William Boddy
Biographic Data
| ID | 1375335 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Boddy |
| GIVEN NAMES | William |
| FAMILY NAME | Boddy |
| SIGNATURE | BODDY W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Baruch College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3967-5828 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 34 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Contradictions of Care in the Rhetoric of US Broadcast Policy, 1920 to 1970
This article examines the way competing notions of care have been enlisted in broadcast policy debates from the beginnings of commercial radio in the 1920s to the radical guerrilla TV movement of the 1960s. The term’s semantic and ideological flexibility has provided an ethical rationale for the state allocation of a scarce public resource, a justification for restrictions on program content organized by “careful and caring” industry leaders and …
Revisiting Postwar Theater Television
This essay explores the largely unsuccessful attempts to exploit electronic moving images in public cinemas in the United States between 1946 and 1953 as a case study of failed technological innovation. Scrutinizing the contemporaneous trade and popular press, the essay untangles the complicated web of interests and tactics among firms across the industries of theatrical exhibition, electronic manufacturing, and commercial broadcasting involved i…
Thrills Sweep Like Electric Currents through Multitudes’
This article analyses contemporaneous debates over the competing screen formats, venues, and technological platforms designed to deliver moving images to domestic and public audiences in mid-twentieth century America. The postwar crisis in the American theatrical box office witnessed changes in film gauges, aspect ratios, and theater sound as well as in the architectural design of motion picture theaters, and the article examines the failed innov…
A genealogy of electronic moving image displays
This essay addresses one element of the ongoing process of moving image culture "going digital", a process which includes the move to digital terrestrial broadcasting, the introduction of the digital video recorder, and the shift to digital formats in theatrical film exhibition. Specifically, I would like to explore some of the promotional strategies associated with the recent shift from cathode-ray tube to flat panel display technologies, not on…
“Is It TV Yet?”
Beyond the Multiplex
A century of electronic cinema
The prospect of the electronic distribution and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures has provoked fearful, even apocalyptic, warnings from some in the contemporary Hollywood industry. While the immediate prospects for, and consequences of, the end of celluloid-based exhibition are unclear, the shift to digital cinema has already complicated some of the fundamental business models, industry practices, and power relations within the film and te…
Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs
As Popular Press interest in the fanciful imaginative landscapes of virtual reality faded, the late 1990s marked the culmination of a long technological, policy-making, and marketing campaign waged by a diverse set of private interests to bring digital television into American and British homes. An examination of digital television’s distinct fortunes in the United States and Great Britain offers revealing insights into some of the most persisten…
Redefining the Home Screen
One Way To Assess the significance of recent technological innova tions associated with the shift from analogue to digital television platforms in the United States is to chart their impact upon traditional assumptions about television and its audience, assumptions themselves informed by specific historical forces within and beyond the television industry. The turmoil which accompanied the medium’s transition to digital standards at the end of th…
High Tech in a Falling Market
Despite a decade of both apocalyptic and utopian predictions about life in the ‘post-television era’, the effects of technological and industrial realignments upon actual viewing practices and the advertising and programme forms of American television are still quite uncertain. This chapter provides a context for understanding these contemporary disputes through two case studies: the long and unhappy commercial history of interactive television o…
‘Too Easy, Too Cheap and Too Fast to Control’
Many Of The Prevailing assumptions about the future of movingimage culture in the United States which emerged out of the consumer prosperity and booming capital markets of the 1990s were suddenly subjected to new scrutiny in the wake of economic recession and military mobilization at the end of 2001. This chapter examines some of the implications for media scholars and educators of the media landscape transformed by the precipitous declines in sh…
The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor
If The Previous chapter on early radio pointed to a set of remarkably enduring images of domestic media users, this chapter will examine how such constructions of the media audience were deployed in the commercial rivalries associated with the launch of US commercial television after the Second World War. An analysis of the public and trade debates over the nature, uses, and even economic viability of commercial television in the 1940s suggests t…
Wireless Nation
Despite Ubiquitous Claims for the revolutionary nature of the changes associated with the current transition from analogue to digital moving-image media, there is little doubt that the public’s first experiences with wireless communication 100 years ago represent a period of more traumatic uncertainty and improvisation than our own. Moreover, the fundamental economic models, institutions, programme forms, and audience practices which emerged from…
How God Watches Television
Under The Headline ‘TiVo Revolutionizes TV’, a technology review in Chicago Sun-Times on 8 May 2001 opened with this enthusiastic flourish: ‘At the end of your first day with TiVo, you will finally blink and shout, “Holy cats, this must be how God watches television!” ’ In the brief column which follows, columnist Andy Ihnatko first described TiVo as ‘a powerful video bouncer, making sure that the VIPs get through and the losers stay behind the v…
Cinema and Wireless in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination
Historians Of Early cinema and electronic media have long operated in mutual isolation, drawing upon quite distinct historiographic assumptions, methods, and research materials. This isolation is remarkable, not only given the historical coincidence of the technological development of both cinema and the wireless at the end of the nineteenth century, but also in light of the ways in which popular responses to the anticipation and early experience…
Title Pages
US Television Abroad, 1960/1990
