Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This brilliant example of a materialist analysis of technology shows how the fevered fantasies of television's early years were 'acts of invention as real as soldering together circuits in a lab.'" -- Thomas Streeter * author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet *
"With valuable scholarship, Sewell provides a useful corrective to the existing account of the prehistory of television and illuminates the formative processes of television as a medium." -- Alexander Russo * author of Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks *
"Philip Sewell’s exploration of radio-era television powerfully illuminates a formative chapter in the medium’s history, one with special relevance today as the constellation of practices called television continues to transform."
-- William Uricchio * Massachusetts Institute of Technology *
"Sewell explores the history of US television's development into what was to become a mainstay of society. Recommended."
* Choice *
"
Television in the Age of Radio effectively establishes a rich, revised history of the development of television as a cultural formation. It offers insight beyond the surface-level policy and commercial power struggles and impacts to reveal a deep history of whom, how, and what made television what it was when released as a consumer product." * Journal of Communication *
"
Television in the Age of Radio reveals how imagination precedes and influences invention, how America's cultural conversation shaped technology, how corporate interests steered American television in a direction so unlike that of British television." * Journal of American Culture *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Substance of Things Hoped For
1. Questions of Definition
2. Engendering Expertise and Enthusiasm
3. Programming the System for Quality
4. Seeing Around Corners
Conclusions: Why Not Quantity Television?
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
