The Front Row Is Reserved for Scotch Drinkers
Early Television's Tavern Audience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7500606 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anna Mccarthy (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 31-31 |
| Publication date | 1995-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225576 |
| OpenAlex | W2073583917 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 4 |
The early history of television viewing in United States is generally examined in relation to certain postwar trends: housing boom, suburbanization, growing consumption, increased leisure time, and an affluent working class.' Numerous sociological studies of middle-class populations at time depicted these trends as a series of profound transformations in relation between public and private spheres.2 Drawing upon these studies, Robert Fishman describes television in terms of evaporation of public life, arguing that TV constituted postwar suburb's perfect medium, bypassing the old centers of community . . . to go directly to home.3 More recently, broadcast historians have shown that TV's impact on community life was hardly this simple. Indeed, as Lynn Spigel and others have argued, medium provided a focus for cultural anxieties about these transformations.4 Suburbanization, Spigel points out, did not necessarily entail disappearance of community; rather, it was a specific configuration of a middle-class communal ideal in which communications forms such as TV meant that people could keep their distance from world but at same time imagine that their domestic spheres were connected to a wider social fabric.'5 Furthermore, discourses on TV as home entertainment in postwar years often articulated ambiguities inherent within bourgeois distinction between public and private: Television was caught in a contradictory movement between public and private worlds, and it often became a rhetorical figure for that contradiction.6 Spigel fully explores dynamics of this contradiction within physical space of home and in social milieu of suburban arrivistes, a population negotiating and adapting to a life of housing developments, automobiles, and new families. As several critics observe, advertisements for television receivers offered to reconfigure this lonely crowd as a family circle: kids on floor, parents in armchairs, and a ballerina on screen.' This image of early TV viewership is unquestionably most prevalent one in popular memory, perhaps leading to impression that middle-class suburban living room was only social space where TV was viewed. This essay aims to expand this impression of early TV audience by investigating medium's emergence outside home and within a larger
Art · Front (military · Geography · Humanities · Meteorology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Media Studies and Communication · Media, Gender, and Advertising
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
| Citation span | 2001 - 2018 (18) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |