Television

Television

The history of television illustrates the development of a complex sociotechnicalsystem, in which individual leaders, corporate monopolies, and governmentregulators wrestled over the technical and economic direction the industry wouldtake. This also illustrates that many technologies are transitional stages inhuman development, going through a period of innovation, followed by temporarydominance, and then entering a period of decline in which they are replaced by avery different successor technology. Television began as a very sophisticatedanalog information technology that supported a highly concentrated entertainmentindustry dominated by a small number of networks, but the much later digitalrevolution cast all of its assumptions into doubt. This chapter focuses on thesocial history of television in the United States both because its complexityillustrates important points about leadership in technology development andbecause World War II and consequent economic hardship delayed developments inEurope.

For sake of clarity, the history of television can be divided into two periods.The first period spans the decades from the very beginning of the twentiethcentury during which the complex systems of required technologies weredeveloped, culminating in the successful launch of commercial broadcasting inthe late 1940s. A key moment was TV's demonstration at the 1939 New YorkWorld's Fair, which was largely an advertising venue for emergingindustries (Kuznick 1994), but World War II delayed its commercialization. Thesecond period covers the 60 years after the war during which the industryexpanded, adding color in the late 1950s, followed by cable and satellitetransmission, leading to a time in the first decade of the twenty-first centurywhen television had become digital, was increasingly distributed via Internet,and was integrated into many other digital technologies, to the point that thevery concept of television had dissolved.