ABSTRACT', 'Reinventing Television and Family Life, 1960-1990', 'Hannah Spaulding', 'In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the field of television changed. A series of new electronic devices that interfaced directly with TV technology video cameras, home recorders, cable boxes, video calling systemswere introduced to the American public. These devices promised to radically transform the medium. They worked to turn what had long been conceived as a one-way system of mass communication into an interactive and useful instrument in the management and relations of domestic life. My dissertation examines this televisual transformation. Combining archival research, discourse analysis, and close readings, it analyzes how television convergence with new media from 1960 to 1990 strove to redefine the medium, allowing for novel ways of engaging with the TV set that restructured and reimagined family communication and household operations. In particular, it contends that during this period both television and the idea of television transformed. In addition to being an object designed to be watched, television became a complex assemblage to be used. Once linked to these new technologies, television ceased to be the uniquely one-way receiver of broadcast signals, but became a flexible and interactive toola potent force in the management of the household, protection of the home, and the cultivation of the family.', 'My dissertation explores this history of television convergence by focusing on four case studies: home videomaking, video telephony, interactive cable, and home surveillance and security. It analyzes the discourses that surrounded each of these technologies and practices, unpacking the hopes they inspired and the fears they engendered as they interacted with the TV set and intervened in domestic life. In particular, my dissertation argues that these moments of technological linkage were imbricated with the structures of American domestic life. They emerged in response to changing configurations of home, gendered expectations, and the limitations and apparent decline of the nuclear family. In so doing, home videomaking, video telephony, interactive cable, and home surveillance and security functioned to offer visions of the future often rooted in nostalgic idealizations of the past. Although many of the technologies explored in this dissertation have been almost entirely eclipsed by or subsumed within computational media, televisions tenure as the communications center of the home must not be ignored. The modes of interaction, systems of surveillance, visions of domestic efficiency, and gendered assumptions they articulated did not disappear with the end of the 1980s. Far from merely a prehistory of the digital, the history of television convergence from 1960 to 1990 offers a vibrant and significant reimagining of the function of technology in the home, essential to understanding many of the practices that have come to define domestic life in the digital age.

Last modified

• 11/20/2019

Creator

• Hannah Alice Spaulding

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5wtw-yw27

Subject

• Screen Cultures

Keyword

• Domesticity
• History
• Video
• Television
• Technology
• Gender

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright