Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 3 – the cultural invention of television
“Technology is cultural—not simply in that it exists in a cultural context, that technological artifacts are surrounded by culture, but is cultural through and through, in its design, its meaning, its use and thus its very form’.
• Hugh Mackay, Consumption and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 1997), p. 268.
“To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are...it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air.”
• Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 15.
“In modern industrial societies life is an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is gone, replaced by representations of things.”
• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 1.
“Since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village.”
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (
“In the post-war period there was a profound uncertainty about television’s place and function in the home… Discourses emerged to manage and contain this uncertainty, teaching people-- especially women-- how to accommodate television, both as a domestic object and an entertainment form….[These] discourses constructed TV as a focal point for domestic life…, a catalyst for renewed familial values.”
• Lynn Spigel, Make Room For TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
“TV tends to orient its programs towards its presumed audience, to try to include the audience’s own conceptions of themselves into the texture of its own programs. Hence broadcast TV gives central place to the series of preoccupations that accompany the nuclear family: to heterosexual romance, to the stability of marriage, to the notions of masculine careers and feminine domesticity, to the conception of the innocence of childhood, to the division of the world in public and private spheres…TV programs are addressed to an audience conceived in a very specific way: as…nuclear families in their domestic settings.”
• John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 115.
