Is Seeing Believing?: The Experimental Production of Technical Standards for HDTV

This paper uses the history of television to show that there is a need for greater attention to the roles of carefully staged demonstrations in the (re)creation of technical standards if we are to understand more fully innovations and the (re) creation of markets as collective processes of experimentation and recombination. Specifically, the author examines the emergence of "high definition television" (HDTV) as a new movement of experimentation and standardization in the 1970s and 1980s, spanning East and West in terms of sites, actors and issues. The paper offers a history of a particular Japanese experimental program and then discusses, in greater detail, a series of HDTV demonstrations carried out in the US in 1981 and how these (and a related demonstration in Europe 1982) were conceived and used at the time and later by parties involved in designing, operating, and controlling (HD) TV systems. Based upon this analysis, the paper concludes by showing that close empirical studies of demonstrations have much to tell us about the growth, (de) stabilization, and standardization of movements of innovation, including how their repertoire of founding stories, heroes, and standards expands and evolves.