Television: Technology and Cultural Form - Raymond Williams.
Opening by describing the universal and 'general social visibility' of television has generated elementary 'cause-and-effect identifications' of its effect as change agent on society. Instead of engaging the process of their production within the wider cultural scope, televised content is accused of inciting violence, encouraging sexual permissiveness and slip in general moral code. The other pejorative influences include 'political manipulation' and general 'cultural degradation.'
Viewing violence in this medium is identified has having a cathartic impact on the viewer. In the years since this was published it has been restricted and routinely pointed to as a cause of anti-social and disruptive behaviours. But, Williams, instead associates this with normal socialisation processes. The imperial west have used violence to colonise, divide, rule and regulate for centuries.
The rule of the network lords (think: the maniacal Howard Beale in Lumet's Network), can be further rationalised against this construct; profit can be made from the programming that depicts violence. The methods of mass broadcasting across long distances and bands of viewers can be likened to the organisation of military and capitalist maneuvers. Television is produced centrally - in a studio - but then distributed across a network and 'beamed' into individual private settings. Politicians have been adaptive to new medium too; we think of the youth, pep and charisma of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. It is the arena in which debate is conducted with television interviewers have become famous too.
To examine its further prominence and usage outside of the military and political schema we need to explore the core concepts of cultural science which include: 'understanding, value-judgement, the involvement of the investigator' and explains the emphasis of the effects of a medium or process. Williams explains how the emphasis on the effects of this medium and casual influence on 'socialisation' and 'social function' is contingent on unpacking the concept of 'mass' and on the empirical approach of the social sciences; measuring experience and reliance on evidence. He describes what is a an 'assumptive' use (effects) that avoids the true sociology of communications. The financing of researching into the field has been made by those with a vested interest - those conducting market research, advertising agencies, etc. The other focus, concerning the social impacts, has been mounted by 'social interest groups' and 'political and cultural authorities'.
Tracing the origins of this form of mass communication is employed in opposition to McLuhan's concept of 'the global village'. McLuhan focussed on the specificity of the media and the differences on quality between speech, print, radio and television. With the widespread access to the printed word - especially the reading of the bible - and encouragement of literacy in the west and later deployed as the colonial efforts in global east and south came the unevenly distributed power dynamics of the educational system. Watching television deconstructs these power relations as being a viewer does not require a level of comprehension thus dismantling the power of the teacher, and the priest.
McLuhan de-socialises the respectives medias which Williams instead pinpoints as facilitating connectivity. With the dispersal of people, atomised due to industrialisation, the unitary nature of the television can possess the function of the town hall meeting or community gathering; if we can communicate with friends and family in an intimate group setting, we can watch television with unmediated access. We are also offered the set with tuner or remote and have the option to turn it on or off at our choosing; it is an alternative to the typical social communications, but not a complete departure.
Williams' essentially lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon establish an international network of 'competing and conflicting distribution methods'; something that has been the realised in the internet.
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