Elizabeth (Betsy) Walters
Elizabeth (Betsy) Walters is a PhD candidate in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University, where she also earned her MFA in Film & Television Studies. Her research focuses on the ways in which the film and television industry constructs and perpetuates ideas of prestige and artistry through awards and festivals. Her master’s thesis examined the relationship between Netflix and premier film festivals like Sundance and Cannes and her dissertation will consider the Academy Awards through a cultural and industrial lens. Before graduate school, she worked for the nonprofit film awards organization CINE and in the film festival industry. She currently sits on the board of the Marvin Hamlisch International Music Awards.
Review of Television before TV: New Media and Exhibition Culture in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939 By Anne-Katrin Weber.
Television is an inherently intimate and domestic medium, a technology designed to bring a vast array of experiences and entertainment directly to our living rooms. Scholar Raymond Williams asserts that this endless “flow” of content is television’s defining characteristic, distinguishing the experience of watching television from that of a film or a play — events that are also public, underscoring that television is instead a distinctly private medium.[1] Additionally, television’s role in the home was reinforced by its programs’ idealized representation of the domestic sphere, which Mary Beth Haralovich argues helped construct the idea of the 1950s homemaker in American society.[2] Roughly a century after its introduction, this conception of television as intrinsically domestic has shaped how we consider both the technology of television and its role in shaping and reflecting society, functions that Williams argues are inextricably intertwined.[3]
In Television before TV, Anne-Katrin Weber joins a scholarly body arguing that this assumption of television’s fundamental domesticity is misleading: television’s place in the home was not inevitable, but the result of a complex matrix of industrial, economic, and cultural factors. Using case studies of the technology’s first appearance at radio shows and world’s fairs from 1928 to the outbreak of war in 1939, Weber’s contribution demonstrates the significance of public exhibition to TV’s development, arguing that these displays “gave television its first definitions and its first audiences” by showcasing the new medium’s potential and influencing the debates over how it should be utilized.[4] Rather than consider what television is, Weber challenges us to consider where it is, from an individual display at a radio exhibit in London to the political and social conditions that influenced television’s rise in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.[5] In this way, Weber deconstructs television’s domesticity by demonstrating that the medium was domesticated in a process that crucially yet paradoxically began in public.
Weber constructs Television before TV in chapters that are thematic yet chronological, providing context for the earliest public displays of television and moving through its development in the 1930s. The first chapter focuses on the exhibitions themselves, tracing the history of the New York Radio World’s Fair, Berlin Funkausstellung, and Radiolympia in London to contextualize their demonstrations of the burgeoning TV technology. As Weber demonstrates, television proved a draw at these expositions, a popular innovation that proved the medium’s “fundamental hybridity and flexibility” through novelties such as two-way television — a precursor to Zoom.[6] The next two chapters examine the ways in which television was positioned discursively, first as an example of technological progress and as a nearly-magical marvel that emphasized television as a visual spectacle, then through the technology’s ability to connect viewers with spatially distant subjects simultaneously — what Weber describes as “the televisual imaginary of ‘seeing at a distance,’” a term used by NBC in its promotional materials.[7] Ultimately, the feature of liveness would prove one of television’s defining characteristics.
Weber’s fourth chapter places the burgeoning technology into conversation with the industrial stakeholders in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. In this chapter, Weber uses individual exhibitions as a platform from which to take a broad, transnational view, demonstrating how the development of television in each country impacted one another while hewing to culturally-specific forms based upon their political and industrial ecosystems. In the United States, powerful commercial stakeholders in radio such as RCA exerted their dominance despite competitive technologies from upstart inventors, while in Germany, the National Socialists sought to use the medium to their political advantage and foster television as a communal experience. The public British Broadcasting Company (BBC) invested in television to maintain a cohesive, national broadcasting service which, like Germany, overtly defined itself against the privately-owned, commercial American broadcasting framework. The chapter deftly builds upon the framework established by Michele Hilmes, who demonstrates in Network Nations that the early American and British broadcasting industries were not discrete but entangled, each challenging and influencing the progress of the other in a way that would create this public/private dichotomy.[8] Weber’s triangulation shows how television complicated the dynamic between these now-established industries.
