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Television

Laurie Ouellette

Television is a medium in transition. The era when a few major networks beamed the same programs into everyone's homes has given way to hundreds of specialized cable channels, digital video recorders, programming “on demand,” new distribution and viewing platforms (DVDs, websites, mobile phones), and more opportunities for viewer interaction, from voting on talent competitions to posting clips on YouTube. In light of current developments, the history of television as a mass medium can seem increasingly distant, and perhaps irrelevant. The assumption of cultural progress encourages this view, evoking the past as a barometer against which dazzling improvements in consumer choice, interactivity, and gadgetry can be measured. While television has changed substantially, the tendency to celebrate the “new and improved” can be shortsighted and unhelpful. After all, our ability to historicize the present may be our greatest resource for thinking critically about the future. As the cultural theorist Raymond Williams observed some time ago, media technologies do not emerge or “evolve” spontaneously: they are shaped by the social formations in which they operate. Taking a cue from Williams, this chapter traces the genealogy of television in relation to broader societal conditions and changes. Rejecting the assumption that technological advances are inevitable or necessarily progressive, it situates the evolving “stages” of television as complex responses to the shifting demands and contradictions of advanced liberal capitalist democracies.

What follows is not a comprehensive history of television, but a mapping of events and ruptures in television's development as a cultural form (particularly in the United States). These are grouped into three conjunctures: mass television (1940s–1970s), niche television (1970s–1990s), and post television (2000s–present).¹ While there is a chronology to this map, the conjunctures are also densely layered, and elements of mass television coexist with the move toward increased specialization, flexibility, and innovation. What matters is the dynamic relationship between television, history, and society. At a moment of dizzying technological change, it is important to look beyond the shiny surface of the new, and consider how the cultural transformation of broadcasting intersects with the broader reconfiguration of the “social forms” (work, family, geography, market, government) in which we live. As Williams indicated, this will require a very different way of thinking about a medium in transition.

Mass Television

In his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams considered why television emerged in the West in the cultural form it did. While experiments in public reception and two-way transmission occurred, the model that prevailed in Europe and the United States coupled centralized production with wide distribution to individual homes. The “economic incentive” to develop broadcasting certainly favored such an arrangement, as profitability hinged on the mass manufacture and consumption of domestic receivers and, in the United States, the sale of advertising. On a broader scale, Williams saw broadcasting as the quintessential cultural technology of industrial capitalism itself. From the domestication of radio in the 1920s to the saturation of television in the 1950s, broadcasting was uniquely synchronized to social tendencies and tensions set into motion by the industrial factory system. These include migration, urbanization, the decline of extended kinship networks, the expanding distance between centers of public activity (such as government and paid work) and domestic life, and the rising importance of the autonomous and “self sufficient” single family home. While radio paved the way, television, more than any medium, complemented a paradoxical “new way of life” characterized by increased mobility on one hand and privatization and isolation on the other. Bringing the outside world into the home, television relieved some of the “contradictory pressures” of mobile privatization and structured everyday domestic life around its own temporal and spatial flows (Williams, 1992, p. 20). This was not a matter of television possessing essential attributes or creating “new social conditions,” which implies that technology drives historical change. For Williams, television's formative conjuncture was the cultural outcome of a host of new “needs and possibilities” generated by the emergence of industrial capitalism and its complex social forms (p. 13).

While the development of broadcasting on a broader global scale evidenced cultural tendencies identified by Williams (particularly the model of centralized distribution to private homes), there were crucial differences. In the United States, broadcasting was developed and operated by private corporations, with minimal government oversight. In Europe, on the other hand, broadcasting was developed by state agencies (such as post offices) and eventually managed by tax-funded, public broadcasting bureaucracies. Until the 1950s, commercial television channels were not allowed in the United Kingdom and many other European countries. National broadcasting systems funded through taxes and/or state resources also dominated in India, Latin America, and Asia until the proliferation of satellite technologies and the push toward market liberalization in the 1980s changed the television landscape on a global scale. Today, commercial operators who are generally multinational in scope compete with non-profit national broadcasting systems in most parts of the world except the United States, where all broadcasting (even the modest quasi-public channel, which accepts advertising) is arguably commercial. Each national context presents a unique set of social conditions to the study of television history. Some of these national differences involve alternatives to mobile privatization, from the practice of communal television viewing in rural India and the use of broadcasting during public rallies in Nazi Germany. However, central dissemination (whether by public bureaucracy or private corporation) and private reception took hold across geographical sites, and in no place were the broader social tendencies and contradictions associated with this particular and prevalent (but not inevitable) model of broadcasting more acute than in the United States.

