The Emergence of Television as a Conservative Media Revolution: Historicising a Process of Remediation in the Post-War Western European Mass Media Ensemble

The Emergence of Television as a Conservative Media Revolution: Historicising a Process of Remediation in the Post-War Western European Mass Media Ensemble

This article claims that the emergence of television in the 1950s must be interpreted as a conservative media revolution. It aims at revisiting some of the popular narratives about the emergence of television as a revolutionary moment in media history and questions the newness of television in the European mass media ensemble. Focusing on a set of privileged sites of negotiation where the tensions between the conservative and modernising agencies of the medium became most visible or explicit, the article emphasizes the ambiguous and contested nature of television as a new medium. Finally, the author pleas for an integral approach to media history that studies the intermedial relationships and interdependencies between television and other mass media.