One of Television before TV’s key strengths is its examination of how these public exhibitions played a key role in domesticating television, rather than simply arguing that the medium’s eventual domesticity belies historical roots in public exhibition. Throughout, Weber weaves examples of how these public displays were intended to train consumers in how to understand the role that television would play in their domestic lives, a crucial element of the technology’s adoption. Weber’s fifth chapter examines this process of domestication in depth, noting in particular how international fairs and expositions throughout the mid-to-late 1930s explicitly positioned television as a private technology even as they publicly showcased it to throngs of visitors. Most notably, Weber spotlights London exhibits from the late 1930s in department stores like Selfridge’s, which displayed televisions within sample home exhibits; as Weber notes, this “arrival in the universe of consumption translated television’s changing status from a technological novelty to a commodity.”[9] Furthermore, Weber’s final chapter grapples with the gendered implications of yoking the television set to the domestic sphere, rendering it “a ‘feminine’ object.”[10] As Weber notes, “During the late 1930s, with television sets only slowly finding their way into the living rooms of (upper class) households and regular programming schedules remaining rare, the intersection of domestic consumption, gender, and new media was less pronounced [than in postwar television], but nevertheless already visible,” including through the use of women — or, as Weber pointedly describes, “female bodies” — who helped showcase and promote television at these expositions.[11] Both the public construction of an “ideal” domestic space (available for purchase) and its positioning as the realm of women would serve as a precursor to the television shows that would make this connection overt, such as Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show.[12]
Weber enriches her analysis by making plentiful and impressive use of artwork and photography throughout Television before TV, including images of early TV advertisements, promotional diagrams, maps and blueprints from exposition halls, and photographs of early TV displays and eager crowds gathered around them. However, Weber does not simply rely on archival images or sources but places her work within a broad range of scholarly conversations around the form and function of television and visual media, including considerations of spectatorship and visuality, liveness, and media industries and convergence. In particular, Weber engages with the work of Philip Sewell, who demonstrates that the development of American television was not a seamless evolution from radio but required extensive work on behalf of industrial stakeholders to “naturalize” the new technology within discourses of taste, invention, and progress.[13] Similarly, Weber demonstrates that early television displays were used to publicly cultivate a sense of what this new technology might represent. Notably, Weber also looks beyond the best-known figures or corporate entities, such as when she uses the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934 — a largely-overlooked fair at which television was only marginally showcased, in part because RCA decided to skip it — to show how meanings about television were created even in the absence of those who would ultimately control it. The book is richer for examining these gaps.
In this way, Weber elegantly threads these public displays that she describes as “essential events in the history of television” in ways that enhance rather than upend that history.[14] Television before TV ultimately demonstrates that early public displays of television were not just showcases for a new, seemingly-magical technology but indispensable to television’s evolution as a medium. The form and meaning of television was not inevitable but was constantly negotiated, particularly within ideas of domesticity. Television’s “liveness” was able to collapse geographical boundaries and bring far-flung cultures and experiences into the home while also constructing romanticized and influential visions of the domestic sphere. As Weber argues, by considering television not just as an object but within the broader context of place, we gain a more complex understanding of how television fits within our histories, our cultures, and our homes.
End Notes
[1] Raymond Williams, Television : Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 87.
[2] Mary Beth Haralovich, “Sitcoms and suburbs: Positioning the 1950s homemaker,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11 no 1 (1989): 61-83, DOI: 10.1080/10509208909361287.
[3] Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2.
[4] Anne-Katrin Weber, Television before TV: New Media and Exhibition Culture in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939 (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 28.
[5] Weber, Television before TV, 31.
[6] Weber, Television before TV, 51.
[7] Weber, Television before TV, 143; Weber, Television before TV, 161.
[8] Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012).
[9] Weber, Television before TV, 265.
[10] Weber, Television before TV, 313.
[11] Weber, Television before TV, 315.
[12] As Haralovich argues, these shows would create an idealized version of the American suburban home to which families could (or should) aspire, what she describes as a “rose-tinted picture window” on American society: Haralovich, “Sitcoms and suburbs: Positioning the 1950s homemaker.”
[13] Philip Sewell, Television in the Age of Radio: Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014).
[14] Weber, Television before TV, 25.