I.

Introduction

Television (TV), system of mass communication, involving the transmission of images and sounds to distant screens, by electronic means over electrical or fibre-optic transmission lines or by electromagnetic radiation (radio waves). TV is a vastly important medium, for a number of reasons: the amount of time that many people spend watching it (31 hours per week, for average United States adults, 25 for Britons); its ability to bring together diverse groups of people in a sense of shared national identity; and its powerful role as a source of information about experiences other than the viewer’s own. It was the first medium to relay, via communications satellites, pictures across continents, and it is the prime route to the public for presenting news and current affairs, including the progress of wars and political campaigns. It is thus a powerful influence on public perception and opinion.

TV developed in Western Europe and North America, but has spread across the world. In 1992 there were roughly 16 TV receivers for every 100 people. However, the distribution of TV is very uneven: there are around 80 sets per 100 US citizens, but only 2.3 per 100 people in non-Arab Africa. TV has in general been a very centralized form of communication, which does not easily permit access and participation. This is partly because TV transmission and production have been so expensive that only a few companies could become involved, and also because governments have strictly regulated who could gain access to the relatively scarce parts of the electromagnetic spectrum allocated for TV transmission. In the 1980s, many new forms of TV-related technology, such as cable television and Direct Broadcast Satellite, began to allow other forms of transmission and reception, and many governments began to relax their regulations about who could broadcast. These technological changes have helped bring about shifts in the cultural significance of TV. For more than 40 years, many of the most important national events, in a number of countries, have been experienced as TV events. Examples include the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the royal wedding of Prince Akihito in Japan in 1959, the annual Super Bowl football match in the United States, and the reporting of various international crises and political assassinations. However, some commentators have claimed that the era when TV served as a source of national bonding is coming to an end, as TV begins to appeal to smaller and more specific segments of the audience, rather than to entire societies. In spite of these changes, TV remains probably the most important form of mass communication of the late 20th century.

II.

Invention and Early Development

There was no single moment when TV was invented, and it is very difficult to pick out the contribution of any individual as of more significance than any other. Regular TV broadcasting began in 1936 in Britain, but the development of TV relied on the coming together of a number of developments in related fields, such as telegraphy and electronics, over the previous 60 years. This convergence of innovations happened only when organizations such as the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Electrical and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—institutions with sufficient capital to fund research and development—realized that TV might be the basis of prestige, power, and profit.

A.

The Early Innovators

As early as the 1880s, a number of problems were widely recognized as needing to be solved in order to create the transmission of images. The term “television” does not appear to have been used until the beginning of the 20th century and even then, the aim of innovators was not to provide the news and entertainment medium we know today, but rather to develop a more advanced form of telecommunication than the telegraph and the telephone, using pictures as well as sound.

One problem facing developers was the need for a transducer (energy converter) that could turn light into electricity. The ability of the element selenium to do this was recognized in 1873, and spurred the search for more effective photoelectric materials. More efficient photoelectric cells were developed in the early 20th century.

Just as crucial was the problem of scanning: the breaking-up of a moving image into smaller, transferrable parts. In 1884 Paul Nipkow, a German engineer, produced an early version of mechanical TV, which provided a primitive solution to the problem of scanning. Nipkow drilled a spiral of holes in a disc, which was made to rotate. Light passing through these holes registered on a selenium cell. A similar disc rotated at the receiving end of the system, and the light projected by the selenium cell reproduced the original shape silhouetted by the light. Besides scanning, the Nipkow system also had the vital feature of synchronization, in that the two discs rotated at the same speed.

In Britain, the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird is often credited with the invention of TV. In fact, although Baird was responsible for some important early innovations, and provided the first public demonstration of a 30-line image in 1926, his mechanical system was superseded by electronic systems in the 1930s. At the centre of developments in electronic TV was the cathode ray tube, developed in the late 19th century. This is simply a vacuum tube inside which a beam of high-energy electrons focuses on a fluorescent screen to give light. An early Russian innovator, Boris Rozing, modified the cathode ray tube to display images from a mechanical scanner in 1907.

It was in the 1920s that developments in TV began to proceed quickly. The immense success of radio in the post-1918 period led companies to realize that great profits could be made from the manufacture of communications goods. During this era, TV began to be conceived of as a broadcasting technology rather than as a form of telecommunications, as people began to pursue new forms of leisure activity within the home.

