Core Response Week 2

In regard to this week’s texts, I really enjoyed reading the TV as a technology, particularly through William’s work.  For example, while looking at the origins of the TV, the two main analytical views that the author describes (side note: I wonder why he doesn’t give a better name to the second one, which I think could fall under the “social construction of tech” umbrella) isolate technology and see it as a self-acting force (p. 6), which reminded me of how technology in general continues to be regarded as a self-acting, positive force in de-contextualized way, particularly in “technology for development” (otherwise known as ICTD or ICTforD – you can see an example here). Also, I liked Williams discussion of the TV not just as a constructed artifact but also (or maybe consequentially) as part of a socio-technical system, particularly when he explains at the end of that chapter that the TV’s development as a technical means could have had many forms and that the one that transpired defined the TV set as an inefficient medium of visual broadcasting (p. 20). The idea of the popularized use of an inefficient technology that could have been otherwise is something that I am very interested in studying in general, and thus Williams’ account of the adaptation of people to an inferior visual medium because of how broadcasting as a system was operative (he then describes the institutions that shaped it in Chapter 2, highlighting the profit-seeking behavior of broadcasting companies in the US through sets sales and their attitudes towards content production, as well as the public-private comparison with the UK) reminded me of Ruth Cowan’s account of the adoption of the electric refrigerator, which is also inefficient and noisy, over the gas refrigerator because of the economic decision made by complex social institution (her wonderful article can be accessed here).

Staying in the structural reading of the TV, I have to admit that I kept frowning while reading McLuhan and that I wrote question marks all over the “TV: The Timid Giant” chapter. Apart from the fact that I think he seems to have been writing his every grandiose, semi-random and general thought there, I am still confused about hot/cold media, and particularly I am wondering how his description of TV holds today now that we have HD channels and HD TV content. Is it still cold then? Or is TV both hot and cold depending on the channel? Or depending on the country? Or depending on the service the user is able to afford? Is there still all that user completion activity? How is TV different from film today given all the socio-technical changes around TV?