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 preexiting 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
Long-range analysis: Grouping of programme
categories, quantitatively sorted.
Teleision as
cause,
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