Vladimir Zworykin shows us how to love a 19-inch Motorola

Television remains a blind spot for media theory.  From postwar newspaper reviewers to cultural studies academics, the impossibility of isolating the scope of the televisual “text” to a single unit of analysis has posed a great challenge for many critics. In coming to terms with the fact of television, a great amount of time is spent on the effort of wrapping some sort of intelligible model around the sheer pervasiveness of the medium.

A common fallback position is to simply say that television has no attributes of its own.  It is not a medium––let alone an art form––with any distinctive features.  TV reviewer Richard Burgheim, in the August 1969 issue of Harpers:  “Television … is not one of the arts but a mere transmitter of them. How do you love a 19-inch Motorola or a network vice-president?”

Raymond Williams writes with similar conviction in that seminal book with the perfect subtitle, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974):

Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content.  When the question of content was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically. (18)

Content was merely an afterthought to the primary economic incentive to develop and construct a television infrastructure.  “The general social definition of ‘content’ was already there” (22), providing a store of earlier social forms and events in order to serve the expansion of the broadcast apparatus:  news, sporting events, debates, and techniques stolen from theatrical and motion picture language.

And yet there always seems something wrong with this tried and true fallback position.  Burgheim at once poses and shies away from the exact question we should be asking: how do we love a 19-inch Motorola?

Inventor of the iconoscope Vladimir Zworykin counts the ways in the less excitingly subtitled Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940). Co-authored with his colleague at RCA G.A. Morton, this book is an important and overlooked primer for attuning narrative analysis to the specificities of a given medium. After six hundred pages detailing the physics of electrons and fluorescence, the principles of UHF transmission and reception, and several working prototypes of complete tv systems, Zworykin devotes the concluding section of the book to what is no less than a poetics of television programming––programming which did not yet exist. Read the rest of this entry »

Television outside the set in “Old Master Q”

The other day, one of my students pointed me toward the Chinese manhua series ”Old Master Q.”  Created by Alfonso Wong in the early 1960s, the comic parodied aspects of modern Chinese culture such as consumerism, pop music, technology, and the increasing prevalence of the English language.

One of the most frequent themes taken up by the series is television. What strikes me about Wong’s work is the way in which the grammar of these jokes relies on an idea of the tv screen as a kind of permeable boundary.  Like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot trying to figure out the “conveniences” of modern technology, Old Master Q bashes his set, flips it upside down, takes it with him to soccer matches, and tries to track the movement of images beyond their frame. The humor stems from the fact that each time, Q either assumes that the images transcend the glass plane of the CRT screen, or they actually do. Beginning with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914), there has been an established tradition of comics whose humor relies on play with panel boundaries, size and scale. Here, Alfonso Wong uses the tv set to embed this aesthetic within square, even panels.

“Old Master Q” injects absurdity into the way people understood tv sets to work, and in the process leaves an archive of potential and everyday television use in 1960s China. Most often, these jokes revolve around the gullibility of the Master Q (click through for larger images)…

…or the physicality of the images themselves, as if the tv’s content could literally bounce around inside the set:

But there are other panels whose humor reimagines modes of television spectatorship…

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