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”