and purchase of full seasons on DVD—enabled a small group of early adopters to experience television outside the linear schedules of network programmers