3520 TV Theory Lecture 4: Williams

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3520 TV Theory Lecture 4 Williams Television
Technology and Cultural Form
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What is new about television?

• That the means of communication (distribution and
  continuity) have preceded the mediums 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)

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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.
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Levels of flow analysis

• 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

Teleision as cause,
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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.
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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
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Critique of technoogical determinism
Formulated in opposition to mass communication
effects research and to McLuhans 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
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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) Broadcastin
g then becomes an instrument for social
integration and control
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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 units window on the
outside world
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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
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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