Following The Traumatic post-war debates over the viability and nature of commercial television in the American home, the TV industry settled into a half-century of remarkable economic growth and institutional stability. However, after decades of steady expansion and stable industry structures, the early 1990s marked—in both the USA and Europe, in both public service and commercial television systems—a moment of crisis in political and economic l…
Conclusion
Subject Radio Film Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Dedication
Marketers Strike Back
By The End of the 1990s, the possible effects upon traditional television practices and programme forms brought about by the move to digital broadcasting and the introduction of the digital video recorder were hotly contested within the industry. The distinct capabilities of digital processing of the television signal—high definition, channel proliferation, and interactive services—together with the time-shifting and ad-zapping abilities of the d…
New Media and Popular Imagination
New Media and Popular Imagination places the current technological upheaval in audio-visual culture in the context of previous periods of twentieth-century media innovation. Examining popular and industry responses to the introduction of radio, television, and digital media into the home, the book underscores the continuities and disjunctions in the ways in which electronic media have been anticipated, promoted, and resisted in twentieth-century …
The amateur, the housewife, and the salesroom floor
As a result of industry dissension and a record of previous unsuccessful attempts to launch commercial television in the US, the early postwar period constitutes a moment of unusual introspection and uncertainty within the broadcast industry about the place of the new medium in the home. The debates about the viability of commercial television within the trade and financial presses of the late 1940s were often framed by the discursive figures of …
Statement by William Boddy, Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York
Seeing through the Eighties
Journal Article Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. By Jane Feuer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. x, 168 pp. Cloth, $45.95, ISBN 0-8223-1675-7. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8223-1687-0.) Get access William Boddy William Boddy Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3,…
The Box
Journal Article The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961. By Jeff Kisseloff. (New York: Viking, 1995. xvi, 592 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-670-86470-6.) Get access William Boddy William Boddy Baruch College, City University of New York, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 2, September 1996, Pages 663–664, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945045 Published…
New Media and Popular Imagination
New Media and Popular Imagination places the current technological upheaval in audio-visual culture in the context of previous periods of twentieth-century media innovation. Examining popular and industry responses to the introduction of radio, television, and digital media into the home, the book underscores the continuities and disjunctions in the ways in which electronic media have been anticipated, promoted, and resisted in twentieth-century …
Operation frontal lobes versus the living room toy
The amateur, the housewife, and the salesroom floor
As a result of industry dissension and a record of previous unsuccessful attempts to launch commercial television in the US, the early postwar period constitutes a moment of unusual introspection and uncertainty within the broadcast industry about the place of the new medium in the home. The debates about the viability of commercial television within the trade and financial presses of the late 1940s were often framed by the discursive figures of …
"Approaching "The Untouchables
Historians of television face the challenge of working with an ill-defined and potentially limitless universe of ephemeral program texts, self-serving corporate and trade press documents, and elite critical commentary frequently marked by a willful superficiality and condescension. Moreover, beyond the formidable task of assembling an accurate descriptive account of television's changing modes of production and the shifting terms of economic and …
A century of electronic cinema
The prospect of the electronic distribution and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures has provoked fearful, even apocalyptic, warnings from some in the contemporary Hollywood industry. While the immediate prospects for, and consequences of, the end of celluloid-based exhibition are unclear, the shift to digital cinema has already complicated some of the fundamental business models, industry practices, and power relations within the film and te…
The Studios Move into Prime Time
Contemporary observers and historians of both the motion-picture industry and the network television industry portray the decade of the 1950s as a period of traumatic change. In traditional film histories, the period represents the site of convergent crises: the divorcement of the major studios from their theaters, the loss of a major part of the film audience, the political blacklist. In such accounts, the rise of network television becomes anot…
Entering ‘The Twilight Zone’
Journal Article Entering ‘The Twilight Zone’ Get access William Boddy William Boddy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 25, Issue 4-5, July-October 1984, Pages 98–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/25.4-5.98 Published: 01 July 1984
Entering ‘The Twilight Zone’
Journal Article Entering ‘The Twilight Zone’ Get access William Boddy William Boddy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 25, Issue 4-5, July-October 1984, Pages 98–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/25.4-5.98 Published: 01 July 1984
The Studios Move into Prime Time
Contemporary observers and historians of both the motion-picture industry and the network television industry portray the decade of the 1950s as a period of traumatic change. In traditional film histories, the period represents the site of convergent crises: the divorcement of the major studios from their theaters, the loss of a major part of the film audience, the political blacklist. In such accounts, the rise of network television becomes anot…
Operation frontal lobes versus the living room toy
La télé de guérilla revisitée
Boddy William. La télé de guérilla revisitée. In: Communications, 48, 1988. Vidéo, sous la direction de Raymond Bellour et Anne-Marie Duguet. pp. 155-166
Launching television
Spread like a monster blanket all over the country
Journal Article ‘Spread like a monster blanket all over the country’: CBS and television, 1929–33 Get access William Boddy William Boddy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 32, Issue 2, Summer 1991, Pages 173–183, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.2.173 Published: 01 July 1991
Fifties Television
