Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting

Chapter 5 Where the Cable Ends

Chapter 5 Where the Cable Ends Television beyond Fringe Areas Lisa Parks Why is it that in the United States there are 65.4 million homes with cable television subscriptions and only 26.1 million with direct satellite broadcasting services?1 This numerical disparity involves a complex set of issues ranging from federal policies to product designs, from landscape topographies to population densities, from cultural sensibilities to technological anxieties. Different TV distribution systems have emerged in different parts of the country at different times for different reasons. This essay explores sites beyond cable infrastructures in an effort to develop a more relational understanding of cable and satellite systems that can account for their distinct distribution architectures while considering how and where their histories intersect. Television historians Tom Streeter and Megan Mullen forged an important sub-field of cable television studies focusing on key regulatory and programming issues.2 Their work has deeply enriched our understanding of cable television, yet too often the medium still gets reduced to terms such as the multi-channel environment, niche marketing, and consumer choice. While these issues have been subject to critique, there are ways of researching cable and satellite television that considers the spatial dynamics of distribution as well. In their introduction to MediaSpace Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy suggest that “The spatial orders that media systems construct and enforce are highly complicated, unevenly developed and multi-scaled. . . . the development of electronic media is a spatial process intertwined with the development of regimes of accumulation in capitalism.”3 To probe this complexity and unevenness, it is necessary to consider the fringe areas of television and beyond—that is, those places geographically removed from television’s operational centers. Historically, television reception in remote 103 locations was a dubious affair as technicians had to contend not only with vast distances, but unpredictable weather, mountainous topography, and rudimentary technologies. Nevertheless, it was the push for transmission to and reception of signals in outlying areas that ultimately helped to generate nationwide television networks. By the mid-1950s TV signals passed through communities scattered from coast to coast. Since then a variety of distribution systems has emerged, and, as a result, the study of television’s content and form cannot be separated from cable, satellite, web, and wireless technologies. In this essay, I combine approaches from media studies and cultural geography to survey two sites in California that lie beyond the grid of cable television infrastructures.4 To begin, I examined maps of California cable television coverage and market ownership, but such maps tell us little about conditions within a given locale and require further investigation and explanation. The term “geo-annotation” has recently emerged in relation to the location-based or wireless economy. It refers to the convergence of global positioning system (GPS), wireless telephony, photography , and text technologies, which allows users of mobile devices to identify a location numerically and upload personalized data about it that can be 104 l i s a pa r k s Fig. 5.1. This photo was taken on a road beyond Yucca Valley, California, while looking for the area where the cable ends. Photo by author. shared with others. One writer describes it as the act of attaching “digital graffiti to real places.”5 I find geo-annotation to be a useful critical practice and model for building knowledge about television’s multiple sites and especially those that lie beyond its operational centers. Such a practice might extend site-specific research by scholars such as Lynn Spigel and David Morley, who have explored television “homes” and “homelands ”; Anna McCarthy, who has documented television in the tavern, the laundromat, and the airport; or Nick Couldry, who studied TV-fan pilgrimages to various sites in rural England.6 Expanding our sense of where television research might take place, such scholars revealed that the medium ’s study cannot be reduced to frame-based aesthetics, genre, or narrative analysis alone. Television demands analytical models that can account for its complex spatiality. Adopting geo-annotation as a critical practice might be a way of stretching the spatial imaginary of television studies, of venturing beyond familiar tropes of frame, narrative, channel, and network to consider how television has become part of the built and natural environment. Using cable coverage maps as a starting point, then, I set out to annotate specific locations with written descriptions, photographs, and critical discussions.7 The...