Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Television – which literally means “seeing from a distance” – has seldom been discussed by either critics or scholars primarily as a visual medium. Yet from the start, key sectors of the television industry itself were fascinated by the possibilities and potential for televisual representation (→  Visual Representation ). In the shadow of more “legitimate” art forms in the twentieth century, and →  cinema's →  spectacle- oriented wide screen in particular, television came to be known in largely style-less terms as “the small screen.” But this denigration of television glosses over a great deal of visual complexity and diversity that can be understood within three broad perspectives: the industry, the audience, and scholarship (→  Television ; Television: Social History ). First, “the” television industry is not one thing; it is many, each with very different visual imaging practices. Reality television producers, for example (→  Reality TV ), employ very different visual strategies to filmed dramas. Second, “the” television →  audience , far from being monolithic, splintered into many different forms of visual consumption, decades before digital cable and YouTube. Since the early 1980s, for example, “narrowcast” music videos challenged their niche audience with visual styles far more complex than televised games in sports bars. Finally, scholarship, while largely discounting television's ... log in or subscribe to read full text