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.

It’s exactly because Zworykin’s poetics proceeds from a painstaking discussion of the affordances of mechanical vs. electronic image scanning and transmission, for instance, that he is able to list possible visual effects ranging from the realistic to the fantastic:

The possibility of electrically combining all or parts of two sets, of fading from one set to another, of combining all positive and negative pictures, and many similar means of creating illusions make it certain that this new medium of entertainment provides opportunity for many interesting effects when the fantastic is desired.  This same flexibility is also an aid in obtaining realism in dramatic production.  In this respect the new vehicle much more closely resembles moving pictures than it does the stage. (623)

As a principal researcher in the 1930s NBC transmission tests with the studio iconoscope camera (pictured above), Zworykin uses his “contact with the television of today” to project a multi-stage “future of television.” The farthest edges of this extrapolation approaches a kind of singularity:  “The third and final phase will come when television becomes a more or less general means of broadcasting intelligence.  When this phase will arrive cannot be foretold because so many unknown factors are involved.” As one possible modality of this “general broadcasting intelligence,” Zworykin gestures toward a new kind of ambient image reception in which the television set becomes just another object in the furniture of everyday life:

Many programs will be watched from start to finish with close attention.  However, there will also be many programs when the user of the receiver will merely listen to the sound and will look at the picture only every now and then when his attention is particularly attracted.  Television will enable him to see whatever he so desires.  As soon as there is general recognition of the fact that a radio receiver need no longer be blind, the acceptance of television is inevitable. (631)

The fact that engineers were thinking so early on about the nature and future of television programming should give us pause when we encounter the common claim that television’s mode of transmission leaves no traces on the “content” delivered.