Ira D. Glick - Living with Television

Ira Glick & Sidney J. Levy

Preface by W. Lioyd Warner
With a new introduction by Kurt Lang

New material this edition copyright 2005 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2005052022

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30796-1 (pbk)

Based on studies conducted between 1957 and 1961, this book recalls what life in America was like before the television set in the living room became a family fixture. It should serve as a period piece for that dwindling number of us old enough to remember this decade, evoking memories of bygone attitudes toward television and the programs people once viewed and talked about. It should make all of ushowever youngaware of the many ways in which not only television but research about television have changed since the days when both were still in their infancy. Not only were screens far smaller than today but, for most people, color was still around the corner. Most households could afford only one set, which made viewing very much a family affair, with the set occupying a prominent place in the living room and parents and children often watching together. The highly popular programs they jointly enjoyed, such as Gunsmoke, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, The Price is Right, and the names of TV personalities whom they allowed to enter their lives, among them Red Skelton, Garry Moore, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Fred MacMurray, are no longer widely familiar. Some have been practically erased from the historical memory. Or, to switch perspective from the past to the future: how many television viewers, producers, program directors, and researchers in 1960 could have anticipated how much the largely self-imposed content restrictions, then in effect, would erode? Back then, characters in sitcoms did not casually commit marital infidelity, contemplate abortion, or utter now acceptable expletives. On the other hand, cigarette advertising, once the mainstay of popular shows, has been largely banished to be replaced, in part, by the repeat appearances of a former U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate as the pitchman for a pharmaceutical to cure erectile dysfunction, not to mention public discussion of condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS.

These are not surface changes. They reflect the competition among the three networks that dominated the airwaves, each vying for a larger share of the great audience, a term popularized by Gilbert Seldes, a now forgotten pundit of the popular arts. The large amount of free time people spent watching the limited number of programs translated into remarkably high program ratings. Not that viewers were undiscriminating. Their viewing choices were based on information available to them about both the humans and the fictional characters they met on the screen, many of whom they came to consider personal acquaintances who became a vital part of their everyday world. Indeed, many programs were real for those who loyally followed their personal dramas. There was no need then for networks to boost ratings by offering what are currently labeledreality shows. This sense of having been put in touch with reality through exposure to televised shows extended also to newscasts. Television, it was widely believed, allowed people to see for themselves and, even though, over the years, trust in television news has declined, faith in the impressions conveyed through ones own eyes seems somehow to have survived.

Meanwhile, the additional television channels made possible, first by the expansion of the spectrum and then by cable and satellite dishes, have created an abundance of program material. These technologies have chipped away at the conceptualization of the television audience as a mass audience, appropriate at a time when pay programs for television-on-demand were still in their experimental stage and the video-recording devices that enabled home viewers to save programs for later watching (with unwanted commercials edited out) were not yet available for either love or money. With the home computer fast becoming a household staple, technology has allowed advertisers to create and disseminate individually focused ads that pop up in response to keyword searches on search engines like Google or Yahoo. Finally, as television goes digital, televiewers should be able to download just about anything from the airwaves for their personal use. All these things have been undermining the economic structure of television broadcasting as described in this book.

Research methods have also reaped the benefits of advances in recording and transmission technologies. These same video-recorders and computers give researchers the tools to replay any program or commercial in its original version or to edit it so as to serve a variety of objectives. Data collected in experiments or on-line surveys can then be fed directly into computers able to handle previously unimaginable amounts of data, tabulate them almost instantaneously, and perform complex statistical analysis. Aided by rapidly advancing technology, researchers have managed to fine tune their messages by locating vulnerabilities of potential recipients and to tease out effects that eluded predecessors whose methodological efforts, judging by current standards, might seem to be rather unsophisticated.

Given these methodological advances some readers may be tempted to downgrade Living with Television as not especially scientific. I would strongly disagree. It certainly reflects careful interpretation of data collected by methods that were then state of the art and in some places are still employed today. There is a heavy reliance on the large number of fully open-ended questions collected in sixty-nine surveys, for which a total of 13,479 persons were interviewed, the large majority by telephone. Contact by phone is still the accepted method despite the increasing number of people who own only cell phones and the increasing use of online surveys. The investigators followed time-honored procedures in asking respondents how often they watched, what they liked or disliked, what they remembered, and in confronting them with paired word choices from which they were to select the one that better fit the program. But they do something more than tabulate for their commercial sponsors such phenomena as how much time Americans in different social categories were spending on watching television, audience size as it varied by time of day, season, number of stations in a market, special programming pr for the ratings and demographics of individual programs. Nor will those interested in the effect on ratings of such factors as place on the program schedule and competition in the same time segment find it here. More than likely, data of this genre were contained in reports to the commercial sponsor who funded these surveys but, to put it bluntly, this book contains no statistics, not even purely descriptive ones, beyond the two tables on the demographics of the samples for the different inquiries and on the total number of people interviewedinformation that, quite appropriately, is relegated to an appendix on methods.