Doing the history of television in Australia: problems and challenges

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Liz Jacka is Professor of Communication Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney. Correspondence to: [email protected]

For example, Lyn Spigel's Make Room for TV (Spigel, 1992b), the Console‐ing Passions series of television history published by Duke University Press (Spigel, 2001; Bodroghkozy, 2001; McCarthy, 2001; Feuer, 1995), and the work of William Boddy, Susan Douglas, Michelle Hilmes, etc.

Other exponents of this approach are, for example, Lesley Johnson in her study of the history of Australian radio (Johnson, 1988), which she calls ‘a cultural history of early radio’, and Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff's Social History of British Broadcasting (1991).

See Lynn Hunt (1989) for a useful introduction to the social history/cultural history issue from within the discipline of history. In the particular context in which the terms ‘social history’ and ‘cultural history’ first emerged, the first is linked to the counter‐histories that emerged in Britain in the 1970s (Johnson, 2001) and the second, at least in Australia, references the kinds of histories which pay attention to cultural institutions like museums, theatre, memorials, parks, etc.

Spigel also talks about the role of memory in the historicization of television (Spigel, 2001, pp. 366–367). Given the difficulty of directly studying the history of viewing experiences, memory studies might be a fruitful way of approaching television history. The extensive literature on history and memory is relevant here (see Hamilton, 1994).

Perhaps related to aesthetic or formal histories of television genres is the history of production processes in television. The interaction between how television is produced and its formal characteristics is quite an intimate one and one that was pursued in the rash of ‘production studies’ of television that appeared in the late 1970s/early 1980s (e.g. Hazell: the Making of a TV Series, by Alvarado & Buscombe, 1978—the study that perhaps founded the area). More recently, Georgina Born has produced an ethnographically inflected history of recent changes in the working practices of the BBC as a result of the increasing marketization of broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Born, 2000, 2002).

Nikolas Rose, one of the key figures in the neo‐Foucauldian governmentality school of thought, makes quite commonplace observations about public broadcasting (Rose, 1999, p. 82). Admittedly it is a throwaway line but it is perhaps symptomatic of the neglect of communications by sociologists (see Murdock, 1993; McQuail, 1997, p. 13).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liz Jacka

Liz Jacka is Professor of Communication Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney. Correspondence to: [email protected]