The cable fable revisited: Discourse, policy, and the making of cable television

Around 1970, Utopian talk about cable television as a dramatic “new technology” swept through the policy arena. Analyzing the talk as a discursive practice demonstrates both the value of discourse analysis and some contradictions of the policy process. The talk treated cable as an autonomous technology and consequently obscured political and economic conditions while exaggerating cable's uniqueness; these characteristics encouraged the reconceptualization of cable in the policy arena in a way that, in combination with several other forces, led to the reregulation of cable and its subsequent growth. The discourse thus helped shape an institution that it failed to describe.