The best historical scholarship on US television shares Williams's concern with broader societal contexts. Whereas Williams identified television's pivotal relationship to mobile privatization, other historians have specified how the medium's development coalesced with the sexual division of labor, the rise of suburbs, racial and class hierarchies, the expansion of consumer culture, and the tensions of a particular stage of liberal democracy. In so doing, they have shown how the basic characteristics of mass television – centralized distribution, ritualized domestic viewing, regional and national networks, programming addressed to a broad audience, and a “scarcity” of channels – emerged in relation to the aims and contradictions of postwar capitalist societies. In Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992), Lynn Spigel traces how the “social construction” of television as a mass medium coalesced with assumptions about women's work inside the home. Television's flow into the home punctuated everyday life in synchronicity with prevailing ideologies of gender and leisure. Daytime television was geared to women who were assumed to perform domestic chores such as cleaning, cooking, and household planning while they watched, followed by afternoon programming for children. While primetime was presented as the family hour, advertisements showed fathers relaxing in easy chairs, while mothers combined casual television viewing with the ongoing labor of homemaking and caretaking. These representations reinforced gender roles while also teaching women (as the presumed guardians of family life) how to incorporate television into its existing practices and routines. The gendering of bifurcated public and private spheres since the Victorian era also shaped television's cultural priorities, says Spigel. Promoted as an alternative to public recreations, television invited men as well as women to access the historically male-coded “outside world” from the comfort and privacy of one's home. Tellingly, anxieties about the medium's feminizing effects on people circulated in cartoons and other popular media depictions of emasculated male viewers. While the jokes reinforced sexist ideologies, television was a feminized medium – not because of any innate attributes or technological biases, but because its cultural form and address were so closely connected to feminized domestic spaces and routines. Designed to be watched for hours on end in a semi-“state of distraction,” all television was synchronized, in some sense, to the assumed habits and dispositions of multi-tasking housewives who were also the imagined consumers of the goods it advertised.

Television's mutually constitutive relationship to suburbanization and postwar consumer culture is further explored by several important studies. In “Sitcoms and Suburbs” (1989), Mary Beth Haralovich situates an enduring television genre – the family sitcom – within a broader assemblage of technologies for shaping and managing social life. In constituting white middle-class suburban families as the “normal” achievement to which everyone was supposed to aspire, television also provided a national cultural platform for showcasing the latest home appliances, furnishings, and consumer goods. Behind the scenes, television functioned as an informal testing ground for the emerging science of marketing and product design. Providing a “picture window” into the idealized consumer lifestyle of the suburban family, sitcoms supported aggressive campaigns by government and private industry to return women to domesticity after their recruitment to the workforce during World War II (interestingly, while fictional housewives decked out in pearls and heels learned to embrace their “natural” domestic role to various degrees, they were never shown actually doing housework). As Haralovich points out, television's cultural output complemented federal housing policies that encouraged white middle-class suburban settlement and, through “red-lining” policies, discriminated against African Americans. In this respect, television was more than the ritualized flow of information and entertainment into the home. Sitcoms simultaneously modeled and mobilized the objectives of a dispersed range of public and private institutions, including population migration, racial segregation, the formation of nuclear families, and a lifestyle predicated on the consumption of goods.

In “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs” (1986), George Lipsitz examines the collaborative efforts of US government officials and business leaders to increase consumer spending in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. Mass consumption was encouraged as a stimulus to economic growth, and as a way to temper the working-class radicalism and labor unrest of the 1930s and 1940s. Television's officially sanctioned positioning as privately operated, nationally networked, advertising-sponsored entertainment medium encouraged people to purchase the proliferating products of industrial capitalism, and seek gratification from consumption rather than political organizing or work. The informal “lessons” about the emergent consumer lifestyle that infused so much television programming of the 1950s complemented television's institutional relationship to the growth of consumer capitalism. Lipsitz analyzes the shortlived urban ethnic working-class comedies of the postwar period as an example of television's participation in the moralization of consumer values. In these sitcoms, characters marked by immigrant status, extended ethnic social networks, and the lived experience of scarcity and rationing learned to “let go of the past” and consume without anxiety (often on installment plans) as a sign of modernization and Americanization. While the programs negotiated residual understandings of increased spending as hedonistic and unwise, they ultimately nudged even the most unlikely and resistant individuals toward a new ethic of consumption. Through this implicitly white and middle-class ethic, these comedies also exemplify what Herman Gray calls television's constitution of an “imaginary middle.”

In Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (1995), Gray traces mass television's historical investment in racist ideologies and practices. This manifested in representation of Black people as inferior, dangerous, and subordinate “others,” and in the medium's address to a broad audience imagined as white, educated, and middle class. During the period when only three networks competed for the largest audience share possible and specialized cable channels didn't exist, racial difference was relegated to the margins of television programming or avoided altogether. A similar appeal to a “naturally” white imagined center characterized much consumer culture during the Fordist stage of capitalist production, named for the emphasis on the mass production of goods for an undifferentiated market. In the documentary film Color Adjustment (1992), Marlon Riggs shows how mass market logic and racism coalesced in the few representations of African Americans on broadcast television from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Even as the civil rights movement opened the door to cultural reform, “positive” images were typically conceived from a white middle-class perspective and designed to flatter the sensibilities of the imaginary middle. The proliferation of niche television (including programs and channels pitched to African Americans) since the making of Color Adjustment speaks to the segmentation of the mass market, the development of cable as a vehicle for niche programming, and the realization that diversity can be profitable. As will be discussed in more detail in the following section, the transition to a more flexible post-Fordist mode of production, and the “posting” of movements for social equality, have also brought a new set of struggles to racial representation.

