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In 1950 I was living in St. John’s and I had made the acquaintance of Duke, a young American boy who lived on the American Armed Forces base Fort Pepperell. In the corner of his living room I saw a wooden box with a glass window and some buttons on it. I asked“what is it?”He replied,“It’s a television set.” I then asked “What does it do?” And he went on to tell me that it brings all kinds of things into your living room—moving pictures— movies, entertainment, sports and events from all over the world. I said, “That’s fantastic! Let me see it!” He said “I can’t because there is no television in Newfoundland.” —Charlie Callahan, Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Extension Service (recounted in Extension Service’s Community Television Conference Report 17) Another matter is that the percentage of imported programs is very high. Fifty percent of RTÉ broadcast comes from the United States and England , and 4 percent comes from other countries. —Maolsheachlainn Ó Caollaí,“Teilifís—Fórsa Láidir inár Saol,” Inniu 13 June 19751 The Faroe Islands, which lie halfway between Scotland and Iceland and are constituted as a “self-governing region within the Kingdom of Denmark ” (and thus have the same status as Greenland), were the last European society to get television. Their distance from the European mainland may preclude some from thinking of them as a “European society,” but at any rate, a European language is indigenous to the Faroe Islands. Faroese is an insular-Scandinavian language, closely related to Icelandic and fairly distant from Danish (which all Faroese children learn at school).As“small languages” 89 3 Sjónvarpsfelagið í Havn 90 part 1: the islands go, Faroese is relatively strong. I’ll discuss that in more detail in chapter 6, by way of a contrast with Irish Gaelic.Suffice it for now to quote Jóhan Hendrik W. Poulsen, one of the Faroes’ most distinguished scholars, on the matter of the language’s historical evolution: “From having been a pariah in its own land, without official standing, for several centuries the spoken language of about 5,000 people, Faroese has made its mark as the official language of the country , the spoken and written language of about 50,000 Faroese”(“Danish Interference in Faroese,” in Mal í Mæti 249–50). Faroese is also unusual among “small languages” in the degree to which those responsible for its maintenance (including Poulsen, who was for many years chair of Føroyska Málnevndin , the Faroese language committee, based in the Faroes’ capital city of Tórshavn) have created neologisms for modern objects and concepts that are now actually in everyday use without resorting to English loan-words, although some of these news words are borrowed from Icelandic.2 “Sjónvarp” is one example of such an Icelandic borrowing: that’s the word for television. One way to examine this late introduction of television to the Faroe Islands would be to investigate the ways in which it changed the life of a relatively insular society. This is a fairly well-played method in anthropology, and as a method it is by no means limited to television.Studies of the effects of the introduction of radio, of film, or of running water for that matter to isolated societies offer a chance to replay a familiar narrative of the fall from communal solidarity into modernity. Not all studies of this sort come to the same sorts of romantic conclusions about the old ways of life being forever lost because of radio/television/cinema/plumbing being introduced into a remote outpost , but there is a way in which this narrative of the fall has come to define studies of the introduction of communications technology even when they consciously try to avoid it. The experience of the Faroe Islands, on the other hand, is an example of a highly gradual introduction of television into a national community, one that offered considerable opportunity for locally based planning, debate, and experimentation : no less than eleven years elapsed between the first plans and the first broadcasts, the debate leading up to those broadcasts was vigorous, and the energy that these debates produced bore some surprising fruit in terms of the spread of the medium. But there were other surprises too. Indeed, despite this very gradual, very thoughtful introduction of television on the part of highly engaged activists, there is a sense in which the medium...

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