Distinguishing television: the changing meanings of television liveness

Abstract

Contemporary Western culture remains awash with certain distinctions between media, distinctions that hierarchize media as they attribute to them certain essential traits. This article analyses some of these media hierarchies, focusing in particular on a range of discourses that distinguish the medium of television from media such as cinema and digital 'new media'. Discursive attempts to differentiate television from other media (and other media from television) depend upon constructions of medium specificity that position television as the medium that caters most to 'popular', rather than 'legitimate', taste (Bourdieu, 1984: 16). In such processes of distinction, television comes out on the less valued side of the oppositions between 'the male and the female, the serious and the frivolous, the responsible and the irresponsible, the useful and the futile, the realistic and the unrealistic' that dominant social powers employ to distinguish between their elevated position and that of the 'dominated factions' (Bourdieu, 1984: 93-4). Although Bourdieu's analysis of these processes of distinction did not consider television per se, many scholars (e.g. Brunsdon, 1997;Petro, 1986) have pointed out the medium's denigrated discursive positioning, seen most clearly in its ongoing association with the domestic sphere, and in the domestic's abiding association with the conventionally feminine, the pre-or postadult, and the underclass, all identities of economic, social and political subordination. The perpetuation of television's denigration can thus be seen as party to the perpetuation of a number of social inequalities.Throughout television history, however, the cultural denigration of television has occurred in the context of an ongoing tension between discourses of television's low cultural status and those asserting the medium's worth and significance. Take the US context since the mid-1990s as an example. Whether

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