The TV Problem

While mass television complemented the broader social dynamics of the postwar era, it was also problematized from the outset. The same attributes – centralized production, broad dissemination, mass consumption, ritualized domestic reception – that made television so “functional,” also magnified the contradictions of consumer capitalism and triggered anxieties about the medium's relationship to liberal democracy. As Graham Murdock (2005) points out, the term broadcasting originally stemmed from the agricultural practice of a farmer scattering seeds, “throwing them out in a broad arc, in an effort to spread them as widely and evenly as possible” (pp. 174–175). The farm metaphor took on increasingly negative connotations as television became closely associated not only with wide distribution, but with the presumed attributes (low taste, homogeneity, passivity, unruliness) of so-called masses as a social grouping. As Williams argued, television's problematic affiliation with mass culture and the mass audience was steeped in assumptions about the working-class “mob,” despite the fact that it (unlike cinema and other urban recreations) did not assemble a physical massing of people. By bringing a ritualized flow of entertainment into the home and fostering privatized domesticity and consumption, television discouraged the coming together of populations in public. Nonetheless, the TV Problem, as it was known in the United States, characterized television as a serious threat to cultural standards as well as “enlightened” citizenship. The terms of this problematization can be traced to the “irresolvable” contradictions that Michele Hilmes observes at the heart of US broadcasting. In Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922–1952 (1997), Hilmes points out that the private corporations that controlled radio were held accountable to an ethic of public service interpreted as the transmission of legitimated knowledge and culture. On the other hand, broadcasting was a business that profited from the sale of advertising, and therefore the ritualized listening of as many potential consumers as possible. When popular entertainment became the leading conveyor for the movement of merchandise, broadcasting became the target of intellectual contempt, as well as grave concerns about its poisonous impact on democracy. When television emerged at the center of postwar culture and society, the residual tension between high expectations of public service and the commercial drive to manufacture popularity resurfaced with a vengeance.

The consumer boom was partly responsible for this escalating tension, to the extent that it freed up intellectuals (including critics, academics, policy advisors, and professional thinkers) to ponder new pressing problems that coalesced around the quality and homogenizing effects of mass culture. In “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass Consumption Society” (1989), Jackson Lears proposes that the growth of public universities and the expansion of the white-collar professional middle class, composed of college-educated people who increasingly worked with knowledge instead of “making things,” made it easier to displace “questions of power” onto cultural symptoms. Intellectuals of various political stripes took the level of mass culture as demonstrable proof that the upwardly mobile people needed (and perhaps secretly wanted) the “guidance of a cultural elite.” Vance Packard summed up this sentiment in his journalistic account of The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America (1959). “In modern America, where especially at the consuming level the masses have to a large extent become the dictators of taste, we have to endure the horrors of our roadside architecture and billboards; our endless TV gun-slinging; our raw, unkempt, blatantly commercialized cities; our mass merchandising of pornographic magazines; our faceless suburban slums-to-be; our ever-maudlin soap operas,” Packard wrote. “Voices have been crying out for the restoration of some kind of elite that can set standards and make them stick” (pp. 327–328).

Similar thinking prompted the 1960 President's Commission on National Goals to declare that US mass culture was in a state of emergency. The report included a scathing assessment of “The Quality of American Culture” by August Heckscher, the president of the 20th Century Fund, a prominent New York City philanthropy. Heckscher chided the media for abandoning their public interest obligations by pandering to an “audience eager for fourth-rate material” (1960, p. 128). He further worried that rising postwar affluence had not spawned higher levels of cultural sophistication in the mass public. On the contrary, US citizens had become a “great mass prepared to listen long hours to the worst of TV or radio.” Paradoxically, if the hoi polloi were setting the sights for broadcasting, the mass market was simultaneously “virtually abolishing” class distinctions, making the United States a little too close to communism for this Cold War critic (p. 131). Indeed, the TV Problem, as Michael Curtin argues in Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (1995), emerged just as social scientists and cultural critics were embracing the United States' commitment to liberal pluralism as the “distinguishing difference between free societies and totalitarian ones.” Mass culture – especially primetime television – was not easy to reconcile with this theory. Yet, burgeoning anxieties about the medium's homogeneity had nothing to do with television's presentation of prosperous white middle-class suburban families as the national norm, to the exclusion of everyone else. Tellingly, Heckscher's (1960) dismay at seeing everyone offered the “same culture” on their television sets was rivaled only by his alarm that “women at different levels of income dress indistinguishably” and that the “most luxurious housing units boast the same dish washing machine available in almost any worker's home” (p. 131). This defensive response spoke to a perceived blurring of class differences and, more broadly, to the social authority they bestowed on “tasteful” people like well-educated foundation presidents.