Journal Article Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. By William Boddy. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. x + 294 pp. $29.95.) Get access Susan J. Douglas Susan J. Douglas Hampshire College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Page 741, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079676 Published: 01 September 1991
Deja View All Over Again
Statement by William Boddy, Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York
Seeing through the Eighties
Journal Article Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. By Jane Feuer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. x, 168 pp. Cloth, $45.95, ISBN 0-8223-1675-7. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8223-1687-0.) Get access William Boddy William Boddy Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3,…
The Box
Journal Article The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961. By Jeff Kisseloff. (New York: Viking, 1995. xvi, 592 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-670-86470-6.) Get access William Boddy William Boddy Baruch College, City University of New York, New York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 2, September 1996, Pages 663–664, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945045 Published…
"Approaching "The Untouchables
Historians of television face the challenge of working with an ill-defined and potentially limitless universe of ephemeral program texts, self-serving corporate and trade press documents, and elite critical commentary frequently marked by a willful superficiality and condescension. Moreover, beyond the formidable task of assembling an accurate descriptive account of television's changing modes of production and the shifting terms of economic and …
The amateur, the housewife, and the salesroom floor
As a result of industry dissension and a record of previous unsuccessful attempts to launch commercial television in the US, the early postwar period constitutes a moment of unusual introspection and uncertainty within the broadcast industry about the place of the new medium in the home. The debates about the viability of commercial television within the trade and financial presses of the late 1940s were often framed by the discursive figures of …
Weather Porn and the Battle for Eyeballs
As Popular Press interest in the fanciful imaginative landscapes of virtual reality faded, the late 1990s marked the culmination of a long technological, policy-making, and marketing campaign waged by a diverse set of private interests to bring digital television into American and British homes. An examination of digital television’s distinct fortunes in the United States and Great Britain offers revealing insights into some of the most persisten…
Redefining the Home Screen
One Way To Assess the significance of recent technological innova tions associated with the shift from analogue to digital television platforms in the United States is to chart their impact upon traditional assumptions about television and its audience, assumptions themselves informed by specific historical forces within and beyond the television industry. The turmoil which accompanied the medium’s transition to digital standards at the end of th…
High Tech in a Falling Market
Despite a decade of both apocalyptic and utopian predictions about life in the ‘post-television era’, the effects of technological and industrial realignments upon actual viewing practices and the advertising and programme forms of American television are still quite uncertain. This chapter provides a context for understanding these contemporary disputes through two case studies: the long and unhappy commercial history of interactive television o…
‘Too Easy, Too Cheap and Too Fast to Control’
Many Of The Prevailing assumptions about the future of movingimage culture in the United States which emerged out of the consumer prosperity and booming capital markets of the 1990s were suddenly subjected to new scrutiny in the wake of economic recession and military mobilization at the end of 2001. This chapter examines some of the implications for media scholars and educators of the media landscape transformed by the precipitous declines in sh…
The Amateur, the Housewife, and the Salesroom Floor
If The Previous chapter on early radio pointed to a set of remarkably enduring images of domestic media users, this chapter will examine how such constructions of the media audience were deployed in the commercial rivalries associated with the launch of US commercial television after the Second World War. An analysis of the public and trade debates over the nature, uses, and even economic viability of commercial television in the 1940s suggests t…
Wireless Nation
Despite Ubiquitous Claims for the revolutionary nature of the changes associated with the current transition from analogue to digital moving-image media, there is little doubt that the public’s first experiences with wireless communication 100 years ago represent a period of more traumatic uncertainty and improvisation than our own. Moreover, the fundamental economic models, institutions, programme forms, and audience practices which emerged from…
How God Watches Television
Under The Headline ‘TiVo Revolutionizes TV’, a technology review in Chicago Sun-Times on 8 May 2001 opened with this enthusiastic flourish: ‘At the end of your first day with TiVo, you will finally blink and shout, “Holy cats, this must be how God watches television!” ’ In the brief column which follows, columnist Andy Ihnatko first described TiVo as ‘a powerful video bouncer, making sure that the VIPs get through and the losers stay behind the v…
Cinema and Wireless in Turn of the Century Popular Imagination
Historians Of Early cinema and electronic media have long operated in mutual isolation, drawing upon quite distinct historiographic assumptions, methods, and research materials. This isolation is remarkable, not only given the historical coincidence of the technological development of both cinema and the wireless at the end of the nineteenth century, but also in light of the ways in which popular responses to the anticipation and early experience…
Title Pages
US Television Abroad, 1960/1990
Following The Traumatic post-war debates over the viability and nature of commercial television in the American home, the TV industry settled into a half-century of remarkable economic growth and institutional stability. However, after decades of steady expansion and stable industry structures, the early 1990s marked—in both the USA and Europe, in both public service and commercial television systems—a moment of crisis in political and economic l…
Conclusion
Subject Radio Film Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Dedication
Cinema and Media Studies (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Advertising (14 works) · Art (14 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Business (13 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · History (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works)