Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 10 – as seen on tv: televisual event
“Unlike film, television has always placed emphasis on the witnessing of events in the real world. When television began, all of its programmes were live, because the technology to record television signals had not been invented. The thrill of watching television in its early days, and still occasionally now, is to see and hear representations of events, people and places distant from the viewer. “
Jonathan Bignell, An Introduction to Television Studies (
“Live is usually defined by the simultaneity between the event and the transmission of that event. The emphasis is on the coincidence of time. A live telecast is said to happen in ‘real time’.”
• “ Paolo Carpignano, “Televisuality”
• More generally, you might like to check out “Channel 6: The Live”
“In the context of objective time vectors – that is the real time of the actual event – the live telecast is totally event-dependent. As much as you may want to know the outcome of the event or go back to a previous portion of the event, you cannot do either in a true and unadulterated live telecast.”
• Herbert Zettl, Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1999) p. 247.
“Network television never truly exploits its capacity for instantaneous and unmediated transmission.”
• Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, ed. E Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983), p. 16.
“The televising of public occasions must meet the challenge not only of representing the event, but of offering the viewer a functional equivalent of the festive experience. By superimposing its own performance on the performance as organized, by displaying its reactions to the reaction of spectators, by proposing to compensate viewers for the direct participation of which they are deprived, television becomes the primary performer in the enactment of public ceremonies. Such performances by television must not be considered mere ‘alterations’ or ‘additions’ to the original. Rather, they should be perceived as qualitative transformations of the very nature of public events.”
• Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 78.
“Television enacts a commitment to the event, not merely its reproduction.”
• Dayan and Katz, Media Events, p. 78.
“What we offer you, says television, is not just an unobstructed view of ‘there,’ but a wholly different experience that is available only to those who are not there….Instead of a pale equivalent of the ceremonial experience, it offers the uniquely televisual ‘experience of not being there’.”
• Dayan and Katz, Media Events, p. 100.
“Instead of a pale equivalent of the ceremonial experience, [the televisual event] offers the uniquely televisual ‘experience of not being there.’ As a matter of fact, says television, there may not be any ‘there’ at all.”
• Dayan and Katz, Media Events, pp. 100-01.
“Theories of the postmodern have made much of the absorption of events by representational technologies, and the ways in which representational technologies have themselves produced or determined events”
• Jonathan Bignell, Postmodern Media Culture (
“We used to be able to say about something, in order to unmask its rhetoric: 'It's only literature'; to reveal its artificiality: 'It's only theater!'; to denounce its mystification: 'It's only a movie!' But we can't say 'It's only TV!' Because there is no longer a universe of reference. Because illusion is dead or because it is total.”
• Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87.
See “Television: Hyperreality and Hybrid Selves” in Postmodern After-Images, ed. Peter and Will Brooker (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 147-71.