To be sure, some institutions tried to harness television as an instrument for enlightening the public, raising the level of taste, and creating the “right kind of citizens.” Championed by social scientists, universities, and private foundations, a smattering of (deeply marginalized) educational radio and television stations had emphasized edification since the 1920s. Higher profile initiatives were also pursued. In The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (2010), Anna McCarthy traces some of the earliest “public interest” objectives carried out by the major broadcast networks in partnership with sponsors and major philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation. Their approach to the public interest as a matter of corporate social responsibility exemplifies the broader regulatory framework in which broadcasting developed. In Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (1996), Thomas Streeter shows how “corporate liberalism,” a system of governing in which state intervention in social life is downplayed and corporations are rationalized as the neutral arbiters of diverse interests, underscores broadcast policy, particularly in the United States. In Europe, most nations created centralized, tax-funded, non-profit public broadcasting bureaucracies to operate as mass cultural technologies of education and citizenship. The United States, on the other hand, equated “freedom” so closely with the market that any state involvement in the operation of broadcasting (except to orchestrate private control and make suggestions) was suspect. Commercial broadcasters alone were licensed to handle the day-to-day operations of serving the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” Both the European and the US system presumed the near-universal distribution of signals to individual homes, and both were top down to the extent that regulatory policies and programming decisions were made for the people, not by them. The difference was that broadcasting in the United States was expected to fulfill the needs of postwar liberal democracy, while also turning a profit. When it became clear that these priorities could not be reconciled, the impetus for reform gained urgency.

Chronicling this impetus in Viewers Like You? How Public Television Failed the People (Ouellette, 2002), I show how intensifying anxieties about mass culture in the United States shaped blueprints for “better” television. In a famous 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Newton Minow called television a “vast wasteland,” coining the instrumental metaphor for the medium's reform. The speech spoke to the widening social and cultural contradictions of postwar capitalism but did not address their messy origins. For example, Minow did not question private ownership, treating television's “screaming, cajoling and offending” ads less as structural determinants than as cultural offenses. His critique of “assembly line entertainment” geared to a mass audience spoke to television's redundancy and lack of innovation – but it also evoked critical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) assertion that the ranking of culture is always related to the ranking of people in capitalist democracies. When Minow (1961) told broadcasters they must present a “wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives,” he evoked pluralist ideals, but took for granted that diversity meant upgraded programs imbued with legitimacy, such as live plays and panel discussions. Minow overlooked television's failure to serve every minority except one: (implicitly) white college-educated people with respectable tastes. Because the mass audience was characterized as unsophisticated and hedonistic compared to professional middle-class “opinion leaders,” the TV Problem took on political connotations as well, as Edward Murrow, host of the acclaimed (but cancelled) news program See it Now, implied when he claimed that the majority desire for mass amusement jeopardized “the virtue of the republic if not the security of Western democracy” (cited in Baughman, 1985, p. 30). As James Baughman (1985) has shown, anxieties about the decline of television journalism signaled a widening “crack” in the liberal corporate faith that broadcasters could be free marketeers and serve the public interest as interpreted by reformers. Television and its audience were implicated in what Toby Miller (1993) calls the conflicting demands of the consumer economy (selfishness, pleasure, indulgence) and the political order (ethics, discipline, civic duty). This logic, in turn, further alienated the “people” from the presumed requirements of democracy. As one reformer put it:

As the TV Problem escalated, philanthropies flush with the surplus of industrial capitalism – especially the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, which were funded by the estates of moguls Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie – mobilized for an alternative program service, providing the stimulus and seed money for what eventually became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The interventionist approach to social welfare that emerged with the Great Society programs of the 1960s also made it possible to rethink television as a technology of public education and citizenship formation more broadly. Federal investment in public education, health, and welfare rose dramatically during the 1960s in response to the demands of the emerging information economy, the Cold War, the “discovery” of poverty, civil rights organizing, and percolating social unrest. Subsidies to the arts expanded as well, reflecting a national commitment to a New Frontier of aesthetic and cultural values deemed unachievable through existing market mechanisms. The Great Society era's concern with raising the quality of life in the United States, equalizing educational opportunities, and improving people's capacities also placed a new premium on broadcasting as an instrument for maximizing human capital and instilling higher standards of excellence. Commercial television's refusal – or inability – to allocate resources to these goals prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson and eventually the US Congress to support the idea of a non-commercial public broadcasting system (Ouellette, 2002). With a broader national mission than “educational” television, US public television would disseminate what Graham Murdock calls “cultural resources for citizenship” – informal education, civic training, cultural enlightenment, opportunities for self-improvement – in tandem with the expanding social and educational services provided by the US government during the Great Society period (Murdock, 2005, p. 186).

Slotted as the “oasis” of the wasteland, its creators expected PBS to pursue a different mission entirely. Since the commercial networks were criticized for pandering to mass appeal, PBS was called upon to bring “excellence and diversity” to the air-waves, while also recasting the worrisome mass audience as a fragmented array of specialized interest and taste groups. PBS was regarded as a natural home for well-educated populations with advanced cultural tastes and opinion-leading capacities – the “minorities” deemed least served by the mass approach to television operating across commercial channels. Predating the arrival of cable television, it developed as the original niche channel, a home for “quality” television with an educational twist, synchronized to professional upscale lifestyle clusters. Yet, because PBS relied in part on tax funding, it was also expected to uplift disadvantaged populations and facilitate more enlightening and purposeful uses of television among all US citizens. Expected to protect a small slice of television from the ravages of commercial mass culture, provide programming for sophisticated viewers, and improve the public as a whole, PBS operated as a distinguished and redemptive – but deeply marginalized – niche channel rather than a major broadcaster such as the BBC and other European broadcasters. (Likewise, the problematization of mass television worked differently in the United Kingdom. Criticisms focused on the paternal cultural authority of the BBC, and pleas for diversity often hinged on the development of commercial channels offering popular alternatives, including some US imports, to what the national public broadcaster offered.)

