Helen Kelly-Holmes
School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK |
| What makes television such a fascinating and challenging object of study is precisely what makes it so frustrating: its instability. Stabilityor rather the lack of itprovided a leitmotif through our discussion during the first seminar in the 'Media and Society' strand of the Current Issues in Language and Society seminar series. Terms such as 'destabilisation', 'disorientation', 'dislocation' featured time and again as we attempted to make sense of the current impact of the multi-channel environment of satellite and cable television, barely daring to predict the effects of 'mega-channel-land', once digital television becomes more widely established. |
| What are the implications of this development for society, for groups, for identities, for our sense of time, space, place, for education, for language, for genres, for 'ideologies', for communication, for our work as teachers even? These were all issues of concern raised during the seminar. The level of concern was, one suspects, perhaps a feature of the fact that most of us participating were products of what Wenham (1982) terms the 'second age of television', when '... television was organised as a regulated and essentially national medium dependent on the scarce resource of electromagnetic frequencies' (Smith, 1998: 1). Now, thanks largely to technological innovation and also ideological shifts, 'television is becoming, at its roots, international, prolific, regulated lightly if at all' (Smith, 1998: 1). This ideological shift is also reflected in how we think about television today. As Price (1995) points out: |
 | | | Rather than thinking of broadcasting entities as primarily 'public' or 'private' our mental categories have a new divide: global broadcasting enterprises, regional (supranational) broadcasting enterprises, and, then, a residual category of broadcasting entities that work primarily within traditional borders, often more locally than before (Price, 1995: 17). |
| All of the issues we discussed are far from disputed. Before contemplating whether or not satellite, cable and digital television will destabilise identities, we must ask ourselves whether television actually contributes to a sense of identity, and, if so, how? On the one hand, it can be argued that during the 'first' and 'second' ages of broadcasting, television (and also radio) '... provided the concentrated essence of a nationally authorised culture' (Smith)no more evident than in 'Auntie BBC', whose founding mission today reads like paternalistic propaganda. Such terrestrial channels, the national, publicly funded channels in particular, constructed 'the nation', the public that sat down together to share the news about their place and time issued authoritatively from the capital. More than this, however, as Smith (1998) points out, 'what the inventors never quite realised was that television would become normative, that so much of what we see on the screen would contrive to suggest how things ought or ought |
|
