1. How Should We Write a History of Television? -- 2. A Dominant Narrative in Irish Television History -- 3. Personal Memory and Social Power -- 4. Making Sense of Television -- 5. Memories of Imported Programmes and International Broadcasts -- 6. Time, Space and Television -- 7. Recollection and Social Status -- 8. Putting the Bishop and the Nightie to Bed -- 9. Personally Remembering the Global -- Index.
The first television broadcasts in Ireland were watched in the 1950s. These initial programmes were British. This history of these early viewers, however, has been ignored. A dominant narrative has addressed the history of television in Ireland as the history of the public broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Thus, the history of Irish television often begins in 1961, overlooking Irish people's experience of the medium in the preceding decade. This paper breaks with traditional historiography by employing life history interviews to explore the uses, rituals and feelings attached to television in the years before RTÉ. Irish people who watched television in the 1950s are often passed off in literature as 'enthusiasts'. Connotations of an inconsequential private hobby are misleading. As early as 1953 there were public controversies surrounding the broadcast of the Coronation of Elizabeth II. By May 1954, the Irish Times was publishing BBC television listings. In 1955 there were an estimated 4,000 television sets in Ireland. 1958 saw an estimated 20,000 television sets in the country. Nevertheless the experience of television at this time has gone unexplored. This limitation in historical accounts stems, in part, from sourcing. There has been a heavy reliance on sources 'from above', archives and official documents, and 'from the side', memoirs, press coverage and so. British programmes were inside many Irish homes but lay outside the game of Irish politics. As such they left few traces in Dáil debates, national archives, newspaper reports and so on. A dependence on official sources has amplified certain ideas about television in Ireland while silencing others. A focus on the institutional has also encouraged media historians to ignore audiences. To date there has been little use of sources from 'below'. Mindful of the limitations of memory work and oral history as a method this work triangulates with sources 'from above' and 'from the side'. It will show television to have been a source of prestige, envy and aspiration. Upsetting the current orthodoxy, for many people, their earliest memories of television are attached to British rather than Irish programmes. This is to be expected since television has always been a transnational media phenomenon. Nevertheless, across the world, historians have insisted on recalling it within national boundaries.
Cathode Ray Memories: Television as memory and social practice The history of television in Ireland is, predominantly, an institutional history. Indeed, rather than studying television in Ireland most commentary addresses Irish television as embodied by Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). There are plentiful accounts of RTÉ, its programmes, personalities and the circuits of institutional power surrounding it. This is a history populated by political and clerical elites, and written by their cultural counterparts. Institutional crises surrounding RTÉ have been used as a proxy for the experiences of Irish people. With few alternatives, this perspective has underpinned common sense understandings of how television has helped to shape Irish society. Ironically, in attempts to explain the effect of the medium in Ireland the medium itself is overlooked. There is little comment on the changes in pace and scale that television technology has introduced. There has been no investigation of the medium's effect on the use of time, daily habits, family routines and so on. Such ubiquitous changes, lying outside the fields of parliamentary and cultural politics, have been overlooked. They are hidden in plain sight. To understand the effect of television in Ireland, as opposed to Irish television, this paper moves beyond the narratives that have predominated heretofore. Methodologically, it takes a necessary step beyond the limitations of a dependence on broadcast archives, newspaper records and official archives. It asks people, rather than tells them, how television has shaped their lives. Following the life story methods of Jerome Bourdon, it presents a pilot analysis of Irish memories of television. It tries to identify, and make explicit, common themes in the collective memory of television. Mindful of the medium, its affordances and the everyday rituals that are built around it, the paper traces and analyses memories of how television has re-shaped social practice.
As an intellectual, the first duty of the academic who wishes to engage with society is on the level of ideas, writes Eddie Brennan. Trying to build a new society within the institutions, language and politics of the nineteenth century is hopeless; what is needed from intellectuals and academics is rebellious thought.
This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society . This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through deliberate design. Rather it is an unintended consequence of television production's response to economic and practical necessity. In their form, content and production practices formats are pre-adapted to the demands of a globalised media market place. This commercial logic has given formats a peculiar signature in terms of what they can and cannot represent.
This article argues that humour can provide researchers with a unique access point into the professional cultures of media producers. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfil several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the 'emotional labour' that increasingly precarious media work demands. For production research, the everyday joking and banter of media workers can provide an important and, heretofore, overlooked means of accessing culture, meaning, consensus and conflict in media organizations. The article argues that humour's organizational role should be considered as a sensitizing concept when designing production research.
This article is part of a larger study that sought to measure community satisfaction with and perceptions about the economic impact of state correctional facilities located within four rural communities in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.The project culminated in the development of recommendations for policies that could benefit rural communities presently hosting, or considering hosting, a correctional institution. This article briefly discusses the relevant literature and the methodology used in the study and then presents and discusses policy recommendations in a rank ordering based on their relative importance. The goal of this research is to recommend policies that may improve the sometimes strained relationships between correctional institutions and their host communities.
Frontmatter --Contents --Digging into Digital Roots. Towards a Conceptual Media and Communication History --Technologies and Connections --Networks --Media Convergence --Multimedia --Interactivity --Artificial Intelligence --Agency and Politics --Global Governance --Data(fication) --Fake News --Echo Chambers --Digital Media Activism --Users and Practices --Telepresence --Digital Loneliness --Amateurism --User-Generated Content (UGC) --Fandom --Authenticity --Authors
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