by Steve Clarke
When the then unknown young Scottish engineer, John Logie Baird, transmitted those famous grainy images of a ventriloquist dummy's head on 30 October, 1925, an experiment that heralded the birth of television, no one could have predicted that the broadcasting of moving pictures into people's homes would alter the Western world forever.
Yet 80 years later as we stand somewhat bewilderedly on the threshold of another communications revolution as the long promised convergence of computer, telephony and TV technologies emerge on a portable digital device of your choice, academics and commentators continue to argue over what precisely is television's effect on society. The only difference is that these days they tend to be drowned out by the economists and consultants who have cornered what can be a very lucrative market.
It is significant that at the two big recent UK television 'talking shops', the Edinburgh International Television Festival and the Royal Television Society's (RTS) biannual Cambridge Convention, there was a dearth of academics present as speakers on the various panels that dissected everything from the ethics of plastic surgery makeover shows to how public service can survive in the digital age. This is more or less normal at today's industry gatherings.
Rarely does a piece of academic research serve as a curtain raiser at the industry's get-togethers in the 21st century, but ever since TV developed as a mass medium in the 1950s, academics have attempted to help us all to understand and deconstruct this extraordinarily powerful medium's impact on our lives and on society as a whole.
Readers need no reminding of the valuable work published in the United Kingdom by such people as Hilda Himmelweit, Jean Seaton, Barrie Gunter, David Buckingham, Sonia Livingstone, David Docherty and Guy Cumberbatch, not forgetting the important studies of the avowedly left-wing Glasgow Media Group which, since the 1980s, starting with the Falklands War and the miners' strike, has continued to cast its beady eye over mainstream television news coverage.
If the crime figures were up and standards of literacy were down, it was automatically blamed on TV.
The aforementioned - and many others - have ranged wide and deep across such topics as children's TV watching, the importance of soaps, and media policy. The ESRC has been involved, inter alia, with research examining the effect of TV on children. In one such project, undertaken by Dr Tony Charlton of the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, satellite TV in the form of the rolling news service, CNN, was introduced to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena, which had one of the lowest incidences of behavioural problems anywhere. The behaviour of a group of children was monitored as they became TV viewers for the first time. The findings suggested that the children's behaviour deteriorated as a direct result of their newfound viewing habits.
Another study, 'Does advertising to children make them fat?' by Dr Brian Young at the University of Exeter's Psychology Department, took a sceptical view that cautioned against jumping to any over-hasty conclusions.
The work of Sonia Livingstone, whose research has received funding from the ESRC, has examined how new forms of media may change traditional relationships between children and the small screen.
These subjects have moved in and out of fashion as British TV has evolved from a predominantly public service medium to one that often looks as commercially cut-throat as the high street supermarkets we all love to hate.
Not for nothing do today's TV broadcasters talk openly about occupying digital shelf space, as "content" (how long before the term "programme" is abandoned completely?) is salami-sliced, apparently ad infinitum to be (re)packaged and marketed as new "channels". The recent arrival of More4, sold mischievously as an "adult" service by Channel 4, is but the latest example of a trend that looks set to run until economic realities trigger a bout of consolidation.
Around twenty five years ago, when British newspapers first started hiring media writers and editors, and programmes aired by commercial television (at the time only ITV) were subject to pre-transmission approval by the formidable men and women who ran the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the debate that exercised most heat among commentators revolved around TV standards and what TV detractor's regarded as the medium's generally destructive effect on behaviour. If the crime figures were up and standards of literacy were down, it was automatically blamed on TV.
Next