P
eople increasingly say that television is dead – or on its last legs. Maybe so. But we no longer really know what we are talking about, and perhaps we never did. What is "television"? If we refer to the set itself, it is a device for receiving moving images, organized into channels and programs. This object has seen many technologies, from cathode-ray tubes to liquid crystals. Over time, it increasingly took a central place in 20th-century homes.
But television is not just the TV set. It is a much broader system of production and broadcasting, involving not only cameras, microphones and studios, but also a complex mapping of the country, public policy, massive private investments, and countless strategies of cultural warfare to gain access to viewers' "available brain time."
"Televisual" also gradually came to refer – with a hint of disparagement – to a whole aesthetic associated with these popular, low-brow images: the staging of news bulletins on set, opinion debates and heated clashes, sports broadcasts, relentless advertising and commercials,; the creation of soap operas, originally funded by laundry detergent brands and aimed at housewives, and the development of the TV series as an art form seeking legitimacy.
