In this regard— flow as “the impulse to go onwatching”—Williams’s concept is neither a fascinatingbut outmoded critical tool, nor a broad brush to ap-ply to any cultural incongruities, but still a compellingmodel with which we can analyze how communica-tions systems structure societies (and vice versa)

In the era of audience fragmenta-tion and time shifting, when much (if not most) viewingwill take place in the hours, days, weeks, or even yearsafter an initial broadcast, and when program segmentsare regularly extracted from their original flow and recir-culated into others as video clips, what textual sequencecould possibly constitute “planned flow

keeping up with these flows is the source of “di-giphrenia”: the anxiety about being out of synch withour online identities and information flows

The 1970s TV viewer was arelatively anonymous part of a one-way ideological sys-tem functioning largely at a macro level, but the 2010ssocial media user is constantly registered, addressed,and compelled to participate as a series of discrete anddistributed data points

His description of twentieth-century citizenship as increasingly ensconced in theconsumerist machinery of “mobile privatization”—best exemplified by television—has proven particularl

In this interpretation, flow is less a machin-ery for ideological reinforcement and more of a descrip-tion of formless content, fleetingly visible, and devoidof deeper meaning

prime-time viewer in her analysis of how the frequentinterruptions of daytime television’s flow (particularlycommercial breaks) bolstered the “decentered” experi-ence of women’s housework.

When first formulated in his seminal 1974 bookTelevision: Technology and Cultural Form, RaymondWilliams’s concept of flow was a compelling metaphorof the ideological power of television

the flow of hurried items establishes asense of the world: of surprising and miscellaneous events com-ing in, tumbling over each other, from all sides.

he apparently disjointed ‘sequence’ of items isin effect guided by a remarkably consistent set of cultural rela-tionships: a flow of consumable reports and products,

It would be like trying to describe having readtwo plays, three newspapers, three or four magazines, on thesame day that one has been to a variety show and a lecture and afootball match. And yet in another way it is not like that at all, forthough the items may be various the television experience has insome important ways unified them.

n it is awidely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us findtelevision very difficult to switch off;

It is then not surprisingthat so many of these opening moments are violent or bizarre:the interest aroused must be strong enough to initiate theexpectation of (interrupted but sustainable) sequence.

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a pro-gramme of discrete units with particular insertions, but aplanned flow

In all developed broadcastingsystems the characteristic organisation, and therefore thecharacteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow.

These new viewing practices could mean the end of genre in the sense thischapter has described it. Yet it could also mean that a rapid flow from onegenre to another will come to represent the typical viewing experience.

another "lifestyle" sitcom,The Cosby Show, returns us to the father-knows-best world of the 1950sdomestic comedy

The Beverly Hillbillies, although it is not satire per se, is nonetheless a "nihilistic caricatureof modern life:'

ThusNewcomb sees the sitcom as providing a simple and reassuring problem/solution formula

The principal fundamental situation of the situation comedy is that things donot change

Genre offers a way for the film andTV industries to control the tension between similarity and differenceinherent in the production of any cultural product.

Genres are rhetorical and pragmatic constructions of an analyst, not acts of nature.

Filmand television, however, are culturally specific and temporally limited

The very use of the term implies that worksof literature, films, and television programs can be categorized; they arenot unique.

Despitemany ambitious Hollywood announcements of prospective theatre-TV plansbetween 1948 and 1951, fewer than 100 theatres across the country were everequipped for its use

To curtail or destroy thenetworks’ unique quality of instantaneous national interconnection wouldbe a colossal baward step.

“e style of acting in television is determined by the conditions ofreception; there is simply no place for the florid gesture, the overprojectionof emotion, the exaggeration of voice or grimace or movement, inside theaverage American living room.”

is means thatvulgarity, profanity, the sacrilegious in every form, and immorality of every kind willhave no place in television. All programs must be in good taste, unprejudiced, andimpartial

was alreadylamenting what he saw as a decline in the programme quality since theearlier days when minuscule audiences freed program-makers from therelentless need to address the widest public tastes:

elevision is the poor man’s latest and most prizedluxury.”

So far it’s aman’s world in the programme department, with sports and news eventshogging the average station’s 20 hour-a-week showbill.”

“the American householdis on the threshold of a revolution. e wife scarcely knows where thekiten is, let alone her place in it. Junior scorns the late-aernoon sunlightfor the glamour of the darkened living room. Father’s briefcase liesunopened in the foyer. e reason is television.

We hope that you will enjoy our programs. e Columbia BroadcastingSystem, however, is not engaged in the manufacture of television receivingsets and does not want you to consider these broadcasts as inducements topurase television sets at this time

First we have an obligation to give most of the people what they want most of the time

Network economicstrength derived from a decade

e first decade of commercial television in the United States set in place themajor economic actors, programme forms, and regulatory structures of thevast American TV industry of the next thirty years.

e ubiquitous TV antenna is a symbol of people seeking—and geing—the identicalmessage”

one respondent said, “It keeps us together more,” andanother commented, “It makes a closer family circle.”

According to the logic of this composition, the central fascination forthe reader is not the actual product, whi is pictured only in minusculeproportions on the lower margin of the page, but rather its ability to bringthe family together around it.

e family circle ads, likesuburbia itself, were only a temporary consumer solution to a set ofcomplicated political, economic, and social problems

Many contemporaries fearedthat returning veterans would be unable to resume their positions asresponsible family men. ey worried that a crisis in masculinity could leadto crime, ‘perversion’ and homosexuality

Photographs, particularly in advertisements,graphically depicted the idea of the family circle with television viewersgrouped around the television set in semicircle paerns.

o common had thissubstitution become that by 1954 House Beautiful was presenting its readerswith “another example of how the TV set is taking the place of the fireplaceas the focal point

McCall’s magazine coined the term “togetherness.” e appearanceof this term between the covers of a woman’s magazine is significant notonly because it shows the importance aaed to family unity during thepostwar years, but also because this phrase is symptomatic of discoursesaimed at the housewife. Home magazines primarily discussed family life inlanguage organized around spatial imagery of proximity, distance, isolation,and integration

With its“bad reception,” television serves as a rhetorical figure for the loss ofcommunication between family members