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51 The era of mechanical television was not just a moment of setting standards and definitions that conformed to the sociocultural order. At the same time that the medium’s technical identity was being pinned down, television became an important front in attempts to stabilize the relations among institutions, enthusiasts, and the public—particularly the radio public—by means of several interrelated systems of authority. Significantly, early television presented a paradoxical problem in which social and technical change was, on the one hand, a more or less welcome harbinger of modernity and, on the other, a destabilizing threat to a coalescing cultural and communicational order. The forms and practices of identity described for and claimed by experts, ascribed to or disputed by amateurs, and presumed of audiences sought to rein in such instabilities, adapting the patterns, pleasures, and penalties of inclusion and exclusion from broader social life to the specific logics of radio and television. During the decade prior to the Baird and Jenkins demonstrations of 1925, electronic media in the United States had undergone at least two significant industrial reorganizations that were accompanied by elaborations of a complementary regulatory framework. The first key industrial change was the formation of a national monopoly to manage US wireless telecommunications through RCA, bringing the twin benefits of not being beholden to a subsidiary of British Marconi and consolidating the intellectual property portfolios considered necessary for a truly excellent system. The second was the rapid displacement of that point-to-point paradigm by broadcasting, which forced RCA and its confederates to renegotiate not only their contracts but also their understandings of and arguments for an orderly approach to electronic communication. Over the same period a rough political consensus emerged that wireless communication demanded coordination through government regulation. Congress claimed 2 Engendering Expertise and Enthusiasm 52 TELEVISION IN THE AGE OF RADIO authority over radio through the Radio Acts of 1910, 1912, and 1927, as an exercise of the constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, and the general legislative prerogative to protect public safety.1 After the 1927 act, introduced during a supposed time of “chaos” brought on by successful court challenges to previous regulatory schemes, the newly created Federal Radio Commission issued a series of orders and station reallocations that worked to contract the number of sound broadcasters and further the dominance of the commercial, sponsor-driven model of broadcasting in the United States.2 These reorganizations and the developing regulatory system were molded, as broadcast historian Thomas Streeter has shown, by corporate liberalism’s attempts to rationalize and legitimate a particular vision of technical and social order in which the technical and the social bled into one another and the former became a means for understanding the latter.3 As we have already seen, debates about television’s supposed nature were tied to understandings of social relations, but appeals to and exercise of authority over television also directly articulated a faith in society’s functioning as a sort of machine. As Streeter found, “metaphors of technology” conceived of the social world in terms of discrete parts that could be effectively balanced and integrated to keep the overall system in good working order. Leveraging the supposed political neutrality of machines, what constituted good working order became a sort of common sense, while whom that order benefited was spun in corporate liberal discourse through a particular conception of the public and its interest. While corporate liberalism certainly functioned ideologically to obscure the material and cultural stakes of decisions such as winnowing the number of broadcasters, it also facilitated compromise among institutional actors and mediated conflicts within capitalism and liberal thought. Thorny issues such as the contradiction between “individual freedom” and “the social good” and the public’s existence as both a political force and a market for goods and services were framed as matters of alignment, calibration, and balance.4 As the precepts of corporate liberalism converged out of public relations and regulatory policy, the proposed agency of the public was limited. The public was thought and discussed not in terms of its rights but its need for a particular type of communication. This line of thought posed the public less in terms of freedom of expression and consumption than being able to opt in or out of a centralized communication and social system framed in paternalistic rhetoric and organized in the interests of corporations like RCA and AT&T.5 By the time of the 1927 Radio Act, the...

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