Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, and: TV Living: Television, Culture, and Everyday Life (review)

Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. By John Ellis. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000; distributed by St. Martin's Press. Pp. 193. $55/$22.50.

TV Living: Television, Culture, and Everyday Life. By David Gauntlett and Annette Hill. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xii+315. $75/$24.99.

These volumes provide valuable insights into British television broadcasting that complement North American viewpoints and lend perspective on the social roles of television in these two cultures separated by a common language. John Ellis, formerly a television producer and now at the University of Bournemouth and the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Bergen, provides a philosophical and theoretical commentary on the historical development of British television. David Gauntlett and Annette Hill, respectively from the Universities of Leeds and Westminster, present findings and analysis of a massive longitudinal study of viewer uses and gratifications conducted and published by the British Film Institute.

Ellis examines television in two complementary contexts. In the first, he places it among the other audiovisual technologies such as photography and cinema that collectively have "introduced a new modality of perception into the world, that of witness, . . . confront[ing] us with much more about the wider world than previous generations had encountered." This new form of representation has brought with it "a sense of powerless knowledge and complicity with what we see. The essence of this sense of witness is that 'we cannot say that we do not know'" (p. 1).

Concurrently, Ellis looks at television's role in the development of the postwar consumer society, as it has already passed through two eras and shows signs of emerging into a third. The first, the era of scarcity, coincided with the creation in England of public-service broadcasting and was characterized by "a period of standardized mass market consumerism" (p. 2). The second era, that of availability, fostered by the creation of BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4, is characterized by the proliferation of choices. This process has led to what Ellis terms a diffuse and extensive process of working through. This takes the form of a constant worrying over issues and emotions, dealing with a riot of ways of understanding the world without ever coming to any final conclusions. The third era, that of plenty, is being ushered in by the growing penetration of cable and satellite systems in the market, leading to a pervasive state of uncertainty about the future role of terrestrial broadcasting in society and the role that broadcasting as a whole will play in people's lives.

By far the more valuable of the two contexts in Ellis's analysis is the social and historical, as we are given an insider's view of the concurrent transformation of broadcast institutions, programming, and technologies within a clear social framework. In this regard his work is reminiscent of David Abrahamson's superb 1996 analysis of America's magazine industry in Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical, although Ellis does not develop anything like Abrahamson's strong empirical foundation. Ellis's analysis becomes much less certain when he strays onto the turf of psychoanalysis, defining the feeling of witness in terms of guilt: he calls the relationship between the witness and what is witnessed "one of complicity, because if you know about an event, that knowledge implies a degree of consent to it" (p. 11). This contention is elaborated but never critically examined, and the reader is merely induced to accept it. Fortunately, such tendentiousness does not intrude severely on the better part of his work, and the book remains valuable for its institutional orientation.

TV Living reports on the British Film Institute Audience Tracking Study conducted between 1991 and 1996, which recorded and analyzed the television viewing diaries of between 509 respondents at the beginning and 427 at the end, encompassing more than...