3520 TV Theory Lecture 5: No Sense of Place and Radio, Television and Modern Life
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Transcript of 3520 TV Theory Lecture 5: No Sense of Place and Radio, Television and Modern Life
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”