B.

Zworykin’s Kinescope

Important developments in electronic TV systems were made by two inventors: Vladimir K. Zworykin and Philo T. Farnsworth. In the United States in 1927, Farnsworth patented an electronic camera tube, the image dissector, and went on to develop improvements in the electronic synchronization of cameras and receivers. Farnsworth was something of a maverick, and attempted to work independently of large institutions. It was the corporations, however, that were to determine the technology of TV. Zworykin had been Boris Rozing’s student in St Petersburg, Russia, but had moved to the United States and in the 1920s worked for the giant US electronics companies Westinghouse and RCA, who were collaborating on developing broadcasting technology. In 1923 Zworykin outlined ideas for a TV camera tube that used electrons to scan across a target that had been charged by exposure to light. He failed to produce a workable system, but was eventually commissioned by RCA to extend European developments in cathode-ray technology, and in 1929 he patented a prototype of modern picture (that is, TV set) tubes called the “kinescope”. By 1931 Zworykin’s team at RCA had developed the type of camera tube he had envisaged eight years earlier, and called it an iconoscope.

C.

Early Broadcasting

In the early 1930s in Britain, the work of Zworykin and his team was extended at EMI’s laboratories in Hayes, near London, in a transatlantic partnership with RCA. Separate research also made progress in Germany and the Netherlands, and the resolution of images (indicated by the number of scanned lines on the screen) improved rapidly. The world’s first high-definition, regular TV service was begun by the BBC from London in 1936, using both the EMI electronic system, of 405 lines, and the mechanical system Baird had developed, which by this point was of 240 lines.

In 1937 a British government committee rejected Baird’s design for the electronic system, which was good enough to last until the introduction of a 625-line system, phased in from the late 1950s onward. Meanwhile, in the United States, after protracted battles between the RCA-owned National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and rival developers of TV systems, the US government’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) accepted NBC’s 525-line, 30 pictures per second standard in 1941. This technology is still the basis of the US system today, having been modified to include a compatible colour system in 1954.

III.

How TV Works

The TV camera converts the light of an image, and the sound, into an electronic signal, which for pre-recorded programmes can then be transferred to videotape. The image is converted into electricity in the camera tube. This is achieved by focusing the light of the image on a light-sensitive surface. An electron beam scans over the image, and converts each light value into a corresponding electrical charge.

A.

Signals

Each signal is made up of image, sound, and a synchronization pulse, which ensures that the image and sound of the camera or videotape at the transmission end are coordinated with those of the TV set. These elements are amplified by a device in the TV set, and are separated out. The sound is converted back from a carried wave to an audio signal current and is amplified into the loudspeaker. The synchronizing signal is picked up by a separate circuit. The picture signal goes to the picture tube. At the back of this funnel-shaped vacuum tube are three electron guns that fire electron beams at a coated fluorescent screen at the front of the tube (the TV screen) and illuminate it. The electron gun is a metal cylinder that fires streams of electrons at the back of the screen. A positive element (anode) within the gun pulls the negative electrons away from a cathode. The TV picture signal determines how many of these electrons pass through an aperture, and on to the back of the screen. Thus the brightness of each element on the screen is controlled. Each beam corresponds to one of three primary colours: red, blue, and green. By combining these colours in various ways, all the colours that are seen on a TV screen can be produced.

B.

Scanning

The synchronizing signal controls the movement of a scanning spot, which moves in a horizontal line, activating electronic dots formed by chemicals called phosphors on the back of the screen, before returning to the beginning of the next line in a deactivated form, and then moving across again. The scanning process takes place at great speed.

The image signal contains information about how bright to make each picture element (the brightness signal), and in colour TV, information too about which combination of red, blue, and green to create (hue) and how strong or pastel each colour should be (saturation). The hue and saturation information are known as the colour signal. There are over a million phosphor dots on any colour TV screen, arranged in tiny triangles of red, blue, and green. The electron beams are made only to strike their own colour. The red beam strikes the red dot of each triangle, and so on.

C.

Transmission

The control centre of any TV station determines which images are to be transmitted, and the signal is attached to a pattern of waves (called carrier waves) of a particular frequency and wavelength, and sent out from the broadcast station’s transmission antenna. In the United States, for example, the government allocates each terrestrial channel 6 MHz of frequency between 54 and 88 MHz and 174 and 216 MHz on the electromagnetic spectrum.

