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The current transformation of television could be regarded both ways, as a crisis or as the complete opposite of a crisis. Television is in crisis as the result of a reconfiguration of its audiences. The crisis would be because television no longer addresses and unites a vast audience and loses its capacity to provide a cultural forum. The obvious narrative and aesthetic complexity of quality television comes at the price of a cultural void and the loss of a specific form of televisual complexity that finds its grounds in the volatile and everyday nature of television.

The first chapter is about the loss of the ordinariness of television. It is based on a philosophical concept. Television studies contribute to this reconfiguration actively, turning television into something no longer ordinary. Because the mature quality television genre is repressing the ordinariness of television, this chapter finds its main impulse in a growing dissatisfaction with this genre. 

Television (still) has the potential to transgress boundaries of class and culture. Similarly, the disintegration of television series from the everyday seems to be one reason why there are more books than ever on television, why it is easier but also less relevant to write about television.

There is no denying that television viewing is not what it used to be. Multichannel choice, the alternatives offered by downloads and streaming video on the internet and, last but not least, the opportunity to make one’s own television. High definition video cameras are available at reasonable prices; montage software can be downloaded without any problems. Any amateur who wishes to make television can do so.

In the second chapter the author argues that most thinking about television implicitly or explicitly refers to ‘the mass communication paradigm’. The mass communication paradigm consists of historically located theories and practices around television as the medium developed from the 1950s onwards. These theories and practices are often in discord. They share the notion that television is typically the medium of mass societies and that there is a centralized source and a multitude of dispersed viewers.

Most essays know that quality television is not a matter of good television, but a matter of promoting customized programs for a niche audience in the TV III age. Nevertheless, the author has the impression that some central issues in relation to why people are doing television studies are not addressed. Reading, in the sense of cultural studies and other scholarly works about television, had always meant to transgress a boundary that detained from finding television significant.

Television itself once provided a negative point of reference for the culture: ‘Television secures the distinction of all non-televisual cultural forms’. Now, it is some forms of television that fulfill this function, indicating that the audience of television is changing, that popular television no longer provides a cultural forum.  Television studies, which has been and is still advocating the study of all forms of television and especially of reality television, possibly suffers from the attention quality television series are given by scholars coming from media, film and literary studies. Many viewers and scholars alike want to be addressed as media literate individuals, as members of a new class of digital elite, endlessly downloading programs to be the first and sometimes the last to get access to new quality series.

It is important to re-embed the study of programs within the study of television. Some works on quality television prove that television studies can profit from the study of quality television, but fan/scholar literature often ignores the aesthetic properties of television itself.

Everyday presence gives television a sense of being ordinary in an unambiguous way, meaning ephemeral, taken for granted, unimportant, not really art. But within this ordinariness lies the potential to address the viewers in a specific way. People are often surprised, challenged but also irritated by television. It does not mean that within a vast variety of banal television programs hides the one program that rewards all the dull moments spent watching television. The extraordinariness of some moments or of some programs is allied with the ordinariness of television.

Before arguing what is entailed in respecting the autonomy of how television is understood in everyday life and how this is a different challenge for critical theory than actual technological or political developments, it should be clear that what, here, is called the paradigm of mass communication is part of a ‘dispositif’ that has been severely criticized in cultural studies. A caricature of the mass communication paradigm would point to the strong focus on media effects, the reification of quantitative methods and its administrative orientation. From a critical perspective, there is little to be gained by a paradigm that favors a top-down view of audiences as ‘masses’ and that sharply distinguishes between proper and improper behavior. Cultural studies, on the contrary, has argued that a bottom-up perspective of culture as the ways in which people make meaning, is more conducive to understanding how television functions and may effectuate different types of meanings.

Beyond technologies of dissemination and production and beyond the family set in the living room, the paradigm of mass communication still offers ‘programming’, ‘liveness’ and even particular types of narrative in national news programs and in indigenous television fiction. Instead of focusing on new media forms and cultures, critical cultural studies ironically needs to pay more attention than ever to mainstream thinking about TV.

