C792 Media Guide for Radio, Television & Modern Life
"Foucault thought the panopticon was a device invented by the authorities for the scrutiny and disciplining of the potentially unruly majority (in prisons, hospitals, schools, etc.), while they themselves remained invisible (Foucault 1977). Perhaps it was so in the last century, but now it is surely the other way round. Those who were once the lords and owners of their faces are no longer, for they can no longer control the terms and conditions of their being-in-public. The management of visibility, in John Thompson's useful phrase, has been thoroughly problematized by modern media (Thompson 1994:40). In particular, what can no longer be managed are the behaviours of the wider listening or viewing publics. And this is because, as we have already argued, the nature of the relationship between broadcasters and listeners or viewers is unforced because it is unenforceable. Public events now occur, simultaneously, in two different places: the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. Broadcasting mediates between these two sites. Events in public thus assume a degree of phenomenal complexity they did not hitherto possess, and this has consequences for the character of the events themselves." (76)
"Concern is all such things as noticing, remarking upon, attending to, observing, picking out, foregrounding and bringing to bear a focused attentiveness upon phenomena (upon each other and our selves and circumstances) in such ways as to find and make the matter to hand significant and meaningful in some way or other. Concern is being caught up in. It is engagement with, involvement in. Such concern discovers (finds) the meaningfulness of phenomena. Care is the meaning of meaning. It has no reason. It simply is. Dasein will light on some thing -- no matter what -- as the object of its focused attentiveness, its concern. It may be no more than idle curiosity, it may be for strategic self-interest, it may be simply for the sake of the thing itself (for its own sake). But whatever reason we attempt to find for whatever concern will always fail (though reasons can always be found) because concern is the earliest mark of our common nature. We cannot get behind it. Care is our state and way of being in all aspects and at every level. It gathers in all ways (always) of human being which is understood, finally, as being-in-concern. For this, first and last, is what it is to be in the world, to be with others. In so far as the world is found to be meaningful and full of meaning it is so to the extent that it matters for us in the specific ways that it is found by us to matter. If nothing matters nothing means and care no longer is." (144-145)
"What is dailiness? We might begin with what it is to provide a daily service of say bread or milk, newspapers, trains or whatever. In order to bring it about that an everyday service is produced every day (without exception) a routinization of the production of the service is required in such a way that that, precisely, is the outcome. Now it is one thing -- complex enough -- to produce a single good (a newspaper, a pint of milk) in such a way that it is there for anyone on their doorstep each morning. It is another thing to produce a daily service that fills each day, that runs right through the day, that appears as a continuous, uninterrupted, never-ending flow -- through all the hours of the day, today, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. What does that mean? What is it to have such a service in such a way that it appears as no more than what I or anyone am entitled to expect as an aspect of my days?Our sense of days is always already in part determined by the ways in which media contribute to the shaping of our sense of days. Would time feel different for us without radio, television and newspapers? Would it run to a different rhythm? Would it have the edge that it has today? The sense that each day is a particular day? For the effect of the temporal arrangements of radio and television is such as to pick out each day as this day, this day in particular, this day as its own day, caught up in its own immediacy, with its own involvements and concerns. The huge investment of labour (care) that goes to produce the output of broadcasting delivers a service whose most generalizable effect is to re-temporize time; to mark it out in particular ways, so that the time of day (at any time) is a particular time, a time differentiated from past time-in-the-day or time that is yet-to-come. The time of day in broadcasting is always marked as the time that it is. Its now is endlessly thematized in a narrative of days and their dailiness." (149)
"For a programme to happen it must happen sometime somewhere through someone's agency. The elementary components of an occasion are time, place and people. A realized occasion is always and everywhere context-specific: the someone someplace somewhere is always in a particular here-and-now. What we are considering as an ontology of events (the horizon of their transition from a possibility into a reality) are the basic, mundane problems that broadcasters have to deal with in order to bring into being-- and sustain as such-- that continuos, unbroken and never-ending flow of output that we check out in television listings in the papers each day." (8)
"Sincerity changes the basis whereby singing is judged. We no longer ask 'is it beautiful?' but 'is it true?' It may be the case that beauty is truth; truth, beauty -- but if we emphasize one rather than the other we express a very different sense of the relationship between life and art. To emphasize truth rather than beauty involves a shift from aesthetic to moral judgement. Aesthetic judgement proceeds by immanent criteria: the qualities of, say the singing voice are in the voice itself which can be compared -- impersonally -- with other voices of that kind. As a matter of pure taste, he song can be detached from any singer or any performance: heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter. It is only a naive taste that attends to the singer rather than the song, that worries about whether the song is meant. Aesthetic judgment is pure taste, unsullied by grosser emotions and feelings. 'Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion... has not yet emerged from barbarism', says Kant... Radio and television tear down the fence: the distinction between life and art is no longer sustainable. The displacement of aesthetic criteria by moral and social criteria is a very pervasive effect of broadcasting and contributes to that common-sense perception of television and radio as lacking artistic value. In assessing radio and television performances listeners and viewers tend to overlook the quality of the performance (unless it fails to pass and thereby becomes, in some way remarkable, i.e. a matter of comment). That is, the unobtrusive aesthetics of performances are presumed. Of more immediate concern are the moral assessments of the genuineness (or otherwise) of performances, and social assessments as to whether they are enjoyable or boring." (73-74)
