C792 Media Guide for Radio, Television & Modern Life
Key Facts
-Career summary from his CV includes the phrases "a pioneer of British communication and media studies since the 1970s" and "internationally renowned historian of broadcasting"
-Is currently working on a book entitled Love and Communication, the third in a 'trilogy' with his 2007 and 2014 books
-Holds a degree in English literature from Oxford
-Holds a postgraduate certificate in Education from the University of Hull
-Began postgraduate work in English literature but quit after one year, calling it a "total waste of time"
I did my teaching practice in an inner city comprehensive school and found it emotionally exhausting. So I was applying for jobs in advertising when I saw a little ad in the Sunday Times. It said: ‘The Polytechnic/Lecturer in Communication’ and then went on to say: ‘must be interested in film, television, radio and theatre’. Well who isn’t? So I applied though I’d no idea what a polytechnic was, nor what a lecturer in communication might do. To my great surprise I got the job. I accepted it and I suppose I have spent the rest of my life, the last forty years, trying to discover how to be a lecturer in communication.
Paddy Scannell
It’s worth saying something about how we started up an undergraduate degree course in Media Studies in the mid 1970s - I still think of this as our most enduring achievement, for all of us involved in getting it going. In the early 1970s Polytechnics were allowed to become degree awarding bodies, like the universities, subject to their courses being monitored and validated by a national body, the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards), so we decided then to go for an honours degree in Media Studies. ... We taught practical, industry-oriented options in broadcasting and newspaper journalism. The new thing was on the Theory side, as we came to call it. ... In preparation for all this some of us needed re-training and in 1974 I attended Stuart Hall’s famous Monday theory seminar which he taught the graduate students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. It was this experience that got me away from teaching Eng Lit and into thinking seriously about media and communication.
I wanted to try and capture the communicative ethos of radio and television which I now thought of as expressed in the sociable character of ordinary talk, or conversation. A little program produced in Manchester in the mid-30s, the Harry Hopeful series, was the first instance, in the BBC, of broadcast talk as entertainment, as fun, as pure sociability. How it came about is described in our BBC history. How it worked as fun, as entertainment was what I went on to consider in my next book. I wanted to explore the communicative character of talk on radio and television in actual instances, and to begin to apply what I was learning from the sociology of interaction, conversational analysis and pragmatics. The sociable character of talk is a many sided, complex thing and it raises questions of sincerity, authenticity, spontaneity and performance all of which I tried to open up and examine in Radio, Television and Modern Life.
The eye-opening text for me was by Harvey Sacks - ‘Doing being ordinary’ - which I discuss in Radio, Television and Modern Life. I think Sacks was a genius and this was one of his most stunning insights into the performed self. It builds of course on Erving Goffman who supervised his PhD and Harold Garfinkel, and all the work of Goffman, Garfinkel and Sacks became foundational for how I thought of, and tried to understand communication as interaction, an action between people in specific institutional and non-institutional social settings in the various situations and circumstances of mundane daily life. You know in most studies of radio and television the question of their informative and entertainment roles is always taken as given. Entertainment programs are accepted as entertaining, without pausing to consider how, in fact, they are produced as entertaining; and likewise for informative programs. But how, for instance can we (as viewers) distinguish between being informed and being entertained - the answer, in large part, is that they both depend on very different kinds of performance, different ways of staging the program-event, different styles of talk etc etc. And on the basis of this communicative labour we, viewers, make our assessments and find the performers and their performances to be authentic, sincere, funny, serious, boring… or not as the case may be. And this is the fundamental interpretative work of human social interaction.
I think it was Colin Sparks who put me on to him at the start of the 1990s. He said ‘you’re interested in everyday life - you should look at Heidegger’. This was news to me. All I knew about Heidegger was that he’d been a Nazi and was somehow responsible for existentialism which I associated with Sartre and I knew I didn’t like it or him. But I was certainly interested in the analysis of everyday life so I started looking into Heidegger (thank you Colin!) and it was a revelation - Being and Time remains the single most important, life-changing thing I have ever read. ... I got two things from it immediately that have remained with me: a quite new understanding of what it means to speak of ‘the world’, and that its fundamental structure is care: the world as a care-structure. Care as the truth of our human condition, our being in the world, and the world’s care for us and all living things. Now what it means to speak of this - the meaning and significance of care - is something you have to earn. Heidegger earns his insights through the extraordinary intellectual quest that he undertakes in BT. It is a winding journey round the huge hill, cragged and steep, of Truth. That is what he is seeking, and if you, as his reader, are willing to accompany him you will get to and share something of his hard-won understanding of the truth of what it is to be human and to be confronted, as human beings uniquely are, with the question of existence, with what it is to be alive and living in the world. It was an awesome achievement and I am profoundly grateful and thankful for Heidegger’s great effort on our behalf.
Key Quotes
I was very much under the influence of Marshall McLuhan at this time. He was the only person I’d read that seemed to have anything interesting, relevant and new to say about ‘the media’ as we were learning to call them, thanks to him.
I wanted to say that what radio and television do is they re-produce the world as ordinary. I got that from the study of production; these were real programs made by real people working in real institutions under real constraints for real audiences - people who actually did watch and listen. It was an everyday worldly thing; television and radio were part of ordinary people’s real lives. It gave them a sense of what was going on the wider world in which they lived and at the same time was part of their world and their life.
Career Timeline
1967: Took position as Lecturer in Communication at Regent Street Polytechnic
1979: Helped found and edit the journal Media, Culture and Society
1986: Co-edited Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader
1991: Published A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 with David Cardiff
1991: Edited, wrote intro, and co-wrote a chapter for Broadcast Talk
1992: Co-edited Culture and Power
1994: Editor for journal The Canadian Journal of Communication
1996: Published Radio, Television and Modern Life
2000: Editor for journal Media History
2006: Took tenured position in Department of Communication at the University of Michigan
2007: Published Media and Communication
2007: Organized colloquium with Elihu Katz on "The End of Television"
2014: Published Television and the Meaning of 'Live': An Enquiry into the Human Situation
Perhaps I should explain my recent PhD! When the possibility of a job at Michigan came up I sent in my CV and they wrote back ‘Great stuff, but you’ve forgotten to mention your PhD’… well I didn’t have one of course, but it was made plain to me that I couldn’t get an academic job in an American university without one. So I did a PhD by published works at Westminster and the University was very helpful since I needed to do it rather quickly, to fit in with Michigan’s timetable for new appointments.
Let me offer a very minimal and inclusive definition of phenomenology as an effort at thinking about the world uncluttered by the usual academic baggage. That’s how I’ve put it in the introduction to Media and Communication [published in July 2007]. Ten years ago I’d have said in answer to your question that phenomenology was a code-word for Heidegger. Now I see him as one (very significant) instance of academics who try to think outside the academic box they find themselves stuck in - other examples in philosophy would be Wittgenstein and Austin, and in sociology there’s Sacks, Goffman and Garfinkel. Garfinkel is especially important for me. He wanted sociology to be less about the interpretation of social phenomena by sociologists, and more about the interpretations of social actors themselves - their ethno-methods, their ways of dealing with the situations in which they find themselves. Phenomenology tries to put on the back-burner what academics think and to treat seriously and respectfully what ordinary people (including broadcasters) think and do. This position, the phenomenological position, aspires to take everyday life at face value initially: in its terms in the first place rather than those of the academic with his or her theories and hypotheses about everyday life and the behaviours of social actors.
All quotes are from "An Interview with Professor Paddy Scannell" conducted by Tarik Sabry of the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster, July 2006