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10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.143122
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2006. 32:103–25
doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.143122
Copyright
c
2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
VIDEO CULTURES: Television Sociology
in the “New TV” Age
Laura Grindstaff
1
and Joseph Turow
2
1
Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, California 95616;
email: lagrindstaff@ucdavis.edu
2
The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania 19104; email: jturow@asc.upenn.edu
Key Words
new media, political economy, programming, reception
■ Abstract We argue that the most significant and influential research on television
over the past five decades positions the medium as a key site for addressing the complex
interrelationship between culture and institutional/organizational power. Granting that
such work is theoretically and methodologically diverse, we employ an organizational
frame that groups political-economic approaches on the one hand and cultural ap-
proaches on the other. Political-economic approaches largely attend to issues of power
at a macro level, focusing on how ownership and control of television along with the
organization of television production practices shape and influence content; cultural
approaches focus more on the expressive and symbolic dimensions of television pro-
gramming and reception. At the same time, contemporary changes in the medium
threaten to make past research on television appear quaint and anachronistic. The in-
dustry’s transformation of television into continually emerging sets of multifaceted
digital-interactive technologies challenges researchers to draw enduring perspectives
from the older work and assess how they apply to the new-media environment. Con-
sequently, we suggest the term “video cultures” in lieu of “television sociology” as a
way of capturing future trends.
INTRODUCTION
Sociological perspectives have been central to the study of U.S. television since
its earliest days. What has television sociology taught us? We argue that the most
significant and influential work on television over the past five decades positions
the medium as a key site for addressing the complex interrelationship between cul-
ture and institutional/organizational power. For analytic purposes, such work may
be classified as either political-economic or cultural. At the same time, we argue
that contemporary changes in the medium threaten to make past research on TV
appear quaint and anachronistic. What we traditionally call television is becoming
an inseparable part of media streams that individuals encounter in everyday life
and that they use to make sense of their worlds. Thus, we suggest that the term
0360-0572/06/0811-0103$20.00 103
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104 GRINDSTAFF
TUROW
television sociology is too narrow to encompass the increasing interconnectedness
of textual, audio, and audiovisual messages that characterize the contemporary
media landscape. Rather than bracket out television from this stream, it makes
sense to explore how it fits and what it means in the larger symbolic context
that we call video cultures. The industry’s transformation of television into con-
tinually emerging sets of multifaceted digital-interactive technologies challenges
researchers to draw enduring perspectives from the older work and assess how
they apply to the new-media environment. The changes also require media schol-
ars to raise new sociologically informed questions about digital-interactive TV’s
contemporary relationships to culture and power.
Systematic academic study of television’s social role over the past five decades
has undoubtedly been driven by the medium’s pervasiveness and centrality in the
American home. In an early survey of TV’s social impact, Leo Bogart (1956, p. 1)
observed that “on the evening of March 7, 1955, one out of every two Americans
was watching Mary Martin play ‘Peter Pan’ before television cameras. Never be-
fore in history had a single person been seen and heard by so many others at the
same time.” To Bogart, this phenomenon was evidence that television had become
“a firmly established feature of American life” (p. 8). It was also clear to him that
TV was a domestic feature of life; he noted its presence in “four out of five U.S.
homes” (p. 8), and he ignored the medium’s uses outside that milieu (in bars, for
example). Bogart was a graduate of the program run by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert
Merton at Columbia University that had done much to establish mainstream aca-
demic discourse on mass media—newspapers, magazines, books, the movies, and
especially radio—with its emphasis on the individual and interpersonal uses and
effects of those technologies. In outlining the reasons for studying the particulars
of television’s role in U.S. society, Bogart and others drew on broad ideas about
the media’s cultural power that were engaging many thinkers of the day and that
harked to the late nineteenth century.
Central among these ideas were concerns about the stability of European,
British, and American societies in an age of political and social upheaval. In-
dustrialization and urbanization were generating large, unorganized masses that
seemed poised on the brink of dangerous action. Karl Marx and his followers
attributed this development to the increasing gap between the owners of capital
and the working classes, a gap that was destined to result in revolution and a
redefinition of social relations. A different group of social philosophers led by
´
Emile Durkheim and Frederick Tonnies blamed primarily the industrial age itself,
not enduring class divisions. It was an age, they said, in which commercialization
and specialization seemingly threatened the traditional roles that knit communities
together (Durkheim’s notion of mechanical solidarity) and encouraged reciprocal
activities based on formal contracts rather than communal ties (Tonnies’s notions
of gesselschaft as opposed to gemeinschaft). A more conservative variation is evi-
dent in Gustav Le Bon’s (1908 [1952]) treatise The Crowd, which argued that mass
assembly encouraged violent, irrational behavior, threatening to overturn society’s
rational (and aristocratic) leadership.
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VIDEO CULTURES 105
These streams of thought had major implications for understanding the role
of media industries that was developing in the late nineteenth century. Accord-
ing to the Marxist perspective, the media formed the ideological superstructure
that expressed the values of the capitalist social base. The enactment of capital-
ist beliefs across establishment media would not abate until revolution changed
the base and instituted a new superstructure. The industrial age social philoso-
phers, by contrast, saw the media as reflecting the tensions of the new era. Al-
though often critical of the sensationalism that passed for journalism and liter-
ary works, they held out the possibility that mass media would benefit society.
This more positive view was carried forward by scholars such as John Dewey
and Robert Park (both of the University of Chicago), who believed that be-
cause the new technologies of communication reached so many so quickly, they
could bring Americans together in ways that would encourage democratic think-
ing akin to town meetings of old (see Czitrom 1982). Park (1972), in particular,
believed that properly managed mass media could help America create rational
citizens (publics) as opposed to emotional, dangerous crowds. He argued, for
example, that the immigrant press of the early twentieth century, far from keep-
ing people tied to homeland customs, were socializing them en masse into the
norms of mainstream U.S. life. These questions surface again in the contemporary
moment in theorizing about the public sphere potential of television and other
media.
The suggestion that mass media’s significance lay in shared patterns of content
faded somewhat with the decline of immigration in the 1920s and the rise of social
concerns about the short-term effects of media messages—for example, of enemy
propaganda on civilians, of movie sex and violence on children, of advertising
on buying habits, and of radio coverage on political participation in elections. At
the same time, Marxist analyses of media continued in various quarters and in
various guises across the decades. Although the Marxist and Chicago perspectives
are quite different, they both suggest that a medium’s ability to present appealing
content to millions of people more or less simultaneously is the starting point for
caring about, and exploring, its social role.
Virtually from the start of television’s commercial life in the late 1940s, aca-
demics saw that it would achieve an unparalleled centrality in society. Many agreed
with Bogart (1956, p. 2) that “with no other form of impersonal communication
has the sharing of experience been possible on so universal a scale and to so intense
a degree as with television.” This belief led media scholars to take television as
a site in which key questions about the relationship between culture and power
could be asked and explored. As we have noted, the resulting arguments have
been theoretically and methodologically diverse; moreover, the best division is
not necessarily between Marxist and non-Marxist perspectives. Critiques of the
political and economic elements of power do, however, coalesce into a more or
less coherent field that attracts some scholars more readily than others, whereas
different but compatible streams of research take the complexities of culture and
text as more useful nodes for understanding the medium’s social importance. It
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