While the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act signaled a reinterpretation of the state's role as financial partner in the mobilization of television as a social and cultural force, a mixed system of funding sources – including Congressional appropriations, viewer donations, philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship – tempered the “socialistic” tendencies ascribed to European public broadcasting and authorized PBS's pioneering role in bringing upscale niche marketing to television. To avoid the centralized power ascribed to state-operated broadcasting as well as the US broadcast corporations, public television itself was also fragmented to the greatest degree possible, composed of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, hundreds of stations, and PBS operating as a new national program service rather than a traditional broadcast network. Because PBS was developed as a corrective to commercial television and its imagined audience, its relationship to the people it claims to represent always has been contradictory. On one hand, PBS introduced programming not tied to the imperatives of advertising, a more diversified system of cultural production (with content suppliers outside the entrenched Hollywood system), and early experiments in public outreach and interactivity (from the distribution of educational resources to the staging of mail-in votes on political debates). Yet, PBS has also been positioned outside popularity, with the exception of its children's programs, culturally tied to “influential” viewers' disproportionately high incomes and education levels. Indeed, because of this association, PBS has been vulnerable to campaigns to downscale the “welfare program for the rich” that began almost immediately, with politically motivated Republicans at the helm. Since the 1990s, the rationales for public television have lost import across partisan lines. As the number of broadcast and cable channels has proliferated, the notion that PBS requires public subsidy to correct market deficiencies has been difficult to sustain, and the US government's retreat from the 1960s has thrown the Great Society's uplifting aspirations for PBS into flux as well.

Niche Television

Diagnoses of the TV Problem shared an aversion to mass culture rooted in the contradictions of postwar capitalism. Broadcasters' quest to maximize profits was sanctioned by free enterprise – yet spawned cultural products that mocked the nation's claim to pluralism and ignored the taste and authority of the white, educated, male bourgeoisie. Commercial television was perfectly in sync with the “fun morality” noted by sociologists of the day, and thus helped circulate the values (enjoy! indulge! spend!) of the consumer economy. Yet, its perceived association with hedonism, passivity, and mental escape also clashed with ideals of enlightened citizenship, the competitive image of a world superpower, and the ethic of hard work and self-improvement long associated with the American Dream. While commercial television was encouraged and valued as the engine of the consumer economy, its cultural output was increasingly deemed at odds with the core liberal attributes – individualism, pluralism, self-governance, robust civil society – ascribed to liberal democracy in the West. Television's standardization, homogeneity, and association with a mass audience also triggered anxieties rooted in Cold War ideology, despite the medium's presumed centrality to the privacy and “freedom” of the imagined white middle class.

In the United States, the solution – public broadcasting – was marginalized and unable to challenge commercial network hegemony. However, PBS anticipated the rise of more and more commercial niche channels geared to specialized audiences. By the early 1970s, the same broadcast networks that once defended the “vast wasteland” began counting more than just eyeballs, partly to appease commercial sponsors. At a time when young, urban, upscale professionals were assumed to be dropping out of a mass audience coded as elderly, lower-income, unsophisticated, and rural, the quest for more precise knowledge about viewer demographics emerged. Broadcast television's experiments in “quality” and “relevance” were closely connected to its attempt to attract the “right” consumers sought by advertisers. As Jane Feuer points out in MTM: Quality Television (1985), the emphasis on improving commercial television's quality (exemplified by the Mary Tyler Moore show and its spin offs) brought reflexivity, character development, and a nod to the feminist movement of the 1970s into the sitcom format, while Norman Lear's production company dealt more “realistically” with racism, poverty, and the women's movement in a number of socially relevant comedies including All in the Family, Good Times, and Maude. Both strands of programming enabled network television to reach the youthful “class” audience sought by advertisers, as well as the broad viewership historically associated with television. By the end of the decade, however, commercial cable and satellite technologies were being positioned to reorganize television and “break up” (Turow, 1998) the mass audience much more decisively.

Why did this break up occur when it did? Why were choice and diversity characterized as cable television's “natural” properties, when for years the technology had been used to bring broadcast signals to remote areas? Why were satellites adopted for domestic as well as international television transmission and reception? Following Williams, we might characterize a second conjuncture – niche television – as a cultural response to tensions and transformations in the capitalist societies of the West. These include the segmentation of the mass market, increased individualization, the reconfiguration of women's work, the marketization of social life, the commodification of identity-based movements, and the rising currency of consumer and lifestyle based forms of citizenship. Globalization, deregulation, and the expanding markets/territories of Western media conglomerates are crucial factors as well. Television's relationship to these intersecting and sometimes contradictory developments is brought into focus by a number of important historical studies.

In A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003), Lizabeth Cohen situates the impetus for narrowcasting within the expansion of postwar consumer capitalism. The quest for profit maximization led to a search for new markets that included other nations as well as untapped populations and lifestyle clusters within the United States. Just as consumer goods were customized for increasingly differentiated markets, so too was television. Within a context of capitalist expansion and growth, the masses were reconceived as an infinite array of consumer “niches” that could be known through more and more refined market research. Marginalized groups (including African Americans) were more fully embraced as distinct markets and emergent social identities (such as the independent woman) made possible by the social movements of the era were sold back to consumers as specialized consumer choices. As information, culture, and brands became the leading “immaterial” commodities produced by capitalism in the West, what sociologists call individualization, or the further decline of traditional social networks and the rising imperative to “choose” and express one's own lifestyle and social identity, intensified. Not surprisingly, as Lynn Spigel demonstrates in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (2001), portable television technology also appeared, promising each family member the “freedom” to customize his or her own viewing rather than watching together in the family circle.

