Abstract
In 1958 the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) promoted its vision of television’s future with an image of a stylishly modern home (Fig. 3.1). Equipped with a “picture frame” flat screen TV mounted on a wall near a huge picture window, the living room was overcome by the postwar dream of TV leisure where views of the outside world (gleaming through the window) were now competing with virtual views on the TV screen. Adding to the attractions of this domestic utopia are a “television control unit” and a mini-fridge on wheels so that the residents are spared the quotidian “challenges” of simply moving around. As the RCA promotional rhetoric suggests, television offers a new and thoroughly modern form of spectacular intimacy where the virtual and the material co-exist, and where the object world is easily manipulated through technical and architectural tricks that allow for (at least the fantasy of) mastery over the environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Histories of television’s installation in homes is a relatively recent phenomenon, and to date there is no single comparative historical study of this on a transnational level. My effort to do so here, therefore, is based on my preliminary attempts to merge some of these studies. I want to thank generous colleagues for either translating or sharing essays, findings, and resources, especially Mirta Varela, Cecile Panati, William Uricchio, and Judith Keilbach.
- 2.
For an excellent analysis of the rise of the suburban family sitcom see Haralovich (1992). Note, however, that television programs, including family sitcoms, also offered more critical perspectives via allegories of suburban alienation, racism, and isolation for women. See for example, Chapter 4 (“Static and Stasis”) in Sconce (2004) and Chapter 4 (“From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sitcom”) in Spigel (2001).
- 3.
Note that such confusions between material space and media space, and the jokes about this, were not new to television. As Carolyn Marvin (1988) observes, these kind of jokes circulated in the trade journals of electrical engineers, who often specifically poked fun at children, women, and people of color who they depicted as “technical illiterates” who were unable to distinguish material from electrical spaces.
- 4.
See www.samsung.com/ae/consumer/tv-audio-video/home-theatre. Retrieved June 1, 2010.
- 5.
For the ad see http://www.tvhistory.tv/1950s-Siemens-TV-Ad-Germany.JPG. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
- 6.
For the ad see http://www.samsung.com/us/2013-smart-tv/\#smart-tv-4. Retrieved June 1, 2010.
- 7.
For the ad see http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess_TV0445/. Retrieved July 19, 2013.
- 8.
For analysis of cooking shows along these lines see Strange (1998) and Bell and Hollows (2007). There is also a growing body of literature on television’s depictions of places that considers, for example, the racial dynamics of TV cities in dramatic programs like The Wire or the identity politics of regional location. See, for example Lipsitz (2011) and Johnson (2008).
- 9.
Felski also observes that feminist theorists (she names, for example, Betty Friedan) have also often denigrated the home as have classic writers on everyday life such as Henri Lefebvre. Regarding the latter, it is also the case that while I am generally drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) important insights about the social production of space, and while his volumes on everyday life are central to any consideration of the topic, he saw television in negative terms as a source of alienation. Particularly apropos to my discussion here, see his 1958 Introduction to the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life where he calls television as “leisure machine” that is part of a more general conversion of “spontaneous” social needs into a form of “social organization” that modifies and directs those needs. In the same passage his also uses the phrase “armchair reading” negatively with regard to “escapist” mass culture items like “travel books” or “reader’s digests,” and he especially names “images” in “films…which are as far from real life as possible.” (Lefebvre 1958; reprinted 1991, pp. 32–33, emphasis his).
- 10.
For a classic discussion of mass culture’s association with tropes of femininity and passivity see Andreas Huyssen’s chapter “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” in Huyssen (1986).
- 11.
It’s also important to point out however, that feminists have also often objected to television and seen it as a source of boredom or an outright tool of patriarchy for women’s domestic confinement and role as consumer. Outright attacks on the medium especially ran through feminist writing of the early second wave, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and specifically in a series of articles published in TV Guide (Friedan 1964). By the late 1970s, and especially with the rise of feminist film theory and cultural studies, feminists developed a much more varied literature that (while still holding onto a negative critique) also understood television’s relation to women’s pleasure and to their everyday lives in more diverse and complex ways. For a bibliography see Brunsdon and Spigel (2007).
- 12.
- 13.
See http://www.mobitv.com. Retrieved August 4, 2013.
- 14.
Itself a spatial metaphor, the term “vast wasteland” (which was coined in 1961 by Newton Minow, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission) uses the title of T.S. Elliot’s poem to encapsulate the ruinous (and over-commercialized) state of US TV in that period. For his full speech see Minow (1961).
- 15.
In making this observation Morley draws upon Massey (1997).
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Spigel, L. (2015). TV and the Spaces of Everyday Life. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_3
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