Andreas Fickers

Towards A New Digital Historicism? Doing History In The Age Of Abundance

This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially of audiovisual sources – is comparable to the boom of critical source editions in the late 19th century. But while the dramatic rise of accessibility to and availability of sources in the 19th century went hand in hand with the development of new scholarly skills of source interpretation and was paralleled by the institutionalization of history as an academic profession, a similar trend of an emerging digital historicism today seems absent. This essay aims at reflecting on the challenges and chances that the discipline of history – and the field of television history in particular – is actually facing. It offers some thoughts and ideas on how the digitization of sources and their online availability affects the established practices of source criticism.

Politique de la grandeur versus "Made in Germany" : politische Kulturgeschichte der Technik am Beispiel der PAL-SECAM-Kontroverse

Andreas Fickers: »Politique de la grandeur« versus »Made in Germany«. Politische Kulturgeschichte der Technik am Beispiel der PAL-SECAM-Kontroverse, Munchen (Oldenbourg) 2007 (Pariser Historische Studien, 78), ISBN 978-3-486-58178-2.

The Techno-politics of Colour: Britain and the European Struggle for a Colour Television Standard

The first colour television transmissions in Great Britain in 1967 marked the end of more than ten years of national and international debate over the technical specifications of the colour television system to be adopted on a European scale. From 1955 a group of European experts – mainly television engineers from broadcasting institutions, national post offices and the television industry – met at regular meetings of the CCIR (Comite Consultatif International de Radiocommunications) to discuss the possibilities of introducing a common European colour television standard. Engineers hoped that this would transform the fragmented European television landscape with its numerous different line standards for black-and-white television (Fickers 2006a). With the foundation in November 1962 of an ad hoc commission on colour television of the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), the discussion intensified and concentrated on comparing three existing technical alternatives: the American NTSC system, the ‘French’ SECAM system and the ‘German’ PAL system. But what started as a scientific endeavour to determine the best colour television system for Europe slowly but surely mutated into a fierce techno-political controversy between the major stakeholders. The most intense phase of the colour television debate took place between the 1962 EBU ad hoc commission meetings and the 1965 and 1966 CCIR conferences in Vienna and Oslo. While both contemporaries and historians have described this European debate as being primarily a French-German argument (Fickers 2007), the interests and influence of the British television industry, the broadcasters and various political institutions including the Post Office, the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade have received less academic scrutiny. This article highlights the interferences of technical, industrial and political interests in

The Emergence of Television as a Conservative Media Revolution: Historicising a Process of Remediation in the Post-War Western European Mass Media Ensemble.

The Emergence of Television as a Conservative Media Revolution: Historicising a Process of Remediation in the Post-War Western European Mass Media Ensemble This article claims that the emergence of television in the 1950s must be interpreted as a conservative media revolution. It aims at revisiting some of the popular narratives about the emergence of television as a revolutionary moment in media history and questions the newness of television in the European mass media ensemble. Focusing on a set of privileged sites of negotiation where the tensions between the conservative and modernising agencies of the medium became most visible or explicit, the article emphasizes the ambiguous and contested nature of television as a new medium. Finally, the author pleas for an integral approach to media history that studies the intermedial relationships and interdependencies between television and other mass media.

Introduction Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures

After a series of false starts, a ‘Museum of Europe’ recently opened in Brussels, albeit as a temporary exhibition marking fifty years since the Treaties of Rome. The museum, which is still seeking a permanent home, is dedicated to building a sense of common European identity through a narrative of European history.1 Part of the museum’s proposed permanent exhibit is devoted to a series of active maps, the last of which, representing European history after 1945, is in a room fashioned to resemble a railway waiting room. Visitors can gaze up to a moving map, which, like the flipping departures board ‘in a large European railway station’, shows the ‘arrival’ of nations in Europe. ‘After the centuries of Unity through faith and the decades of Unity through the Enlightenment [represented in other maps], the Unity through the project evolves year for year, as shown by a digital counter.,2 While this narrative of Europe’s history is at best questionable, the metaphor of the train for the project of Europe is by no means inept.3 If anything, it is too apt: while it is meant to support an optimistic story of steady modernization, the associations between Europe and material networks, particularly trains, are not so easily channelled. Observers in this waiting room might just as easily think of other trains, and darker sides of European history and modernity: the trains that never arrived, such as the pre-war Berlin–Baghdad Railway or many sections of the German-Dutch Betuwe line project, never stopped, leaving certain towns and places off the map of ‘European’ progress, or, like the trains in the brutal machinery of the Holocaust, never returned.

