Annenberg faculty reflect on the history of television and the social, political, and technological changes its viewers experienced through the medium.
2 min. read
100 years ago, on January 26, 1926, Scottish engineer John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of a working, mechanical television transmission system. It was the first demonstration of television that we know was practically viable. It took a few more decades for TV to become mainstream, but Baird is generally considered a pioneer in the field.
“The limited amount of time available for network news coverage has exacerbated a second negative tendency in political discourse,” says Jamieson, Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “While hyperbole has always been with us, until recently nothing in the system has invited it as a norm. Now 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate compete for the crumbs of network time left after the president has gotten his share. By dramatizing, kernalizing, and shouting wolf, they bid against each other for that time. In the process, complex ideas are transformed into parodies of their former selves and the capacity of language to express outrage is exhausted.”
“The medium’s trajectory over the past century also reveals how local contexts shape global technologies,” says Punathambekar, a professor of communication at ASC. “While Western broadcasting histories often emphasize state-sponsored and commercial models, the emergence of television indifferent contexts reveals how the medium accommodates diverse visions of modernization, public culture, and national identity. Across the world, developmental broadcasting gave way to vibrant multichannel ecosystems that reshaped public and private spheres in distinctly postcolonial ways.”
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