UCLA Television Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams Essay Post response: First, what is the difference between Williams’ distinction below, an

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Contents
First publ ished by
SCHOCKEN BOOKS
1975
Copyright © Raymond Wi lliams 1974
Library of Congress Cataloging in P ublication D ata
Williams, R aymond.
Television: technology and cultural for m.
Bibl iograp hy: p.
Includes index.
1. Television broadcasting. 2. Television
broadcasting-Great Britain. I. Titl e.
H E8700.4.W54 1975
384.55’4
Printed in the United States of America
75-107 14
Foreword
I The technology and the society
2 Institutions of the technology
3 The forms of television
4 Programming: distribution and flow
5 Effects of the technology and its uses
6 Alternative technology, alternative uses?
Selected Bibliography
Index
7
9
32
44
78
II9
135
153
157
Foreword
This book is an attempt to explore and describe some of the
relationships between television as a technology and television
as a cultural form. In the contemporary debate about the general
relations between technology, social institutions and culture,
television is obviously an outstanding case. Indeed its present
importance, as an element in each of these areas, and as a point
of interaction between them, is in effect unparalleled.
I have been meaning to attempt this inquiry since I wrote
The Long Revolution and Communications, which were more
closely concerned with the cultural institutions of print. As in
those earlier studies, the social history and the social analysis
needed to be directly related to critical and analytical examination of the materials and processes of the specific communication. Over four years, from 1968 to 1972, I wrote a monthly
review of television for the BBC weekly journal The Listener.
I was able to choose my own subjects and on several occasions
tried to sum up 91-Y impressions of a particular television use or
form – sport, travel, police serials, commercials, political reporting, discussions. These articles are a necessary background for
the present inquiry, and I have drawn on some of their experience for this book, which was, however, mainly written in
California, in a very different television situation. I have taken
the opportunity to make some comparisons between British and
American practice. I also took the opportunity of discussion
with colleagues in the Department of Communications at
Stanford University and was especially helped by some of their
work on new and emerging television technologies. I am
7
c.
Television
especially grateful to Edwin B. Parker, and for discussions elsewhere to Mr Rice of KQED San Francisco, to Dr John Fekete,
to Mr Nicholas Gamham and to my son Dr Ederyn Williams.
My wife’s work on the material for Chapters Three, Four and
Six was at once primary and indispensable. I am also grateful
to Mr Jonathan Benthall for his help throughout the inquiry.
Stanford, California,
and Cambridge, England.
January-June, 1973·
,(
1. The technology and the society
It is often said that television has altered our world. In the same
way, people often speak of a new world, a new society, a new
phase of history, being created – ‘brought about’ – by this or
that new technology: the steam-engine, the automobile, the
atomic bomb. Most of us know what is generally implied when
such things are said. But this may be the central difficulty: that
we have got so used to statements of this general kind, in our
most ordinary discussions, that we can fail to realise their
specific meanings.
For behind all such statements lie some of the most difficult
and most unresolved historical and philosophical questions. Yet
the questions are not posed by the statements; indeed they are
ordinarily masked by them. Thus we often discuss, with animation, this or that ‘effect’ of television, or the kinds of social
behaviour, the cultural and psychological conditions, which
television has ‘led to’, without feeling ourselves obliged to ask
whether it is reasonable to describe any technology as a cause,
or, if we think of it as a cause, as what kind of cause, and in
what relations with other kinds of causes. The most precise and
discriminating local study of ‘effects’ can remain superficial if
we have not looked into the notions of cause and effect, as
between a technology and a society, a technology and a culture,
a technology and a psychology, which underlie our questions
and may often determine our answers.
It can of course be said that these fundamental questions are
very much too difficult; and that they are indeed difficult is very
soon obvious to anyone who tries to follow them through. We
9
Q
The technology and the society
Television
could spend our lives trying to answer them, whereas here and
now, in a society in which television is important, there is
immediate and practical work to be done: surveys to be made,
research undertaken; surveys and research, moreover, which we
know how to do. It is an appealing position, and it has the
advantage, in our kind of society, that it is understood as
practical, so that it can then be supported and funded. By
contrast, other kinds of question seem merely theoretical and
abstract.
Yet all questions about cause and effect, as between a technology and a society, are intensely practical. Until we have
begun to answer them, we really do not know, in any particular
case, whether, for example, we are talking about a technology
or about the uses of a technology; about necessary ,institutions
or particular and changeable institutions; about a content or
about a form. And this is not only a matter of intellectual uncertainty; it is a matter of social practice. If the technology is a
cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if
the technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of
cause, and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our
expe~ience of its uses? These are not abstract questions. They
form an increasingly important part of our social and cultural
arguments, and they are being decided all the time in real
practice, by real and effective decisions.
