Lynn Spigel

Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition

In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it. With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future. Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Pena Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

Media homes: Then and now

This article synthesizes Spigel’s research on the introduction of television and new technologies into the home. It looks at changing conceptions of ‘media households’ over the course of the last 50 years. The ‘home theater’ represents the media house of the 1950s; the ‘mobile home’ corresponds to the introduction of portable television in the 1960s; and the ‘smart home’ is the contemporary model of digital domesticity. The article considers how these changing models of home incorporate reigning middle class ideologies about family life for their respective times.

Housing Television: Architectures of the Archive

This essay explores the cultural logics of television archives by looking at the architectural designs of buildings that have housed TV collections since the early 1960s and by tracing this to the more recent viral architecture of Internet sites on which people post clips of old TV shows and programs. In particular, the essay examines how the television archive (often constructed through modernist and postmodernist architectural designs) has historically been a place that expresses fantasies about the future (both of the media and of American society more generally). At the same time, the essay explores the seemingly opposite impulse of nostalgia for vintage television (and the baby boom era more broadly) that structures archival collections both in physical archives such as the Paley Center and on online sites such as YouTube.

Domestic Technologies and the Modern Home

This article explores the history of electrical technologies for the home. It focuses on their symbolic dimensions in product design, marketing, and advertising, looking at how labour-saving and media technologies for the home have been promoted in relation to social ideals of modernity, progress, gender, and social life since the late nineteenth century. It also explores cultural anxieties and uses of domestic machines through to the present. Finally, the article focuses on the US context, where home technologies were first widely adapted in the early twentieth century, and it traces this through to the global digital home technologies of today.

TV and the Spaces of Everyday Life

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.

Roundtable. Writing (media) history in the age of audio-visual and digital media

Introductory Remarks The new media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries present particular challenges to historians. To what extent have historians taken these challenges on board, and what remains to be done? Where are the gaps in current scholarship, and what are the most promising avenues for future research? In order to stimulate discussion, the Journal of Modern European History invited four experts to respond to these questions: Michael Meyen (Munich), Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv/ Paris), Frank Bösch (Potsdam) and Lynn Spigel (Chicago). As this journal issue attempts to build bridges and facilitate dialogue between the fields of history, mass communication and media and television studies, to a certain extent, these distinguished scholars represent their academic fields. Lynn Spigel’s works are well known in the world of television Studies. Michael Meyen’s research is part of the historically focused strand of German communication studies, while historians Frank Bösch and Jérôme Bourdon have contributed to our understanding of how mass media shape long-term societal and political developments. The four statements offer intriguingly different perspectives on the future of media history, introducing us to the key concepts and writings in each field along the way. It is high time that historians debated the current standards in teaching and researching media history. As all four experts mention, historians are still held back by the dismal state of mass media archives in most countries. The output of audio-visual and digital media is still widely regarded as private commodity, and national or international authorities rarely feel responsible for collecting and organising media heritage. This situation cries out for a remedy – precisely because today, scholars in the field of contemporary history have come to reject the Rankean tradition of the primacy of research in state archives. In an attempt to supplement official documentation with sources generated by society rather than state, and by local, regional or global agencies instead of national ones, many historians increasingly turn to mass media sources. Frank Bösch, Jérôme Bourdon, Michael Meyen, Lynn Spigel Roundtable. Writing (Media) History in the Age of Audio-Visual and Digital media.

After: Warhol’s “Reveal”

In 1960 Andy Warhol Made the First in a Series of paintings he called Before and After. Based on an ad for nose jobs, and rendered on canvas with polymer paints, the painting portrays a woman’s face, pre- and post-surgery. On the left side of the painting the woman is pictured with a large hooked nose. On the right side, her post-surgery double has a small turned up one. Is the image a comment on Andy’s own nose, which he had already surgically improved by the time of the painting? Is it a critique of consumer beauty culture? Is it one of Warhol’s art jokes told for the benefit of those who might appreciate the ironic convergences between art and kitsch? Or is the painting just a copy of a pleasing graphic design?

Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs

Contents: Introduction PART I TV households The suburban home companion: Television and the neighborhood ideal in post-war America Portable TV: Studies in domestic space travel PART II White flight From domestic space to outer space: The 1960s fantastic family sit-com Outer space and inner cities: African American responses to NASA PART III Baby boom kids Seducing the innocent: Television and childhood in post-war America Innocence abroad: The geo-politics of childhood in post-war kid strips PART IV Living room to gallery High culture in low places: Television and modern art, 1950-1970 Barbies without Ken: Femininity, feminism and the art-culture system PART V Rewind and fast forward From the dark ages to the Golden Age: Womens memories and television re-runs Yesterdays future, tomorrows home

Television Studies for Mature Audiences

Ce fascicule fait le point sur 4 ouvrages ayant pour theme commun les etudes televisuelles, celles-ci ayant reconnu la valeur sociale, culturelle, politique, voire esthetique de la television. Ces ouvrages ont apporte chacun a leur tour une large contribution au developpement des etudes televisuelles