Monday, September 8, 2014
Traces of the Past
In the last paragraph of Lynn Spigel’s “Installing the Television Set,” Spigel quotes historian Carlo Ginzburg, who writes: “Reality is opaque; but there are certain points—clues, signs—which allow us to decipher it.” Why do you think Spigel closes her analysis of post-war television’s role in American domestic spaces with this quote? How does she describe her historical approach/methodology? What types of “traces” of the past does she examine in this essay and how does she use them? Do you agree with her approach to history?
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I like to think of the historian as a detective - an individual who must process contradictory accounts of the same event into one coherent narrative that illuminates a mystery. As Ginzberg argues - reality, or the “Truth” of history can never be known, as we the historians were not there to see what happened. We are left only with biased accounts of people who lived during the time and records of the world they lived in. In quoting Ginzberg, Spigel reinforces her criticism of existing Television History methodology: an excessive focus on the TV industry’s economic and political strategies for promoting domestic television programming. Spigel argues TV historians ignore an important set of clues - the rapid proliferation of social discourses questioning the influence of televisual media on domestic relationships, for better or worse. In other words, it is quite obvious the TV industry thought installing TV sets in the home would be economically advantageous, but what did local communities, individual families, or other segmented social demographics think about a TV set per household? By exploring the representation of Television sets and Television audiences of the 40’s, Spigel questions the simple narrative of installating TV sets into the household, exploding this story into a series of struggles for society to readjust around a technology which destabilized social relationships in the status quo. Spigel accesses a wide variety of social representation: television sit-coms exaggerating family life, home magazines printing accounts of the health risks associated with excessive television-viewing, furniture magazines presenting television as an essential piece of technological furniture or a signifier of progress. These various accounts demonstrate that despite a general historical trend of increasing television units per person in the United States, the growth of the television industry is full of varying opinions on the relative social value of television. I personally appreciate Spigel’s demand to challenge the most obvious solution to a mystery, to observe the scene for more intricate clues, in order to construct a broader tableau of the crime scene.
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