A TV channel needs a much greater bandwidth (amount of spectrum space) than radio because it needs to be able to carry visual information as well as audio. The TV signal and the carrier wave are relayed via stations, usually based on hills and mountains. A receiving antenna (roof aerial, satellite dish, or cable receiving box) picks up the signals. The viewer selects which channel’s frequency to tune the TV to, but unlike radio, where stations advertise their frequency (for FM stations, it is usually between 88 and 108 MHz), TV viewers rarely know the allocation of their favoured channels, as the television controls are pre-set.

D.

Scanning Systems

The main US TV system (referred to as NTSC, after the US government’s standards committee) produces 30 images of 525 lines per second, but as with all systems across the world, each image consists of two interlaced scanning dots, working on alternate lines. This interlaced system produces less flicker than the single scanning of an entire image. Thus 60 half-pictures per second are actually produced, complying with the 60 Hz powerline frequency that is standard in the United States.

In Europe, 50 Hz is the electrical standard, and the two main European systems (PAL and SECAM) produce 50 half-images per second, making 25 whole images. The human eye perceives this rate of single images as forming continuous motion. PAL, a German development, is widely used in Western Europe; SECAM is used in France, and in much of Eastern Europe. Both have 625 lines, though France experimented with an 819-line SECAM system for a while.

E.

HDTV

Recent experiments in Japan, Europe, and the United States have aimed at developing high definition TV (HDTV) based on picture resolutions of 1,125 and even 1,250 lines. HDTV is capable of being shown on a much larger screen, without loss of quality, and in a greater ratio of width to height. For the foreseeable future, HDTV seems likely to remain an expensive option, but may eventually become more widely adopted.

IV.

Development of the TV Industry

The development of TV in Britain and the United States represents two very different legacies of the way governments and corporations developed radio and TV broadcasting in the pre-World War II period.

A.

TV in the United States

A.1.

NBC, CBS, and ABC

In the United States, the dominant concerns were NBC and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS Inc.), set up in 1927. These companies built their TV empires on the radio programming networks they created during radio’s heyday in the 1930s, funding expansion through the sales of sets, and of advertising.

Networks produced programmes for a chain of local stations across the country, some of which they owned, but most of which were affiliated with them. NBC and CBS were joined by another two broadcasting networks, American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and DuMont, in the 1940s, and until the 1980s, the trio of NBC, CBS, and ABC dominated the American TV landscape. DuMont went bankrupt in the 1950s, but a fourth network, Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, emerged in the late 1980s.

A.2.

Network Affiliation

The domination of US TV by the networks was reinforced by the FCC’s 1952 decision to allocate only three VHF (very high frequency) stations to most urban areas. The first three stations in an area inevitably affiliated with the networks in order to get the best-known national shows. New channels were forced on to UHF frequencies, which were of poor reception quality, and unobtainable on most sets. Thus the American TV system developed as an advertising-funded, commercial system, dominated by a small number of companies.

B.

TV in Britain

B.1.

BBC

In Britain, the dominant institution from the 1930s to the 1950s was the BBC, which had its roots in the British state’s conception of broadcasting as a public service, rather than as a commercial enterprise. This notion stressed the provision of information and education, as much as entertainment. The BBC had a royal charter, giving it a monopoly on programme production, and guaranteeing its income via the collection of radio and later television licences by the Post Office. To this day, the BBC carries no advertising.

B.2.

ITV

In 1955 the British government opened a second channel for commercial TV (ITV—Independent Television), but this was still a heavily public service-oriented system. Fourteen regional franchises were allocated, with strict conditions attached: the successful companies would have to show a responsiveness to local conditions and a commitment to impartiality in order to maintain their franchise upon renewal in 1968, 1980, and 1992. Whereas the BBC was non-profit-making, and had to put its resources back into programmes, the commercial companies that bid for the ITV franchises were obliged to pay dividends to shareholders, and could use TV profits to subsidize other parts of their businesses. Arguably, the fact that audiences had to be as large as possible to attract advertisers meant that ITV programmes could not be as adventurous as some of those made by the BBC.

B.3.

