Television and Social Theory

Television has been the object of theoretical reflection beginning with debates on “mass society” that heated up in the years following World War II. Residual concerns over the totalitarian temptation to which the vanquished Axis nations fell prey leading up to the war, the rise of the consumer capitalist economy in the West, and Cold War politics focusing on the Soviet Union and its allies made for serious discussion concerning the role of television within democratic society. In the postwar period, researchers and theorists turned the formerly pejorative phrase “mass society” into a descriptor of popular democracy and “liberal-pluralism triumphant.” (Bennett 1982:40) [Page 829]Television loomed large in this rethinking of postwar liberal democracy.

The relationship between the academic study of social communication and the development of contemporary social theory is surveyed by Hanno Hardt in Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History & Theory in America (1992). This comprehensive overview identifies two primary tendencies within the field. As it concerns television in specific, the pragmatic tradition in the United States manifests itself in empirically oriented “effects” research, which concerns the psychology of individual reception and the social psychology of resultant group behavior. The challenge to the tradition of “administrative research” is represented by British Cultural Studies beginning in the 1950s, whose intellectual heritage reaches back to the Frankfurt School of critical theory. More recent developments include critiques that owe to feminism, postmodernist thought, critical race theory, and a return to institutional-historical approaches to television and social theory.

So far as any discussion of the relationship between television and social theory is even addressed, the research questions asked by those interested in the “effects” of television tend to assume that the political and economic order that gave rise to this new postwar mass medium of communication is in itself not problematic. Contrary to this approach, those writing specifically about television in the cultural studies tradition understand that the very basis of the sociocultural, political, and economic system needs to be examined in understanding both the mundane reality and transformative potential of the medium. Moreover, the empiricist thrust of conventional research on television in the United States is “marked by a built-in inconclusiveness that forestalls the linkage with social theory, the proper goal of research in the social sciences” (Hamamoto 1989:10).

Most social science literature on television, despite its pose of objectivity, is informed by liberal pluralist social theory whereby conflicting beliefs and values compete for supremacy within a fictive marketplace of ideas. From this matrix of supposedly free exchange has emerged a politicaleconomic system—capitalism—that has proved its fitness by its sheer ability to deliver the greatest good to the largest number within the polity. The People Look at Television: A Study of Audience Attitudes (1963) by Gary A. Steiner is a prime example of social science research that legitimates the for-profit system of the three U.S. national networks of the day. Financed by CBS and conducted under the aegis of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the report combines an argument laden with populist and democratic rhetoric (vide “The People”) with a show of social science data marshaled to blunt then-current criticism of network television by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

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