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Television And The Meaning Of Live
by Paddy Scannell
(Polity, £17.99)
THE title of this book by media guru Paddy Scannell is very misleading.
It has little to do with television as such, being largely a treatise on German philosopher Martin Heidegger's ideas of phenomenology - the study of how experience and consciousness are structured - in his book Being And Time.
Scannell devotes an inordinate amount of space to explain the philosopher's seemingly very basic ideas. Heidegger argued that because of the ubiquity of television in our homes, we are no longer "at home" in the traditional sense but are now "in the world" because television allows us to be everywhere while staying at home.
Scannell's book is concerned only with the phenomenon of television as a relatively recent reality, not with its content and its relationship with hegemony.
Describing rather than analysing, he makes very heavy weather of explaining what for many is basic logic and couches his ideas in an unnecessary academic-speak to give it added gravitas, one assumes.
The author also ponders at length on what he calls the "politics of care" and how, in any democratic economy of abundance, these must necessarily affect all aspects of material things, on how and under what conditions products are made.
But he does not develop this idea in the context of how television news and programming is manufactured, by whom and with what aims.
In a paraphrase of Marx, he writes: "To be free from necessity is the material basis of freedom. This is the meaning of the post-modern world in which we live today. But this world has come into being at a huge price."
As "post-modern peoples" today we are all the beneficiaries of the working capitalist mode of production, he claims.
But what Scanell does not make clear in such passages is that he is essentially only investigating the materially better-off sections of the highly developed western world, so limiting the universal applicability of his arguments.
Those looking for a deeper analysis of television as a globalised medium of communication would be advised to look elsewhere.
John Green