Channel 4

In 1982 a new mix of public-service broadcasting and commercial interests was introduced in Britain, with the launch of Channel 4. This involved a new system of programme production. Previously, programmes were made by the BBC or by the ITV franchise-holders, but Channel 4 makes none of its own programmes. Rather, it commissions programmes from independent production companies, and it has an obligation under its charter to show programmes for minorities not adequately catered for by the existing two BBC channels (BBC2 was launched in 1964) and ITV. New companies sprang up, mainly in London, to service Channel 4, and by the early 1990s, the BBC itself was obliged by law to commission much of its output from these independents. A fifth independent station, Channel 5, began transmission in March 1997.

C.

Public Service Broadcasting

Public-service broadcasting is not the same thing as state broadcasting, but nor is it independent of the state. The British TV system relies on “arm’s length” regulation. The governors of the BBC and the authority controlling ITV have autonomy, but they are appointed by the state, and are made up of “the great and the good”. Regulations require broadcasters to be impartial and to produce programmes of quality, but these are terms that are open to different interpretations. At times, political pressure by the ruling party can be strong, especially in times of war or national crisis.

D.

TV in France

The case of the TV system in post-war France suggests that state broadcasting involves much more direct forms of control than public-service systems. In the early 1960s, the Minister of the Interior would communicate with senior executives in Radio Television France, the only TV channel at the time, on a daily basis. Only in the mid-1970s was the system reformed to allow competition between channels, and a greater distance between government and broadcasters.

E.

TV in Australia

Many countries developed a mixture of commercial and public-service stations. Australia, for example, developed a mixed system at about the same time as Britain. By 1957 the bigger cities had six channels, two run by the state-controlled Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and four by commercial owners. However, whereas many countries’ regulations have limited the ownership of both press and TV outlets, publishing companies quickly established a dominance of commercial Australian TV channels.

F.

1950s and 1960s

The great boom in TV came in the 1950s and 1960s, and was brought about by a number of important social changes. Greater affluence, easy credit on consumer goods such as TV sets, and reductions in the length of the working week all served to pave the way for the rise of TV as a mass medium. In 1948 there were fewer than 100,000 sets in the United States; by 1959 there were more than 50 million, and 88 per cent of American homes contained at least one receiver.

TV’s cultural importance rose in proportion to its popularity. The mid-1950s have often been portrayed as a “golden age” of American TV production, as talented writers and performers increasingly turned to the greater exposure and rewards available in the new medium, and away from radio and the cinema. Many critics hold a similar view of British TV in the 1960s: there was a new realism in the portrayal of working-class life in situation comedies (sitcoms) and soap operas (soaps), compared with the sometimes patronizing tone of earlier British cinema and theatre. Satire programmes and current affairs interviewers challenged authority figures in an unprecedented way.

Nevertheless, although TV had become an important new leisure form, and cultural resource, it was far from omnipresent. Much of the world still had little or no TV service until the early 1960s, such as Indonesia (began services, 1962), Singapore (1963), and Pakistan (1964). Even within established channels, programming seems sparse by comparison with today’s standards: in the late 1960s, the BBC’s main channel still ran from only 4 p.m. until 11 p.m.

V.

TV Production

A.

Key Production Roles

Although viewers often come to associate programmes with particular performers, a great many people are involved in the making of a TV programme. Television production processes vary considerably across different institutions, systems, and programme types. In general, the central figure is the producer, who develops the programme concept, puts together a budget, supervises planning, and approves the final edited version of the programme. Whereas the authors of novels and the directors of films often become celebrities in their own right, many important TV producers remain unknown outside the industry.

In TV, the director is responsible for executing production, and consulting with various technical and creative staff about how the programme will look and sound. Although some programmes are written by a single author, many are scripted by a committee process. US sitcoms such as Roseanne employ large teams of writers.

An increasingly important function within TV is that of the researcher, who helps to develop ideas for use within a programme, and whose work often overlaps with that of a writer. A job as researcher is now a common entry-point for newcomers to the TV industry.

Other key roles in TV production include the set designer, lighting director, sound engineer, make-up artist, and, in studio production, the floor manager, who acts as the director’s eyes and ears on set, and who passes on cues to presenters and other participants from the director.

B.

