Core Response #1 by Eileen DiPofi

            While I was somewhat familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous line, “the medium is the message,” before this week, Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology + Cultural Form, in addition to McLuhan’s writings and lecture, offered me a greater understanding of how the televisual medium constructs ideological meaning. Williams’s outline of a “social history of television” reveals that what made television unique from previous communication technologies like the press or the cinema was an early investment in the medium rather than its content (7). He contends that “unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content… the means of communication preceded their content” (17, emphasis original). It was the distribution of the medium that took precedence in terms of capital investment and development. Thus, from its very production as an institution, “the effect of T.V.” was, as McLuhan asserts in his 1977 lecture, “quite independent of the program” ("The Medium is the Message" Part 1).  

            I found Williams’s analysis of the form of news broadcasts to be particularly informative of how ideological messages transmitted through television. Williams emphasizes that television serves as an intermediary for our participation in “a public process” (44). This ideology of televisual representation “reinforces tendencies within the orthodox process of political representation, where representatives, between elections, acquire and claim a certain absolute character; if we do not like them, and through them their policies, we can change them at the appointed times” (45). Television rehearses our acceptance of a political participation that takes place through intermediaries and institutions. This legitimation of power, Williams demonstrates, operates by de-legitimizing those who threaten the status quo. In the case of news coverage of political dissent, the broadcast constructs a formal contrast “between the apparently reasoned responses of the arranged studio discussion and the apparently unreasoned, merely demonstrative, responses of the arranged and marginal visual event” (45). Reading this analysis, I was reminded of the similarities between coverage of protests following the killing of George Floyd and the insurrection at the U.S. capital. On the level of “content,” these two news events couldn’t be further apart; the former movement is a critique of white supremacy, and the latter is an example of its increasing power. However, the news coverage I saw of these two events, particularly during the earliest days of the protests for Black lives, was remarkably similar, even on supposedly left-leaning programs like CNN. The “rational” broadcaster in the studio looks out upon the uncontrolled masses. Field correspondents, while in proximity to the protestors, are observers, separated by the “authority” bestowed on them through the medium. Whether the reporters are decrying the assault on democracy posed by the insurrection or Black Lives Matter supporters’ destruction of “private property” (I vividly remember sensationalized coverage of Rodeo Drive) is less important than the contrast between the authoritative broadcaster and the unorganized, emotional protestors. The broadcaster is our proxy for proper political involvement. 

            Williams’s claim that broadcasting’s emphasis on distribution has historically distinguished it from other communication technologies makes me wonder how we might re-consider the medium at a time when the lines between broadcasting, cinema, and digital technologies cannot be so easily drawn. As we view films on streaming platforms, and as such their distribution patterns converge with those of television, can we say that cinema is becoming a broadcast medium? If that is the case, can we also say that for cinema, the “medium is the message,” and that its mode distribution takes precedence over the production of its content? I am wary of arguments that take this point to its extreme, but I think there is something to be said about the ways in which streaming platforms have made what we're watching less important than where. Is there really a substantial difference between watching Wednesday  or Ozark or Glass Onion when we're often more likely to say we're watching "Netflix"? As Williams, Jane Feuer, and McLuhan all demonstrate, an analysis of content that ignores the effects of its medium risks missing crucial ideological messages.