Television as Cultural Form

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 4 (1996) : 79-87. Television as Cultural Form Mahmut Mutman Since its appearance as a major means of "mass communication" in the aftermath of World War II, television has increasingly become one of the most powerful metaphors of contemporary American culture. Occupying a central place at the crossroads of politics and business, entertainment and information, home and world, sound and image, work and leisure, television is certainly not simply an effective means of disseminating knowledge or images, but a cultural form, a regulating metaphor for social life. Many of its characteristics underpin the ideals of a culture of work and consumption: a technological achievement, a means of communication covering vast distances and bringing information and images to our homes, a service product in all its varieties and programmes, produced in a professional, disciplined and punctual manner and presented as a response to our "demand." This does not mean, however, that television is accepted without criticism. Indeed, it has frequently been the object of scientific research and intellectual criticism as well as public controversy (see Newcomb for an overall view). The most significant part of the discourse on television is in the sphere of public speech. Very rarely is television taken as a whole institution in this kind of discourse. Nonetheless, public discourse may turn out to be an interesting object of sociological or cultural analysis when it is considered as an essential part of the way television is instituted by several forces in society. Indeed, although it might at times be of a critical nature, this kind of discourse must be considered within the same context as some other discourses on and around TV: commercial advertising for TV sets, expert opinion on the virtues of a recent innovation, or the presumed or demonstrated dangers of television for children, etc. All these public discourses together are involved in the signification of television, thus influencing television's signification of the world. Cecelia Tichi has shown how the public discourse on TV has become an essential part of the analysis of TV as cultural institution. The social scientific study of media is understandably characterized by an academic distance from the commonsense assumptions which seem to govern most of the public discourse. Indeed, what is nowadays called "media studies" has a long history rooted in the sociology of mass communications and in the social psychology of the immediate post-war period in the US. Emerging as a response to the hypodermic-needle theory of the pre-war and war years, the early sociology of mass communications was characterized by meticulous empirical research on the "effects" of media messages on discrete, observable individual behavior and opinion (Lazarsfeld et al.). Since the prior "hypodermic-needle" theory of direct and immediate effects had been commonsense in the years of totalitarian regimes in Europe, the main objective of these empirical studies was to develop a precise measurement of how effective the media actually were. The findings of such studies (especially on voting and buying behavior) indicated that the media do not create any significant change in individual attitudes and opinions. We might say that most of the media research in the last three decades has developed as a critical response to this dominant paradigm (see Hall; and Barthes especially for work associated with semiology. See Gitlin for a succint criticism of the concept of effect). Following its social and cultural installation in the 1950s, television has rapidly become a prime object of attention, analysis and criticism (see Spiegel for the process by which TV is instituted as family entertainment). The recent media studies seem to employ various different methodologies ranging from the semiological analysis of media texts to the ethnographic study of audience groups (Fiske; Morley; and Carey). One common aspect of these various approaches is their rejection of a simplistic dichotomy between "direct and total effect" and "no effect," and their insistence on questions of cultural domination and resistance. The emphasis is on the cultural meanings produced by television, and how these are received or interpreted by heterogenous audiences. Television is conceptualized as an institution which is responsible for the reproduction of meanings and values in society, and the audiences are regarded as consisting of several groups who might differently interpret or even contest as well as accept these meanings. Although the value of this research is undeniable, it overlooks a fundamental aspect of our experience of television. Television is not simply a medium for producing or reproducing meanings, but it is itself an important cultural form. Ironically, what seems to be missing from most of the television research is precisely the question of what television is. Yet this question can not be so easily isolated. It is related to a wider social institutional framework on which modern culture is based. In this essay I want to make some initial observations about television as both responsible for and part of our "modernity." My purpose is to provide a description of the fundamental features of television as a specific institutional-technological complex. To begin with, I would like to emphasize a number of implicit assumptions about television. This hidden set of background assumptions is regarded as natural; they are what make television a natural, routine object of experience for us. They constitute a kind of "fore-knowledge" of television, and this is why they need to be made explicit if we want a genuine understanding of our experience of television. The first of these assumptions is that television is an instrument, that is to say a medium of communication through which information and images are transmitted. This is a philosophical-moral assumption: events happen in a place called the "real world," which is by definition separate from television or media, and media professionals and journalists report these events to us. The possible problems are biased, subjective reporting and what communication theorists call "noise," i.e., anything that interferes with the clear transmission of the message. When the report is objective and all noise is eliminated, one has a transparent view of the event. The questions of bias and noise are questions of moral and professional training, that is to say essentially technical questions. Television thus provides the receiver with an objective and transparent view of the world. The implication is that there is such a thing as transparent communication in which the message sent is identical to the message received. Most of the time critics as well as defenders of television make precisely this kind of assumption. While for the defenders, television should be unbiased, objective, hence transparent (questions of moral (...truncated)