Studio Recording

In the early days of TV, much production was live, and took place in the studio. Today, fewer programmes are transmitted live, because TV recording allows mistakes to be edited out. The news is the main category of programme that continues to be transmitted live (though interspersed with recorded reports). In fact, although TV news has the appearance of a spontaneous response to events, much of the content of a daily bulletin is planned in advance, according to a news diary. Public relations staff keep editors, producers, and journalists informed about up-and-coming events, and there is a strong reliance on scheduled political events, such as the release of unemployment figures. At joint editorial meetings, senior figures decide which of the day’s events deserve most attention, while maintaining the flexibility to make way for some unexpected, breaking news.

In studio production of a whole range of TV programmes, whether live or recorded, the control room is the hub of the process. Here, key personnel sit before a tinted screen, looking out on to the studio. Below the screen is a bank of monitors, which show the director and colleagues what images are available on the different studio cameras (usually three), and from other sources, such as an outside broadcast link (called a remote in the United States), titles and graphics generators, and pre-recorded film and video. A master monitor displays what is being transmitted or recorded at any one point.

With the director, who attempts to control the process from a central seat, the following people will also be in the control room: an assistant director, a vision mixer (or switcher), who controls the fading, mixing, and switching of images, and an audio engineer, responsible for checking sound levels. The control room communicates with the studio floor via a voice-link over headphones and earphones. The presenter must be able to listen to the control-room talk, and speak to the audience at the same time.

C.

Location Shooting

Increasingly, however, as video cameras have become lighter and more mobile, TV filming is taking place on location. Documentaries, sport, and news reports have always relied on outside locations, but even traditionally studio-bound genres such as soaps and sitcoms use location shooting more and more. News journalists in distant locations are now expected to combine technical knowledge with reporting skills. As audiences and editors expect news to be as immediate as possible, reporters use an array of technical devices, such as satellite phones, to transmit compressed video signals directly back to the news operation.

D.

Budgeting and Scheduling

However, descriptions of the mechanics of making a TV programme do not convey adequately the complexity of TV production. Because TV is a business, many finance and marketing decisions have to be made and a great deal of power lies with those who allocate budget resources. Within a large corporation such as the BBC, this might be the head of a particular programme department, such as drama or current affairs. Elsewhere, the job might fall to a commissioning editor, or an executive producer, who decides which of the various programme ideas submitted by independent producers are worthy of support.

Even when they are allocated a budget, however, programme-makers have to rely on schedulers to decide when the programme will be shown. Scheduling an innovative new show that needs time to gain an audience against an established, top-rating favourite might ruin the new programme’s chances of survival.

The day is divided by programmers into various time-slots, according to the size of audience that might be considered possible, and the type of viewer they may get. The main categories are daytime, night-time, and prime time, the last of which is defined in the United States as running from 7 p.m. until about 11 p.m. Advertising rates become much higher during this period, and are based on a computation of the likely audience for the particular programme. In the intensely competitive American prime-time market, many series are cancelled during or after their first season, if they are considered not to be attracting sufficient viewers.

As well as scheduling, marketing and promotion are vital factors in creating awareness among the audience about the programme on offer. This can take the form of billboard advertising, or of persuading the writers of newspaper TV preview pages that a particular programme is worthy of special mention. For this reason, it is difficult to argue that the audience determines what is shown on TV. Although in general, commercial TV has to keep popular shows, and scrap unpopular ones, decisions about scheduling, marketing, and budgeting are made on the basis of what TV executives think the audience will like. These people’s images of what audiences want have a great influence on what becomes popular.

Because it is expensive to establish a new programme, TV relies on the series and the serial to form continuity between programmes. The series is a finite number of shows, (often 13) to fill a season of scheduling. A successful series will return each year, saving the broadcaster vast amounts of money in developing new programme ideas. The serial, on the other hand, is continuous; and the most famous TV serials are soaps (originally called soap operas, a term of mild abuse for melodramatic radio plays sponsored by soap companies). The British soap Coronation Street, set in Salford, near Manchester in northern England, has been running since 1960, and still regularly achieves the top rating on British TV. The internationally popular Latin American telenovelas, produced mainly in Brazil and Mexico, share the continuity of soaps, but in fact are usually series of about 100 episodes.

VI.

