Matt Groening’s The Simpsons
Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
Raymond Williams dedicates much of this book to explaining what television is as a technology (that is, an extension of the more fundamental technology that is broadcasting, which first came to prominence via audio and the radio), what kinds of cultural requirements called it into existence (the increasingly atomized social world of a post-Industrial Revolution society), and the effects it has (to be listed later). It seems he writes largely to counter Marshall McLuhan’s conception of technological determinism, in which the technology just kind of pops into existence and has certain effects that are largely disconnected from the culture in which the technology exists. Williams, on the other hand, says that we need to return intention, history, and context to the discussion of television and its effects.
Williams tracks the history of the development of the technology that would lead, eventually, to television and then traces the way that other technologies were results of social needs (tele-phony/graphy as a way of communicating brief information across long distances quickly as a result of a growing desire to organize military and capitalist maneuvers) as a way of setting up how television, which is centrally produced but distributed broadly to individual homes, allows for a similar social requirement to be met. That social requirement is the need for distribution of information (and, less importantly but still crucially, entertainment) to a people who are increasingly separated from a sense of community that had once held society together. As societies get bigger and more spread out thanks to industrial practices and pressures, television (and radio before it) became a way to redeploy the kinds of things that might have been accomplished via town meetings or even public gatherings.
Williams then turns to examining who controls the production and dissemination of television programming, which, he notes, was always secondary to the fact that the signal existed in the first place. It was not that there were tv shows sitting around waiting for a technology to allow them to be broadcast into people’s homes, but that once that signal existed there was then a need for something to send over it. By looking at several British and American tv stations, he looks at what it means to have publicly owned stations and privately owned stations, both what that means for the kinds of shows that are being produced and shown on the channels and what it means for the way that the channels are being run financially. Williams later notes that as technologies of dissemination continue to develop, these signals will soon be able to reach around the world, which will have various additional effects of cultural imperialism and further consolidation of power.
Williams then investigates the way television works on a programming level. Here is his most famous concept from this book, that of flow as the dominant mode of televisual communication. He outlines how tv shows flow into one another, how within those shows there is a flow from scene to scene (or from show to commercial and back) and how within those smaller units there is still a continual flow of visual and aural information. This, he claims, is what makes it hard to turn the tv off, and what makes television seem insidious to those who would classify it as a means of society’s degradation. Even though we might switch between channels to find alternate programming, there is still an experience of flow from one channel to the next. It’s everywhere!
Williams then investigates the effects of television. Here is where he makes his strongest case against McLuhan, who he claims is treating the television as an ideology rather than a technology that has been made and used by a society. Television isn’t pushing the things on tv, society is via the television. Looked at this way, Williams claims, we can see how television was developed to help facilitation communication between those in power and those who have power over them, but also how others can co-opt that system for their own ends. Here lies the realm of pirate radio and tv stations, which exist fully within the boundaries of what is made possible with the technology even if they are not an intended effect of that technology. This kind of thing seems crucial to understanding the rest of William’s project, which projects the current (for 1974) situation of television into the future and in which Williams largely predicts the internet, in concept if not explicit detail.
Williams lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon create an international network of competing and conflicting distribution methods, aka the internet. Williams sees two ways of this working out. On the one hand, if arguments can be made that there should remain some level of local control over what is sent across these new means of broadcasting, there might be a real democratization of information and communication. On the other hand, if corporations are able to influence the development of these technologies enough, they might be able to manipulate the course of events towards a situation where the corporations are able to control what is seen as acceptable and possible within their neigh-unescapable grasp. It seems clear to me that Williams, in creating this binary of possible outcomes, hit exactly on what has happened, in that the internet has allowed for a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and learn about the world, but that corporations still largely control the ways in which those people use that information and lay out patterns of thought that those people still largely follow. There are cracks in the system because both of these outcomes happened at once and the corporate control is not nearly as all-encompassing as it would have needed to be to create that full dystopia and is indeed largely in control of the ways people communicate, but still those pirate messages are possible and even likely within this system. Perhaps it is utopian after all.
