Reference
- Television: Credo ReferenceTelevision is an electronic device by which images and sounds are transmitted to receivers that project the image onto a screen and reproduce the sound. The first television system was demonstrated in 1926 in England, but televisions were not common households items in the United States until the 1950s.
Streaming Media
- Television: Window To The WorldAn exploration of the world's most popular entertainment, from the boy genius who invented it to the RCA "General" who made it a reality.
- Radio and TelevisionThe sudden emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s upended existing business arrangements and led to the competition between the broadcast networks that are still with us today. Learn about the technology of radio and television, the challenges broadcasters faced, the origin of radio commercials, and the cultural effects of these new communications technologies.
Online Resources
- Stormy weather: the pre-and post-history of televisionThis article examines Ingmar Bergman's first (and only) television adaptations of dramatist August Strindberg: The Storm (1960) and A Dream Play (1963). Both were broadcast live and favorably received by contemporary critics. A recurrent reaction was that television finally "did justice" to these plays from the early 20th century; implying, as did Raymond Williams in his 1974 book on television, that Strindberg's later drama somehow "anticipated" television. This claim is explored in relation to various thematic and formal expressions of temporality in both plays (motifs of enclosed spaces, telephones, clouds, and faces and the dialectics of progress and repetition) and the specificities of television (the "management of liveness," "mobile privatization," monitoring, etc.). The type of historicity involved in the claim that art may anticipate oncoming media technology is related to Walter Benjamin's notion of pre-and post-history.
- “Now even Television is Promoting Health?” On the Intertwined History of Television and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in the German Democratic Republic, 1950s–1970sThis paper argues that the historical trajectories of television and cardiovascular disease prevention in the German Democratic Republic are interlocking. These diseases were largely understood as caused by an unhealthy modern lifestyle. Healthcare experts were convinced that health education was an effective strategy to persuade the population to follow a healthy lifestyle. With its rise as a new mass medium, health educators increasingly relied on television as a means to put their message across. Yet the new medium itself was a target of health education measures as excessive TV consumption was considered a potential threat to cardiovascular health. This article deals with the history of health-related problematizations of TV consumption. In the 1950s and early 1960s, during an animated discourse on the strain of a modern lifestyle television was considered a potential source of overstimulation of the nervous system. As this article argues, this interpretation was undermined by a modified concept of TV consumption within the discourse of empirical audience research.
Perspectives
That's the Way It Is
When critics decry the current state of our public discourse, one reliably easy target is television news. It's too dumbed-down, they say; it's no longer news but entertainment, celebrity-obsessed and vapid. The critics may be right. But, as Charles L. Ponce de Leon explains in That's the Way It Is, TV news has always walked a fine line between hard news and fluff. The familiar story of decline fails to acknowledge real changes in the media and Americans' news-consuming habits, while also harking back to a golden age that, on closer examination, is revealed to be not so golden after all. Ponce de Leon traces the entire history of televised news, from the household names of the late 1940s and early '50s, like Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, through the rise of cable, the political power of Fox News, and the satirical punch of Colbert and Stewart. He shows us an industry forever in transition, where newsmagazines and celebrity profiles vie with political news and serious investigations. The need for ratings success--and the lighter, human interest stories that can help bring it--Ponce de Leon makes clear, has always sat uneasily alongside a real desire to report hard news. Highlighting the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of TV news, and telling a story rich in familiar figures and fascinating anecdotes, That's the Way It Is will be the definitive account of how television has showed us our history as it happens.
The History of Television, 1942-2000
Albert Abramson published (with McFarland) in 1987 a landmark volume titled The History of Television, 1880-1941 (massive...research--Library Journal; voluminous documentation--Choice; many striking old photos--The TV Collector). At last he has produced the follow-up volume; the reader may be assured there is no other book in any language that is remotely comparable to it. Together, these two volumes provide the definitive technical history of the medium. Upon the development in the mid-1940s of new cameras and picture tubes that made commercial television possible worldwide, the medium rose rapidly to prominence. Perhaps even more important was the invention of the video tape recorder in 1956, allowing editing, re-shooting and rebroadcasting.This second volume, 1942 to 2000 covers these significant developments and much more. Chapters are devoted to television during World War II and the postwar era, the development of color television, Ampex Corporation's contributions, television in Europe, the change from helical to high band technology, solid state cameras, the television coverage of Apollo II, the rise of electronic journalism, television entering the studios, the introduction of the camcorder, the demise of RCA at the hands of GE, the domination of Sony and Matsushita, and the future of television in e-cinema and the 1080 P24 format. The book is heavily illustrated (as is the first volume).
America Toons In
Animation has been part of television since the start of the medium but it has rarely received unbiased recognition from media scholars. More often, it has been ridiculed for supposedly poor technical quality, accused of trafficking in violence aimed at children, and neglected for indulging in vulgar behavior. These accusations are often made categorically, out of prejudice or ignorance, with little attempt to understand the importance of each program on its own terms. This book takes a serious look at the whole genre of television animation, from the early themes and practices through the evolution of the art to the present day. Examining the productions of individual studios and producers, the author establishes a means of understanding their work in new ways, at the same time discussing the ways in which the genre has often been unfairly marginalized by critics, and how, especially in recent years, producers have both challenged and embraced this "marginality" as a vital part of their work. By taking seriously something often thought to be frivolous, the book provides a framework for understanding the persistent presence of television animation in the American media--and how surprisingly influential it has been.