It could be the case that television has a stronger bulwark of professionals than other media and that it is just a matter of time before production relations are rewritten. Experiences in the world of game development suggest otherwise. Even in the game industry, characterized by its tight bonds between gamers and the publishers and developers, new relations of power and dependence have not emerged. While the game industry is open to initiatives and the skills of gifted individuals, these individuals cannot really hope for more than to have their idea for a game or software improvement taken into production. It is highly unlikely that they will reap much profit from this. While, evidently, within the gaming world this type of recognition is felt to be worthwhile, it can hardly be understood as a form of empowerment, such as claimed by media optimists.

European television was organized and regulated on the level of nation states, who sought to control the new medium, which they deemed important to support the nation as ‘one people’. Television was instrumental in uniting citizens into one ‘imagined community’, creating unprecedented moments of simultaneously shared experiences, both exceptional media events such as royal coronations or weddings and everyday programs such as daily news broadcasts, soaps and game shows.  European public broadcasting was the prime model in this respect, but in an era of limited competition commercial broadcasters could equally create imagined communities. While never truly encompassing the whole nation or completely erasing all internal differences, broadcast television in its first decades was probably the closest people ever got to actual ‘imagined communities’ of media users.

Technological changes – from antenna to cable and satellite reception, from analogue to digital signals – offer consumers ever increasing possibilities and choices, in the process further eroding the sense of a nationwide, shared viewing experience. Programs and formats travel in ever expanding circles, creating a ‘global’ television marketplace.

‘Globalization’ has been one of the buzzwords of media studies in the past decades. The increasing border-crossing has led some to predict the ‘end of nations’, while others are tempted to announce the ‘death of national television’. However, many have subsequently questioned such statements, qualifying the claims of globalization theory and observing the persistence of both the national and national television. Contrary to early beliefs, globalization does not simply imply homogenization as there is a constant tension with powers of heterogenization. The local does remain important and the global and the local are considered as ‘mutually constitutive’. Globalization is now perceived as going hand in hand with heterogenization and the creation of hybrid ‘glocal’ forms of the global. Cultural identities are not one-sidedly based on the national anymore, as other layers – global, regional, local – now simultaneously form part of complex, postmodern identities.

In many national settings, radio entered the world as much a military affair as a grassroots, amateur, two-way medium. The emergence of broadcasting was sometimes related to hardware companies seeking to promote their wares, or to a combination of various commercial, public, and state institutions. Yet in most cases, government regulatory agencies quickly attempted to put the genie back into the bottle, constraining pluriform radio practices by claiming technical and national security reasons. Standardization and regulatory bodies with mandates to control technology, frequency and programme content prevailed. The imposition of a broadcasting monopoly, which was maintained until 1981, when private and commercial radio was finally permitted to operate.

Each setting had its tales of signal interference and broadcaster malfeasance. In each case, national interest was invoked to stabilize the broadcasting environment, albeit with the difference that in the state and public service zones, what was good for the public was good for the nation; what was good for business and not harmful to the public, was good for the nation. In both cases, the medium was understood to be more than a source of information, a site of engagement with the public sphere, or even entertainment: its effects, whether on the construction of nation or the marketplace were held to be certain, if somewhat unspecified. 

Television, like radio before it, was imagined as an instrument in the service of the nation. The Nazi German example is, of course, extreme – as the conflation of Volk and nation, or blood and earth in the period’s vernacular, might suggest. The basic structure of state operated infrastructure, user license fee financing, and private sector hardware development, all in the interest of the nation, was hardly exceptional.

Television was generally too ephemeral a media presence in the prewar years to command its own research profile, and in Germany at any rate, extraordinarily high levels of social control seem to have dampened public critiques of politically supported initiatives. It is nevertheless clear that a cluster of perceived television effects motivated Germany’s significant investment in the development of the medium, and stated positively, offered something of an inverse confirmation of Arnheim’s perceptions.

The traditional idea of a medium as a coherent entity has already been questioned in a number of historical studies that explicitly explore the changing character and the heterogeneity of different media. more often than not these insights are confined by at least two persistent assumptions: 

1) The heterogeneity of media is analyzed with reference to the specific medium’s formative years. This implies that after a phase of turbulent changes and redefinitions a medium will ultimately take on a stable form that lasts until a new technology completely redefines the field and causes the end of the medium’s ‘life cycle’; 

2) Homogeneity remains the reference point when it comes to explaining a medium’s social effects, which are mostly conceptualized as resulting from the implementation of a stable technological and institutional structure. Transformation, thus, is not considered a constant or decisive feature of the medium.