Williams’ concept of television and broadcasting is largely limited to Britain and the US, which does tend to limit his analysis somewhat. I would be curious to read a history of television during this time in other countries to see if the English language examples are as universal as Williams seems to claim they are.
Sarah Palmer watches TV on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return
Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
Williams really only explicitly debates with McLuhan, who he pretty well takes to task for his technological determinism. Other than that, the biggest bit of context is the period in which Williams is writing. About 20 years after television’s popularity began, and with an ensuing 40+ years of development that has followed had made some of his arguments a little outdated. For instance, he writes about the technological inferiority of television as a visual medium when compared to the cinema. While that still remains true, at least on a level of scale, television is no longer so technologically inferior that it limits what can be shown on it the way it did in Williams’ time. Indeed, televisions can now have more color information than a digital projector at a theater can. This means that tv as a way of transmitting old (or new) movies is no longer a matter of dealing with poorer picture quality for the convenience of home viewing. Still, Williams’ analysis allows room for this change to happen, and even briefly predicts it.
Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
Williams takes the socio-political view of the development of technologies as his main way of understanding how technologies come to be based on desires that needed to be fulfilled. He also examines not just the intended effects of a technology such as television but also their unintended and yet still possible effects. By looking at intentions and then effects, he is able to see why television came to be and what it is doing, and what it could be doing.
Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
Williams methodological choice is largely his rhetoric. Here he argues that technological determinism is a flawed way of understanding the ways technology interacts with societies, and he aptly argues for a fuller understanding of its role as a social tool.
Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
As the start of my television-theory readings, this works really well to ground me in a way of thinking about tv as a medium. Even though it contains little in the way of theories of television as a medium of drama, where most of my readings will be focused, it still will likely remain foundational to my understanding of what is going on at a societal level with tv.
Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
television, technological determinism, cause and effect, cause, effect, social, society, broadcasting, flow, commercial, public, technology, medium, programming
Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?
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 experience of its uses? (2)
[I]n 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 and 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. (6-7)
The cheap radio receiver is then a significant index of a general condition and response. It was especially welcomed by all those who had least social opportunities of other kinds; who lacked independent mobility or access to the previously diverse places of entertainment and information. Broadcasting could also come to serve, or seem to serve, as a form of unified social intake, at the most general levels. What had been intensively promoted by the radio manufacturing companies thus interlocked with this kind of social need, itself defined within general limits and pressures. (21)
The ‘commercial’ character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programs for a profit in a known market; as a channel for advertising; and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the norms of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a way of life based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (36-7)
But there has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. Even within the last half-century, at the peak of popularity of the cinema, figures for Britain indicate an average of less than one attendance a week per head of the adult population. It is difficult to get any precise comparative figures for television. But it seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, then would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. […] Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food. (56)
But the cultural importance of the serial, as an essentially new form, ought not to be limited to this kind of traditional ratification. Few forms on television have the potential importance of the original serial. If the form has been overlaid, understandably, by the ‘classic’ emphasis, and more generally by the stock formulas of crime and illness, that is a particular cultural mediation, which it is necessary to understand and look for ways beyond. (58)
What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’. (91)
The flow offered can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the television experience itself. Two common observations bear on this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘program’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. (94)
Especially in advanced industrial societies the near universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause-and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. […] What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialized to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause. (121-2)
[McLuhan’s conception of the media] is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – weather print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such. The initial formulation – ‘the medium is the message’ – was a simple formalism. The subsequent formulation – ‘the medium is the massage’ – is a direct and functioning ideology. (130)
All technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices. […] There will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention. […] While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology. […] We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures. (132-3)
The unique factor of broadcasting – first in sound, then even more clearly in television – has been that its communication is accessible to normal social development; it requires no specific training which brings people within the orbit of public authority. If we can watch and listen to people in our immediate circle, we can watch and listen to television. (135)
All this will take time and prolonged effort. The struggle will reach into every corner of society. But that is precisely what is at stake: a new universal accessibility. Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralized information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television systems, making possible communication and information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-7)