Television in the Age of Radio: Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium

by Philip W. Sewell

Overview

Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813562711
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

PHILIP W. SEWELL is an assistant professor in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Substance of Things Hoped For
1. Questions of Definition
2. Engendering Expertise and Enthusiasm
3. Programming the System for Quality
4. Seeing Around Corners
Conclusions: Why Not Quantity Television?

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Interviews

Washington University in St. Louis.

Editorial Reviews

"Philip Sewell’s exploration of radio-era television powerfully illuminates a formative chapter in the medium’s history, one with special relevance today as the constellation of practices called television continues to transform."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - William Uricchio

"With valuable scholarship, Sewell provides a useful corrective to the existing account of the prehistory of television and illuminates the formative processes of television as a medium."

author of Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks - Alexander Russo

"Sewell explores the history of US television's development into what was to become a mainstay of society. Recommended."

Choice

"This brilliant example of a materialist analysis of technology shows how the fevered fantasies of television's early years were 'acts of invention as real as soldering together circuits in a lab.'"

author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet - Thomas Streeter

"Television in the Age of Radio effectively establishes a rich, revised history of the development of television as a cultural formation. It offers insight beyond the surface-level policy and commercial power struggles and impacts to reveal a deep history of whom, how, and what made television what it was when released as a consumer product."

Journal of Communication

"Television in the Age of Radio reveals how imagination precedes and influences invention, how America's cultural conversation shaped technology, how corporate interests steered American television in a direction so unlike that of British television."

Journal of American Culture

"Television in the Age of Radio reveals how imagination precedes and influences invention, how America's cultural conversation shaped technology, how corporate interests steered American television in a direction so unlike that of British television."

From the Publisher