"The words that come to mind to describe Miss Lomas's voice are 'sprightly' and 'cheerful'. I hear, in this talk with Harry Hopeful, the voice of a small, still active, elderly woman who is lively, neat, bright and respectable. I am charmed by this voice. I hear her telling her little anecdotes-- by now well-polished with repeated tellings-- to old friends over the teacups. Do I hear too much in it? No dobut, but I know this voice touches me, pierces me like a little wound, Barthes' punctum not in an old photograph but in a voice from 60 years ago, a voice from the dead past yet vivid and live to me every time I hear it. Where Bill performs himself as a 'character', Miss Lomas performs herself as herself-- that is, to the life. Certainly we can hear she is reading a script; but equally, we can hear that she puts herself into her self-performance. She gives her self to us. What I hear in this voice, in this performance, is the telling of a lifetime's recollections: memory, gossip, talk with an old friend long dead, a rootedness in time and place, a secure achieved identity. Someone in particular." (36-37)
"[This book] presumes that making programmes is the raison d'être of broadcasting systems and that the analysis of programmes -- showing how they work for audiences -- is a central task in their study. If the first book was about the meaningful organization of the production process in its parts and as a whole, this book is about the meaningul organization of the production process in programmes themselves. Its central concern might be stated as an attempt to show how understanding a radio or television programme is possible for me or anyone. That everyone does understand what they see and hear is -- I take it -- obvious. What is not obvious is how it is that radio and television are intelligible in just such a ways that anyone and everyone can understand them." (2-3)
"The character of broadcasting as necessarily sociable lies in the form of its communicative context, and the broadcasters' lack of control over their audiences. The relationship between broadcasters, listeners and viewers is an unforced relationship because it is unenforceable. Broadcasters must, before all else, always consider how they shall talk to people who have no particular reason, purpose or intention for turning on the radio or television set. If we ask whether people have a particular reason, a motive, for listening or watching, it seems an implausible question. ...it is hard to give good reasons for watching and listening. We do so because we can't find anything else, anything better, to do. In this way, the activities of listeners and viewers appear unmotivated. They are nothing more (or less) than pastimes, ways of spending 'free time'." (23-24)
"All day, every day and everywhere people listen to radio and watch television as part of the utterly familiar, normal things that anyone does on any normal day. 'Anything on telly?' 'No, nothing.' It is not, of course, that there is, in some literal way, nothing to watch. Rather, that what there is is nothing out of the ordinary; merely the usual programmes on the usual channels at the usual times. Nor does this necessarily imply a disincentive to viewing. We do watch a lot of 'nothing' on television, in fact we watch it nearly all the time. Broadcast output -- like daily life -- is, for the most part, largely uneventful, puntuated, now and then, in predictable and unpredictable ways, by eventful occasions (Dayan and Katz 1992). Now suppose that it is not accidental or contingent that the output of radio and television is as we find it to be; that this ordinariness, this obviousness is precisely the intended, achieved and accomplished effect of broadcast output. The question remains -- and it is a difficult one -- as to how (and why) it is that it is as we find it to be." (6)
"From such considerations we can begin to understand how it is that people in these fictional worlds are knowable in the same way as people in the real world are known and knowable. This is surely the remarkable, unique feature of such stories and it enables us to account for their well-known effects as real and life-like for their many followers -- for that, indeed, is what they are. The key is the correspondence between the movement of time in the fictional world and the real world: for, since these move in parallel and at the same pace, it follows that the lifetime of viewers and listeners unfolds at the same rate as the lives of the characters in the story. Thus, one stands in the same temporal relation to them as one does to one's own family, relatives, friends and everyday acquaintances. Moreover, access to these fictional worlds corresponds closely to the forms of access one has to the people in one's own everyday world: in both, people are encountered in similar settings and circumstances, and in the same way." (158-159)
"The truth that is recovered through what is here called phenomenology is nothing more (or less) than the truth of the world in its live and living being. It sees the same world that modernity sees -- the same things in the same spaces at the same time -- but it sees the world existingly. To see the world in such a ways is what art has always expressed and what it tried to hanf on to, even in extremis, throughout the historical epoch of the reification of the world from which we are beginning to emerge at the end of the 20th century. This reemergence 'frees' the world from the frozen grip of instrumental reason as exercised by 'worldless' subjects. Broadcasting has contributed to this process of freeing the world so that it can be found again as that which it truly, existingly is. It is not just this ir that but all manner of things that make up the peopled busyness of the world discplosed by radio and television. What is there to be talked about is not just weighty matters as they appear in news, current affiars and social concern documentaries. There are all sorts of things; the goings-on in soaps especially, but also fun things and odd things, and sporting 'moments' and last night's movie and a great deal else besides. The world-in-common of radio and television is by virtue of the ways in whcih it brings together into a common public domain what had hitherto been discrete and separate. This in part restores our sense of the wholeness of teh world as disclosed routinely by broadcasting. If broadcasting were a single-issue thing it would speak only to particular interest publics. But it speaks to a general interest public, which it indeed created, in which each member is acknowledged as a someone with the attributes of a person, not an anonymous cipher that gets aggregated into a mess." (171)