It is with these problems in mind that I want to try to analyse
television as a particular cultqral technology, and to look at its
development, its institutions, its forms and its effects, in this
critical dimension. In the present chapter, I shall begin the
analysis under three headings: (a) versions of cause and effect
in technology and society; (b) the social history of television as a
technology; (c) the social histocy of the uses of television technology.
celevision has altered our world. It is worth setting down some
of the different things this kind of statement has been taken to
mean. For example:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
(vi)
A. VERSIONS OF CAUSE AND EFFECT IN TECHNOLOGY
AND SOCIETY
We can begin by looking again at the general statement that
TO
(vii)
Television was invented as a result of scientific and
technical research. Its power as a medium of news and
entertainment was then so great that it altered all preceding media of news and entertainment.
Television was invented as a result of scientific and
technical research. Its power as a medium of social
communication was then so great that it altered many
of our institutions and forms of social relationships.
Television was invented as a result of scientific and
technical research. Its inherent properties as an electronic medium altered our basic perceptions of reality,
and thence our relations with each other and with the
world.
Television was invented as a result of scientific and
technical research. As a powerful medium of communication and entertainment it took its place with
other factors – such as greatly increased physical
mobility, itself the result of other newly invented technologies -in altering the scale and form of our societies.
Television was invented as a result of scientific and
technical research, and developed as a medium of
entertainment and news. It then had unforeseen consequences, not only on other entertainment and news
media, which it reduced in viability and importance,
but on some of the central processes of family, cultural
and social life.
Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and
technical research, was selected for investment and
development to meet the needs of a new kind of
society, especially in the provision of centralised entertainment and in the centralised formation of opinions
and styles of behaviour.
Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and
TT
Televt”sian
technical research, was selected for investment and
promotion as a new and profitable phase of a domestic
consumer economy; it is then one of the characteristic
‘machines for the home’.
(viii) Television became available as a result of scientific and
technical research, and in its character and uses exploited and emphasised elements of a passivity, a
cultural and psychological inadequacy, which had
always been latent in people, but which television now
organised and came to represent.
(ix) Television became available as a result of scientific and
technical research, and in its character and uses both
served and exploited the needs of a new kind of largescale and complex but atomised society.
These are only some of the possible glosses on the ordinary bald
statement that television has altered our world. Many people
hold mixed versions of what are really alternative opinions, and
in some .cases there is some inevitable overlapping. But we can
distinguish between two broad classes of opinion.
In. the first – (i) to (v) – the technology is in effect accidental.
Beyond the strictly internal development of the technology
there is no reason why any particular invention should have
come about. Similarly it then has consequences which are also
in the true sense accidental, since they follow directly from the
technology itself. If television had not been invented, this argument would run, certain definite social and cultural events would
not have occurred.
In the second – (vi) to (ix) – television is again, in effect, a
technological accident, but its significance lies in its uses, which
are held to be symptomatic of some order of society or some
qualities of human nature which are otherwise determined. If
television had not been invented, this argument runs, we would
still be manipulated or mindlessly entertained, but in some other
way and perhaps less powerfully.
For all the variations of local interpretation and emphasis,
T”t
The technology and the society
these two classes of opinion underlie the overwhelming majority
of both professional and amateur views of the effects of television. What they have in common is the fundamental form of
the statement: ‘television has altered our world’.
It is then necessary to make a further theoretical distinction.
The first class of opinion, described above, is that usually known,
at least to its opponents, as technologt”cal determt”nism. It is an
immensely powerful and now largely orthodox view of the
nature of social change. New technologies are discovered, by an
essentially internal process of research and development, which
then sets the conditions for social change and progress. Progress,
in particular, is the history of these inventions, which ‘created
the modem world’. The effects of the technologies, whether
direct or indirect, foreseen or unforeseen, are as it were the rest
of history. The steam engine, the automobile, television, the
atomic bomb, have made modem man and the modern condition.
The second class of opinion appears less determinist. Television, like any other technology, becomes available as an element
or a medium in a process of change that is in any case occurring
or about to occur. By contrast with pure technological determinism, this view emphasises other causal factors in social
change. It then considers particular technologies, or a complex
of technologies, as symptoms of change of some other kind. Any
particular technology is then as it were a by-product of a social
process that is otherwise determined. It only acquires effective
status when it is used for purposes which are already contained
in this known social process.