With the fragmentation of consumer culture in general, proliferating brands of television became another resource for differentiating and defining identity and lifestyle. At this stage, the problems of quality and diversity that had plagued US broadcasting were deemed “solved” through a deregulated media economy. The expansion of the broadcast and cable market was encouraged as a means to viewing flexibility and increased consumer choice. While many alternative organizations (including community and countercultural activists) endorsed the development of cable, the logic of reform through increased competition and choice anticipated the Federal Communications Commission's wholesale embrace of free market policies in the 1980s under the leadership of Ronald Reagan appointee Mark Fowler, who famously rejected any notion of television as a public cultural resource and approached the medium as a business like any other – a “toaster with pictures.” As James Hay and I point out in our analysis of stages of media regulation in the United States (Ouellette & Hay, 2008), this logic disrupted the fraught legacy of the mass audience by enabling network and cable brands to become the basis for viewers' investment in more narrow forms of association and membership. At the same time, ideals of liberal education and uplift through unprofitable public interest broadcasting gave way to the profitable empowerment of collectivities conceptualized as taste and lifestyle clusters and to shaping citizens through these consumer technologies. The identity politics of the 1960s, which had partly informed Great Society social welfare programs, became a basis for liberalizing broadcasting through private cable and satellite technologies and for marketing and commodifying identity as a matter of personal lifestyle. The proliferation of new channels also encouraged more refined technologies of consumer choice and self-fashioning, such as the remote control, the time-shifting VCR, and the DVR, all of which made television compatible with lived experiences of individualization and niche-based consumer culture.

While the lifestyle clusters embraced by cable are seemingly infinite – there are now channels for pet owners, military buffs, and even environmentally conscious individuals – niche marketing is governed by the logic of profitability, and this ensures that only those consumer groups with money to spend will be recognized. As John McMurria (2007) argues, cable television was initially pitched as a means of class identification and cultural status. Many of the earliest cable channels for news aficionados, history buffs, the arts, and other culturally legitimated leisure pursuits addressed the professional middle-class “minorities” previously claimed by public broadcasting. As Andrew Goodwin demonstrates in Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (1992), the mass audience was also fragmented from the outset on the basis of age. Teenagers were encouraged to see MTV as an integral aspect of their unique identities and lifestyle, and to “fight” for their right to consume differently under the marketing slogan “I Want My MTV.” Now a globally successful cultural brand, MTV has been particularly adept at translating Western youth culture into a locally customized cultural resource for lifestyle and identity formation across virtually all parts of the world. Exemplifying the expanded mobility facilitated by the globalization of capitalism, MTV has become a focal point for scholarly debates over the refinement of cultural imperialism and the possibilities of increasingly “glocal” and hybrid identifications and memberships.

Cable channels aimed at women and people of color have also developed, bringing new promises – and tensions – to the historically charged politics of representation. In “Once in a Lifetime: Constructing ‘The Working Woman’ through Cable Narrowcasting” (1994–1995), Jackie Byars and Eileen Meehan analyze the Lifetime Cable network, launched in 1984 as the first cable channel marketed explicitly to women. Lifetime offered female viewers an opportunity to identify as a distinct cultural collectivity beyond the gendered terrain of daytime soap operas and homemaking programs. The channel addressed women as empowered consumers worthy of their own channel, and in so doing reflected the mainstreaming of liberal feminist discourse. By the 1980s, women had secured some access to the professions, and all women were increasingly expected to be breadwinners for families while also performing a “second shift” of domestic labor at home. In a changing social context, working women were targeted by advertisers not only as consumers of household items but of more expensive goods such as automobiles as well. Lifetime presented the first venue for reaching those upscale, “independent” female television viewers who could afford a cable subscription. The channel built its brand identity around original movies that combined melodrama with socially conscious women's issues as a way of signaling relevance to this audience. Yet, according to Byars and Meehan, Lifetime equated female empowerment with consumption (including the consumption of Lifetime) and perpetuated ideologies of female subordination to men, and in this sense did more to commercialize and undermine feminism than expand its reach. As Amanda Lotz points out in Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (2006), more recent cable channels aimed specifically at women – including Oxygen, WE, and the Own network, headed by Oprah Winfrey – constitute slightly different “brands” of female television, but all maintain the implicitly white, middle-class orientation prioritized by Lifetime, and all equate female empowerment with the consumption of a niche brand. Given cable's historical connection to the expansion of consumer capitalism, these limitations are not surprising.

