Television, Geography and `Mobile Privatization'

Abstract

This article calls for the spatial and temporal dimensions of communication to be put firmly at the centre of television theory and research in future years. It sets an agenda for the development of a distinctive human geography of TV cultures — taking Raymond Williams's concept of `mobile privatization' as its main point of departure, but also drawing on more recent work in media studies and contemporary social analysis.

Non-media-centric media studies: A cross-generational conversation

“…Of course, it’s true that there was also, alongside the European, 20th-century Marxist and structuralist traditions, a more British, ‘culturalist’ tradition that fed into media and cultural studies. Like Dave, I was interested in Williams’ writings, including his notes on mobile privatisation (see Moores, 1993b), which I felt allowed more room for an exploration of the practical, the everyday and the ordinary. I developed an interest, too, in engaging with Anthony Giddens’ social theories of ‘structuration’ and modernity (Giddens, 1984, 1990; Moores, 1995, 2005), and Erving Goffman’s work on what he came to call the ‘interaction order’ (Goffman, 1983; Moores, 1999).…”

Media, Democracy and Representation: Disembodying the Public

“…Policy discourses and academic theories of the appropriate relationships between media and democratic citizenship have developed in a historical context where broadcasting emerged as a complex of technologies, organizations, and markets that articulated two spatial scales of social activity, the national and the domestic. Broadcasting thus contributed to a process whereby social life became increasingly focused upon the private nuclear family at the same time as the real and imaginary horizons of domestic life were stretched over broader spatial scales through improvements in transport, communications, and mass media (Moores 1993). The fundamental indeterminacy built into the relationships of power and influence characteristic of spatially extensive communications media has been resolved through a combination of paternalism and protectionism.…”

Neither poison nor cure: space, scale and public life in media theory

“…This refers to the double movement of localisation of social interactions into the regulated spaces of the domestic sphere, and an accompanying imperative for new kinds of contact, a movement that Williams diagnosed as being characteristic of the social changes wrought by new communications technologies in the twentieth century (1974: 26). There is in this idea the kernel of an essentially geographical conceptualisation of radio and television, in so far as Williams approaches media as a set of institutionalised practices that organize and giving meaning to the spatial and temporal dimensions of modern social life (see Moores 1993). The dominant sense of Williams's usage of mobile privatisation is, however, of a movement away from engaged forms of public association, and an extension of a private attitude (Williams 1989: 171).…”