The debate between the!;e two general positions occupies the
greater part of our thinking about technology and society. It is a
real debate, and each side makes important points. But it is in
the end sterile, because each position, though in different ways,
has abstracted technology from society. In technological determinism, research and development have been assumed as selfgenerating. The new technologies are invented as it were in an
independent sphere, and then create new societies or new human
conditions. The view of symptomatic technology, similarly,
assumes that research and development are self-generating, but
!< Television in a more marginal way. What is discovered in the margin is then taken up and used. Each view can then be seen to depend on the isolation of technology. It is either a self-acting force which creates new ways of life, or it is a self-acting force which provides materials for new ways of life. These positions are so deeply established, in modem social thought, that it is very difficult to think beyond them. Most histories of technology, like most histories of scientific discovery, are written from their assumptions. An appeal to 'the facts', against this or that interpretation, is made very difficult simply because the histories are usually written, consciously or unconsciously, to illustrate the assumptions. This is either explicit, with the consequential interpretation attached, or more often implicit, in that the history of technology or of scientific development is offered as a history on its own. This can be seen as a device of specialisation or of emphasis, but it then necessarily implies merely internal intentions and criteria. To change these emphases would require prolonged and cooperative intellectual effort. But in the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology in that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. B. THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF TELEVISION AS A TECHNOLOGY The invention of television was no single event or series of events. ·It depended on a complex of inventions and developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography and motion 14 4,l ~H".1-1 h .,.t C;L .. ._ The technology and the society pictures, and radio. It can be said to have separated out as a specific technological objective in the period 1875-1890, and then, after a lag, to have developed as a specific technological enterprise from 1920 through to the first public television systems of the 1930s. Yet in each of these stages it depended for parts of its realisation on inventions made with other ends primarily in view. Until the early nineteenth century, investigations of electricity, which had long been known as a phenomenon, were primarily philosophical: investigations of a puzzling natural effect. The technology associated with these investigations was mainly directed towards isolation and concentration of the effect, for its clearer study. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there began to be applications, characteristically in relation to other known natural effects (lightning conductors). But there is then a key transitional period in a cluster of inventions between 18oo and 1831, ranging from Volta's battery to Faraday's demonstration of electro-magnetic induction, leading quickly to the production of generators. This can be properly traced as a scientific history, but it is significant that the key period of advance 'coincides with an important stage of the development of industrial production. The advantages of electric power 'Yere closely related to new industrial needs: for mobility and transfer in the location of power sources, and for flexible and rapid controllable conversion. The steam engine had been well suited to textiles, aad its industries. had ·been based on local siting. A more extensive development, both physically and in the complexity of multiple-part processes, such as engineering, could be attempted with other power sources but could only be fully realised with electricity. There was a very complex interaction between new needs and new inventions, at the level of primary production, of new applied industries (plating) and of new social needs which were themselves related to industrial development (city and house lighting). From 1830 to large-scale generation in the 188os there was this continuing complex of need and invention and application. In telegraphy the development was simpler. The transmission YC: The technology and the society Television of messages by beacons and similar primary devices had been long established. In the development of navigation and naval warfare the flag-system had been standardised in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the Napoleonic wars there was a marked development of land telegraphy, by semaphore stations, and some of this survived into peacetime. Electrical telegraphy had been suggested as a technical system as early as 1753, and was actually demonstrated in several places in the early nineteenth century. An English inventor in 1816 was told that the Admiralty was not interested. It is interesting that it was the development of the railways, themselves a response to the development of an industrial system and the related growth of cities, which clarified the need for improved telegraphy. A complex of technical possibilities was brought to a working system from 1837 onwards. The development of international trade and transport brought rapid extensions of the system, including the transatlantic cable in the 1850s and ·the I86os. A general system of electric telegraphy had been established by the 1870s, and in the same decade the telephone system began to be developed, in this case as a new and intended invention. In photography, the idea of light-writing had been suggested by (among others) Wedgwood and Davy in 1802, and the camera obscura had already been developed. It was not the projection but the fixing of images which at first awaited technical solution, and from 1816 (Niepce) and through to 1839 (Daguerre) this was worked on, together with the improvement of camera devices. Professional and then amateur photography spread rapidly, and reproduction and then transmission, in the developing newspaper press, were achieved. By the 188os the idea of a 'photographed reality' - still more for record thru1 for observation - was familiar. The idea of moving pictures had been similarly developing. The magic lantern (slide projection) had been known from the seventeenth century, and had acquired simple motion (one slide over another) by 1736. From at latest 1826 there was a development of mechanical motion-picture devices, such as the wheelTl; I I l of-life, and these came to be linked with the magic lantern. The effect of persistence in human vision- that is to say, our capacity to hold the 'memory' of an image through an interval to the next image, thus allowing the possibility of a sequence built from rapidly succeeding units - had been known since classical times. Series of cameras photographing stages of a sequence were followed (Marey, 1882) by multiple... Purchase answer to see full attachment