Similar to television, the laboratory is a complex constellation of practices and technologies: it produces phenomena that can be scrutinized and manipulated by experimental procedures – just as television produces audiences or cultural objects that can be sold to advertisers or become objects of political endeavor. Moreover, and instrumental to our aims, the concept of the laboratory – or to be more specific: the ‘experimental system’ – opens a new perspective on processes of media transformation. Science and technology studies argue that it is precisely the constant transformation of a system, which accounts for its efficiency.

The pertinence and function of newly introduced scientific technology is often disputed until it eventually becomes accepted by the scientific community and, as a result, can be used without further reflection on it.

Once the theoretical foundations had been consolidated, actor-network theory (ANT) attracted the attention of scholars from other disciplines that used its concepts in order to study topics that were not strictly scientific or technological.

At the core of ANT is the idea that every existing phenomenon consists of actors that operate within a network. A network is not a given but is something that has to be established. It needs to be kept together; in other words, it is a precarious achievement. The reason for this is that the actors in the network work together but they also have the tendency to ‘drift off’, or go their own way. Even those phenomena that seem very solid and unshakeable consist of bits and pieces that have to be kept together.

Apart from its surprising ontology, ANT has also developed a vocabulary that is particularly apt for describing how networks are kept together. The symmetrical approach should not be confused with the idea that every actor occupies equal power positions – to do so would make ANT a pluralist approach, which it is not.

For the purpose of this paper, three terms will be examined: the translator-spokesperson, obligatory passage points and immutable mobiles.

The translator-spokesperson is any actor who ‘translates’ other actors and tries to mobilize them in an actor-network. Translation is best described as the process of defining other actors, attributing roles to them, and the subsequent attempts to enroll them in a network.

The broadcaster functions as a translator-spokesperson, ordering shows that will fit the target demographics of a time slot, thus attributing not only roles to the viewers, but also to production companies and advertisers. In sum, the media network is full of attempts at translation, and actors habitually construct themselves as translator-spokespersons, claiming to speak for other actors.

The work offers many great contributions supporting an understanding of television and the transformative process of audiovisual culture, and many contributions succeed in providing a televisual context for the examination of quality series. The article referred to a transgressiveness of television as an object still embedded in the everyday, ignored by many works approaching mature quality programs. The concept of the ordinariness of television could serve as a strategic objective to move into other areas of serial television, to find a perspective on what, unlike quality television, is hidden in plain sight and therefore invisible.

Television is not a book-like object read in solitude and silence. Television is still experienced and not read. Television is still ordinary in many ways. It gives meaning to the casual viewer, it still provides material for the imagination of the avid fan, and even the most mature quality television series should be read as an object embedded in television culture and its viewer should be regarded as being part of an audience and not as consumer of customized products.

While television is changing, technologically and culturally, and critical scholars point to a completely new way of using and thinking media, in everyday life relatively old-fashioned notions of the media rule.

The logic of broadcast media is to both please and surprise audiences, who are best pleased if they can maintain a balance between knocking down most of what they see with an occasional exceptional moment of good television to produce as proof of their own discernment. Since there is hardly any sustained discussion of media texts other than in the academy and a few select discussion forums, discernment never has to be put to the test. That leaves only the option to follow in the steps of the paradigm of mass media and to use popular media with new types of advice and challenges to win over television viewers to a type of viewership that is not especially demanding of their own discernment but does invite them to challenge the industry. More and better television can be had.

1. TV - телевизор

2. remote control - пульт дистанционного управления

3. record player - проигрыватель

4. speaker - динамик

5. record - запись, пластинка

6. headphones - наушники

7. radio - радио

8. microphone - микрофон

9. button - кнопка

10. extension cord - удлинитель со шнуром

11. outlet - розетка

12. antenna - антенна

13. battery - батарейка

14. stop - стоп