Presenting the ‘window on the world’ to the world. Competing narratives of the presentation of television at the world's fairs in paris (1937) and new york (1939)

The progress made in the development of television gives us reason to believe that television will soon become of as great cultural importance as broadcasting is at present. Realizing that television is not merely a future business for a few manufacturers and businessmen but that television concerns everybody in Germany, the Deutsche Reichspost has taken up to the rule itself all matters concerning television. Being at that time encouraged by the impulses rising from the national socialistic idea, the development of television was encouraged with the aim to bring these valuable means of communication to as complete a state as possible and to place it as soon as it may be at the service of the whole nation.

Eventing Europe: Broadcasting and the Mediated Performances of Europe

Studying the role of broadcasting in the making of Europe can help to emphasize technology’s role as central actor in the story of Europe’s hidden integration, and — here’s the other side of the story — its fragmentation. This chapter aims to study the history of Europe by starting with the idea that broadcast communication was the most powerful and influential means for both national and transnational communication in the twentieth century. The central objective is to problematize Europe as a broadcasting space by describing and analysing European radio and television broadcasts originating from the International Broadcasting Union and the European Broadcasting Union and by questioning their specific contribution to the medial construction of European and international communication spaces in constantly changing political and cultural environments. In retracing both sound and audiovisual broadcast transmissions in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s we will link the development of different broadcast technologies (radio and television) to visions of European broadcasting spaces and their role in the continuous reinvention of Europe or re-imagination of European identities. Starting with an a priori geographical definition of Europe is futile given the need to embed the discursive construction of ‘Europe’ into changing material, legal and institutional maps. Here again, the very nature of broadcasting as a transnational or transborder phenomenon with its inevitable spillover effects challenges the classic ways of mapping Europe.

Roundtable: Perpectives on localizing the transnational in regional television history. Introduction.

The tendency to focus on television as a national medium has led to a relative neglect not only of the transnational flows of television across national borders, but also of the place of the regional and the local in histories of television. This section brings together four short articles by different authors all addressing the history of regional and local television within a range of national contexts in order to stimulate discussion and research into the place of the regional in transnational television history. Benoît Lafon examines the centralizing tendencies of the development of regional television in France, Edgar Lersch explores how German television was initially developed as a federal system, Juan Francisco Gutiérrez Lozano examines the uneven development of regional television in Spain, and Sarita Malik looks at the ways in which national broadcasters and, more recently, transnational channels, have attempted to address diasporic communities. Together these articles demonstrate the important role of the regional in the construction of a range of different national contexts, while also pointing to the instability and variety of the ‘regional’ within and across these contexts.

Call For Papers: Media History From The Margins

CSF Summer Seminar at Monte Verita, Switzerland, August 19-24, 2018 Co-organized by the Universities of Lausanne and Luxembourg, and USI Universita della Svizzera Italiana The summer seminar aims to rethink media history from the margins and to place at the center of our attention neglected, alternative, or censured media texts, uses, and technologies. By shifting the discussion from hegemonic actors, dominant institutions, and successful mass media to the fringes of media history, it pursues the double objective of rewriting media history into media histories , and of opening a space to rethink historiographical practices and methods. The writing of marginal histories is inseparable from a reflection on the modes of operation and politics of historical writing: bringing together established and emerging scholars, the seminar investigates what has been left over by hegemonic mass media and hegemonic historical narratives.

Editorial: Towards an Archaeology of Television

Over the last few years, ‘media archaeology’ has evolved from a marginal topic to an academic approach en vogue. Under its banner, conferences and publications bring together scholars from different disciplines who, revisiting the canon of media history and theory, emphasize the necessity for renewed historiographical narratives. Despite, or maybe because of profuse debates, media archaeology remains a loosely defined playground for researchers working at the intersection of history and theory. Far from offering uniform principles or constituting a homogeneous field, its prominent authors – Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinksi, Jussi Parrika and Erkki Huhtamo, to name just a few – distinguish themselves by their heterogeneity regarding methodology and theoretical focus.