New Developments

The 1980s saw important changes in TV, and in the way in which it was regulated by governments. With the decline in the West of traditional manufacturing industries in the 1970s, companies turned increasingly to electronic and information goods for profits. Makers of consumer goods began to concentrate their attention more and more on new, high-technology entertainment services. TV had traditionally been very cheap: after the cost of a receiver and (in Britain) a licence fee, each programme was basically free to the viewer. Three technologies served to transform TV markets: cable, satellite, and video. In order to avoid home-based firms falling behind in an increasingly international market, governments began to deregulate strict controls on broadcasting, so that new companies could enter the industry in these new sectors. Video cassette recorders became widely adopted in the United States and Europe in the early 1980s, and a new film rental sector began to compete with the traditional channels. However, cable and satellite have meant even more significant changes.

A.

Cable TV

Cable TV began in the 1950s in the United States and Canada as a means of obtaining better reception in remote rural and crowded urban areas, where mountains and high-rise housing might interfere with terrestrial (airwave) transmission. Instead of individual TV aerials picking up signals from the nearest relay station, the pictures were fed by coaxial cable directly into receivers, either underground or via poles. The cable provides protection from interference, helping to improve picture quality.

Coaxial cables can carry much more signal information than the airwaves, thus solving the problem of spectrum shortage that plagued terrestrial broadcasting. In the United States and increasingly in Europe, cable has meant many more channels being made available to the public—though at an extra cost. A monthly subscription fee has to be paid, in order to activate a device that allows the TV receiver to tune into the cable channels. Firms are keen to introduce more “pay-per-view” systems, so that charges can be made for watching individual events, such as a boxing match, or a new film.

In Britain, cable was relatively unimportant until the mid-1990s (when firms were allowed to install cable systems capable of combining TV and telephone services). Instead, the biggest new force in British broadcasting in the early 1990s was satellite TV, in the form of BSkyB, launched by media magnate Rupert Murdoch. Like cable systems elsewhere, this works on a subscription basis. In Asia too, satellite is an important new feature. Small local networks are run by entrepreneurs who invest in a small satellite dish and then charge customers for relaying programmes on to them by cable. Programming is mainly provided by Rupert Murdoch’s Hong Kong-based Star TV, which charges high advertising rates for companies to reach the huge audiences these new services attract.

B.

Digital TV

The first digital terrestrial television (DTT) service in the world was launched on November 15, 1998, in the United Kingdom by ONdigital (previously British Digital Broadcasting) following the launch in the same country of Sky's digital satellite service on October 1, 1998. The financial collapse of ONdigital’s successor ITV Digital in 2002 led to a reallocation of DTT licences. A new network, Freeview, backed by a consortium of the BBC, Crown Castle, and BSkyB, took over the services previously run by ITV Digital, offering up to 30 free-to-air digital channels from October 2002. Digital television uses binary signals instead of analogue to transmit programmes. This means that interference such as “ghosting” or “snow” is eliminated. Using digital signals also means that more channels can be transmitted on the same frequency. The United Kingdom, like other countries, is gradually moving over to digital signals, and it is estimated that the analogue signals will be phased out by 2010. Unlike satellite services, digital television can be received through an existing aerial, although customers have to purchase a set-top box to decode the transmission (see Digital Broadcasting).

C.

Effects of New Developments

Cable and satellite mark the end of the era when TV took place on a mainly national basis. Increasingly, messages are transmitted across national borders. In Europe, satellite has also been an important way in which migrant communities can keep in touch with the TV systems of their country of origin, because satellite dishes can pick up much more distant signals. The new era of TV has been called “narrowcasting” (rather than broadcasting) by some commentators, because the audiences for TV channels are becoming smaller and more specific. TV stations increasingly aim at particular segments of the population, rather than at the mass audience.

Some have argued that the proliferation of channels has not meant a new diversity, however, but rather a lowering of standards, and the replacement of public-service broadcasting by cartels of commercial owners, such as Murdoch’s News International and the German company Bertelsmann. While the American system offers a new diversity to those who can afford the extra subscription costs, the low-cost programming on Italy’s many cable channels suggests that overhasty deregulation can reduce the overall quality of a nation’s broadcasting.