Baretta Smith-Shomade's study Pimpin Ain't Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (2008) is a sobering case study of how cable television conceives and markets racial difference within a commercial framework. Focusing on Black Entertainment Television (BET), one of the few cable channels explicitly geared to people of color, Smith-Shomade shows how black entrepreneurs promised to combat network television's racism and whitewashing. Drawing from the earlier history of Black-owned businesses, executives pitched BET as a means of recognition and empowerment, but relied on limited – and highly stereotypical – constructions of Black identity and culture to attract young audiences. Within the advanced capitalist logic of branding, “blackness” is neither natural nor empowering, she contends. Rather, racial authenticity is commodified and sold back to television viewers as a cultural product to be “consumed” rather than engaged with politically. Other scholars have shown how the “posting” of civil rights activism and legislation has contributed to this process of racial commodification across proliferating cable channels. In Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), Sarah Banet-Weiser shows how racial difference stripped of any historical or ethnic specificity is incorporated into children's television to mark cable networks such as Nickelodeon as multicultural and cool. Race in this context becomes little more than an identity or “flavor” to be consumed like any other mass customized product. Because Nickelodeon claims to “empower” children (similar to MTV) by constituting a consumer space just for them, pan-ethnic representation is also articulated to new ways of thinking about democracy and citizenship. Consumer citizenship, rather than traditional forms of electoral politics or political organizing, is heralded as the means of inclusion and participation in civic life, for children and other underrepresented groups. As Banet-Weiser shows, this shift speaks to the intensified marketization of social life in advanced capitalist societies, and plays out on television as the equation of brand membership with meaningful forms of representation and “rights.”

My own study with James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Ouellette & Hay, 2008), focuses on television's relationship to the broader “reinvention” of government in the 1980s and beyond. On one hand, broadcasting was deregulated under the reasoning that the free market is the best way to ensure something called the public interest. Deregulation paved the way for the conglomeration of broadcast and cable networks (many of which are owned by the same parent companies), and it also ushered in a different way of thinking about what television can and should contribute to advanced liberal (or neoliberal) democracy. We show how the logic of consumer empowerment made possible by the expansion of cable overlapped with intensified requirements of self-actualization and self-help as an intensifying requirement of “good” citizenship, as evidenced by the proliferation of broadcast and cable channels offering lifestyle instruction on cooking, financial management, parenting, health and fitness, and similar topics. This development inserts television into the increased marketization of the social, and makes brands of television more integral to a definition of citizenship based more on personal responsibility and self-enterprise than on collective “entitlements” or universal connections to a national welfare state. The reform of Great Society programs and the commercialization of public services is the backdrop against which reality entertainment proliferated on television. While not associated with traditional news or “boring” public interest genres, reality entertainment is often marketed as a civic good, to the extent that it provides “lessons” on proper self-care and strategic self-management in a competitive and privatized social world. Such fare is also attractive to corporate and non-profit “sponsors” seeking to insert themselves into television's articulations of citizenship, volunteerism, and the public good. Significantly, “reality” experiments appear on broadcast channels as well as cable ventures, where they are specifically adapted to specialized demographics and lifestyle clusters.

Mass and niche television are useful to the contemporary reinvention of government. Serialization, we contend, is what makes television suitable to operate as part of a daily regimen of self-actualization, while the lifestyle clustering associated with cable networks allowed television to become a technology for self-actualization (i.e., for being young, or a woman, or Black). The dramatic increase of makeover television programs that seek to transform the unattractive, the unemployed, the unhealthy, the unsuccessful, and the unruly into self-actualizing and self-regulating citizens speaks to the convergence of television watching, lifestyle clustering, and self-help in the context of neoliberalism. Likewise, the convergence of television with other media, particularly digital technologies such as the web, builds on trends of individualization and self-responsibilization by inserting television into an endless loop of consumer resources for work on the self (Ouellette & Hay, 2008). The point is that television has become less relevant to earlier public interest ideals and more integral to the requirements of managing and improving one's life through a set of cultural resources that can be applied to particular lifestyle problems. Tellingly, we have witnessed a surge of cable networks entirely devoted to popular lifestyle instruction, including the Home and Garden Network, Planet Green, Food Channel, Fit TV, the Learning Channel, and the Do-it-Yourself Network, and cable networks not specifically devoted to lifestyle instruction have also increasingly incorporated “how-to” and instructional elements into their schedules. The call for citizens as well as governments to be more entrepreneurial inflects these intersecting developments with new assumptions about television's relationship to citizenship and democracy.

It is worth noting the uncertainty of public broadcasting in the wake of niche television and new technologies. Across Western capitalist democracies, Georgina Born explains in “Digitising Democracy” (2006, p. 102), the “conditions – technological, economic, political, social and cultural” that once fostered public broadcasting have undergone “such a radical transformation that the concept and practice [...] demand to be reconceived.” Born cites the decline of national cultures, increasing individualization, and the flux introduced by digitalization and public sector reform initiatives as factors in the ongoing transformation of European public broadcasting. Interestingly, many European public broadcasters have expanded the definition of public service to include popular reality entertainment focused on lifestyle instruction and makeover formats circulate globally. While the pressures on public broadcasting are also evident in the United States, the situation facing PBS is more complex vis-à-vis the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other national systems. As we have seen, public television arrived late in the United States, as a corrective but structurally marginalized supplement to the commercial model of broadcasting dominant since the 1920s. Created during the expansion of social welfare programs in the 1960s to fill cultural gaps in an over-the-air broadcast schedule dominated by ABC, CBS, and NBC, it has lost much of its footing as the television marketplace has expanded and the broader sociopolitical climate of the United States has changed. The old PBS provided a bridge between the commercial network era of broadcasting and the triumphant declaration of choice, freedom, and empowerment surrounding both the post-television landscape and the concomitant transition to a post-welfare society. Not surprisingly, both the BBC and PBS are now struggling to reinvent themselves as a business, a brand and a resource for a new epoch of mass customization and personal responsibility.

