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16 By the early 1930s, “high-definition” electronically scanned television was said to be “just around the corner,” but mass consumer investment in the technology did not pick up until after World War II. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, public discourse on television was haunted by the twin ghosts of satisfaction and obsolescence. In the case of the former, the fear was that audiences/buyers would be satisfied with technologies that did not meet state or corporate standards , thereby frustrating the institutional designs of manufacturers, programmers , and regulators. In the case of the latter, the threat was that audiences/ buyers would not be satisfied and indeed would be scared of immediate obsolescence , thereby forestalling the acceptance of the next technological leap. The specters of satisfaction and obsolescence held sway over imaginations of television ’s future as a consequence of notions of and desire for progress, stability, and quality. The expectation that television would be a predictable or familiar thing in the future stemmed from the vast cultural work done to imagine a coherent communications system situated within a largely linear narrative of technological progress and subject to evaluation in terms of widely shared norms. But this cultural work obscured a series of struggles over television and its meaning. Although television today is used by billions of people to communicate with reasonable clarity and by thousands of institutions to generate vast income and considerable social control, television was conceived and continues to exist in a complex tension between consensus and dissensus, between concept and practice, embroiling it within ongoing cultural, material, and interpersonal struggles. Moreover, the lines of tension in these struggles are woven together such that substantive changes along one thread provoke changes in the others and require a near constant return to the loom to maintain a coherent tapestry, in which television 1 Questions of Definition QUESTIONS OF DEFINITION 17 tells a story and creates meaning. This television has consisted of not simply the programs we see but the systems that produce and distribute them and the technological artifacts themselves. Indeed, the semantic coexistence of and confusion among these three identities for television—program, system, and apparatus— demonstrate the interconnectedness of struggles over television and its meanings . Television is made to mean, both in its being designed to create meanings and the creation of meanings from it. However, these two types of meaningfulness are thoroughly enmeshed in historical contexts and material consequences that set the stakes in the debates over television.1 The fabric of television cannot be freed from its fabrication. As the following pages will explore, what constituted television as both an ideal and a reality was quite variable in the 1920s, when different parties advocated distinct visions of the medium in accordance with their cultural and material investments. There were winners and losers in these debates, but what made and kept television more or less functionally meaningful was the development of contingent and fungible terms of evaluation such as a pragmatic conception of perfection. Thus, television came to exist in a framework that not only accounts for dispute but often has depended on it. Such a framework was necessary because television is also the product of a shared imagination. Its cultural existence preceded the successful articulation of technologies to yield “distant vision” by a minimum of half a century. That television began as an idea or shared set of aspirations is an observation that was fairly common in commentary on television prior to its widespread introduction into the market. In the United States an exemplary instance is Richard W. Hubbell’s 4000 Years of Television: The Story of Seeing at a Distance, published in 1942, which traces aspirations to television from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and the trope was fairly common in books and articles about television in the 1920s and 1930s.2 The existence of media technologies in the imagination first was a wheel not so much reinvented as respun in the late 1980s and early 1990s by such historians of new media as Carolyn Marvin and Brian Winston, who accounted for the tendency of media technologies to be used in ways that restricted the particular medium’s technological and cultural potential.3 As a practical matter, it is clear that an idea must precede its rendering as an aggregation of wires, wheels, and tubes, but as these scholars demonstrate, that idea does not seamlessly translate into a technology’s actual use. Moreover, in the case of television in the...

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