Many writers now use the term “convergence” to refer to an increasing overlap between telecommunications, computers, the Internet, and mass-media forms such as TV (seeElectronic Publishing). TV is, according to some forecasters, about to become the basis of new home information and entertainment systems. Great power may come to reside in the hands of the companies who control the distribution systems that determine the range and type of services reaching homes and businesses.

VII.

Social and Cultural Effects

The debate about the power of TV to influence people's behaviour and beliefs has been going on ever since the medium became widely popular in the West in the 1950s. There are three main strands of concern: the impact of TV on social behaviour, particularly crimes of violence; its effects on the political process; and whether it causes a deterioration in cultural standards.

A.

Impact on Social Behaviour

A great deal of research has been carried out on the extent to which TV influences social behaviour. The main concerns have been about whether TV makes people lazier and less varied in their social habits, and in particular whether it causes more violence in society. The research shares the problem of much social science, when faced with controversy: it is difficult to provide definite proof of cause and effect. Arguably, to show programmes to children in a laboratory and then test whether they become more aggressive only illustrates how children behave in a laboratory, rather than in the home or the playground. Even where violent behaviour clearly does occur in response to a violent programme, there is still the question of how to separate the TV cause from other causes, such as family upbringing, neighbourhood life, and so on. Many have been willing to accept the difficulties of such proof, on the grounds that authority figures might use evidence of links between TV violence and real violence as a justification for controlling what is shown, and, in a broader sense, for social control. Others have argued that, given the very large amount of violence on TV (a consequence of the fact that most narratives are based around conflict that is often resolved by violence), and given the sheer amount of time that many people watch it, it is difficult to believe that these images could have no effect. Some think that TV encourages the view that the world is a more violent place than it really is. Argument has also centred on appropriate broadcast times for programmes that are primarily aimed at adult audiences. In Britain a “watershed” time of 9 p.m. acts as a guide to broadcasters, based on the assumption that children are no longer watching TV by then. With access within households to video recording of programmes, this guideline has less relevance than in pre-video years.

B.

Impact on Politics

The impact of TV on political processes has also been the focus of intense and unresolved debate. TV organizations are keen to present themselves as independent public watchdogs, working to ensure that abuses of power do not go unchecked. Although TV advocates often claim to present a “window on the world”—a picture of reality—which gives average citizens unprecedented access to the world outside their community, TV can only present a tiny selection of what happens in the world. Techniques of presentation and editing, necessary to communicate accessibly to the audience, can simplify and distort complex problems. Critics claim that TV is very poor at explaining difficult but important situations, such as the causes of a war. Given that TV is many people’s main source of information about many of the most important public events and social issues, this is a significant limitation.

In addition, as TV is primarily used as a source of entertainment, some say that this encourages people to be less interested in knowledge and understanding, and more concerned with diversion. News and current affairs programmes often use dramatic individual stories, rather than reporting unfolding social trends, in order to win viewers from other channels.

The effects of TV coverage on the election process have been the subject of particular concern. Looking and sounding good on TV, it could be argued, is more important than moral character and skilful leadership. Politicians are reduced to trying to encapsulate their agenda into sound bites, to fit the limited times that news organizations allot to each item on bulletins.

C.

Cultural Values

Many argue that TV, at its best, has been remarkable for its innovation, providing new forms of popular entertainment, which speak to people across class, ethnic, and gender divisions. Concern about the impact of TV on cultural values draws upon a long tradition of anxiety about mass culture. The most prestigious forms of culture tend to be viewed as the creation of a talented individual (for example, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s symphonies) but TV programmes, like other forms of popular culture, are made by many people. Cultural value is also considered by some critics in the United Kingdom to be incompatible with a commercial system of production. Other commentators note the importance of TV in the worldwide spread of Western culture and commercial values. This has had the effect of producing a global culture that in fact follows Western (mainly American) trends and norms.

More specifically, TV is often thought of as a particularly passive form of leisure, perhaps because it provides a form of relaxation within the home. Phrases such as “zombies” and “couch potatoes” are often used of TV viewers, even by themselves. However, recent research has tended to the view that audiences for TV programmes are active interpreters of meaning, engaged in discussion and gossip about favourite characters, storylines, and presenters. Whether this activity represents a critical engagement with the world or a trivializing distraction remains an issue for debate. However, the very intensity of discussion about TV, and the amount of space given over to it in other media such as newspapers, indicates its central role in modern social and cultural life.