Post-Television?

In The Television Will be Revolutionized (2007), Amanda Lotz argues that we are moving into a post-network era, in which the very foundations of television are being transformed by a more flexible mode of production, a changing business model, the decline of the traditional networks, the proliferation of new media technologies, and the further fragmentation of the audience. The surge of reality television, which relies on non-unionized production crews and the unpaid labor of ordinary people, integrates advertising into content, can be produced on short notice, and encourages viewer participation via the web and mobile phones, is a high-profile example of the industrial trends she documents. Of course, as Lotz acknowledges, elements of mass television – including its ritualistic flow into the home – remain fully in place for many people, including those who cannot afford broadband access or cable subscriptions. Moreover, as John Caldwell demonstrates in Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (2008), the corporate conglomerates that own the major broadcast networks have developed an arsenal of strategies for ensuring the centrality of television – and television networks – in a context of high anxiety triggered by industrial and technological change. In addition to ratings stunts and intensified flow techniques designed to discourage channel switching, these moves include repurposing content across corporate holdings (such as a broadcast network and cable stations), re-branding campaigns, and promotional activities to educate viewers and affiliates about the “benefits of national network affiliation.”

However much mass television adapts to a changing industrial and technological landscape, the broader logics that have supported narrowcasting have intensified in recent decades. Specialized niche channels aimed at lifestyle clusters continue to proliferate, signaling advancements in consumer choice. What's more, the emergence of digital viewing platforms such as iTunes and Hulu are presented as flexible and personalized alternatives to the flow established by broadcasters, intensifying the “freedom” and self-actualization associated with VCRs and portable television sets in earlier years. Television has also become integrated into a burgeoning “convergence culture” that encompasses digital games, mobile phones, the web, and film. Many television programs now have offshoots in other old and new media, and interactivity and a general intensity of engagement are the norm for “users” of cross-platform media experiences. Whether the majority of television viewers have adopted these practices is debatable. Still, scholars recognize that change is underway and are scrambling to bring scholarship up to speed, as evidenced by the appearance of anthologies like Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Spigel & Olsson, 2004) and Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era (Turner & Tay, 2009).

While studies of what appears to be the medium's third conjuncture – post television – are incomplete, the tendency so far has been to focus rather narrowly on technological and industrial change. Raymond Williams once again provides a model for expanding our questions and recognizing the contexts in which the evolution of something called “television” operates.

If mass broadcasting has given way to a more personalized “anywhere, anytime” television experience, this has as much (or more) to do with changing societal conditions as technical mastery. There are models of the contextual approach I am advocating: In Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2003), Mark Andrejevic situates the transformation of television within broader economic developments. He situates the “promise” of viewer interactivity within the ongoing shift from industrial capitalism to a post-Fordist economy that equates freedom with the ability to “customize” the products of our labor. Andrejevic suggests that the invitation to interact with television using our cell phones and computers is connected to the dispersion and “offloading” of marketing in the new economy. By filling out a survey or joining a forum, we are doing the work of the companies who tabulate information about our preferences and sell them back to us as unique consumer choices. In Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism and Television in a Neoliberal Age (2006), Toby Miller situates the politics of contemporary television within social and political developments, including the decline of industrial jobs, increased militarization, and US foreign policy. For Miller, technological change is less important than television's enduring relationship to uneven power dynamics, and for this reason he pays little attention to new gizmos like cell phones and tie-in websites. Yet, we could extend his critique to the phenomenon of synergistic media industries partnering with military and corporate sponsors and enlisting consumer involvement in governmental agendas via synergistic broadcast and digital technologies, from websites to computer games.

We need more scholarship that extends Williams's crucial insights about technology to our current social and technological formations. How does the apparent “posting” of television speak to the politics of gender and leisure, the marketing of difference, the acceleration of branding, or the operationalization of what currently counts as democracy and citizenship? What contradictory capitalist developments, akin to the mobile privatization identified by Williams, might be served or soothed by convergence culture? How is technology shaping and helping to shape the contemporary social forms in which we live? Television scholars need to expand our engagement with the new, and address these issues.

NOTE

1 My argument here is indebted to numerous scholars who have identified roughly similar periodications. In Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012), Sarah Banet-Weiser characterizes the shift from mass, to niche, to digital media and culture as the historical context for the transformation of advertising and the emergence of brand culture in neoliberal times. In her introduction to Beyond Primetime: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (2009), Amanda Lotz locates a similar trajectory within the US television industry, using the terminology “network era,” “multi-channel transition,” and “post-television” to describe historical shifts in the industrial, marketing, and programmatic dimensions of television culture. In Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Ouellette & Hay, 2008), James Hay and I map this history onto three regulatory periods and the citizenship ideals they emphasize, showing how mass television, niche television, and interactive television intersect with changing political rationalities and strategies of governing.

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