008_ Reaction to Raymond Williams' " The Technology and the Society" and Carlotta Schoolman & Richard Serra's "Television Delivers the People"

On "Television Delivers the People":

Carlotta Schoolman and Richard Serra produced a work of scrolling text, attacking the notion of the master/slave relationship of viewer and television. Aesthetically, they use background music of happy-slappy, perfect jazz allowing the viewer to "relax" as this work scrolls down the television screen. Contextually, I believe Schoolman and Serra are telling the audience that "You are the Product of television" and that you, the viewer, become the commodity that is being bought and sold, not the products displayed through advertisement. Furthermore, "corporations are not responsible" for your actions after watching the propaganda they produce and feed to you via television, but rather your actions of consumption and new-found obligation to a constructed reality, is what is responsible. The corporations are simply giving a vast audience something in common, something to relate to each other through commodities. "Corporation control advocates materialistic propaganda." Therefore, Serra and Schoolman conclude that the people, not materials, are consumed and television propagates this relationship.


On Raymond Williams' " The Technology and the Society":

Williams' essay describes the state of television and sound radio in relation to the society of the time (1972). He begins by asking the question of cause and effect between a "technology and a society, a technology and a culture, and a technology and a psychology." Although these questions seem difficult, the answer to them all is rather irrelevant. In a linear historical context, one may have come before the next but above all, these technologies were developed as systems, as transmissions and for reception/production of communication. The cultural and social significance of them were not used an aggressive tool, but rather in response to "an increased awareness of mobility and change, not just as abstractions but as lived experiences." Therefore, the concept of broadcasting data to individuals grew from a need to spread free information, for good or bad. Thus, when television and radio became an infrastructure of control, be it by corporations or government, there "was this deep contradiction, of centralized transmission and privatized reception." The goal of broadcast was for the spread of free, public information through technology, and once this became abused and labeled "mass communication" the historical order of cause and effect became unimportant. Therefore, television and radio's "use" changed, the output "changed" and the order of operations of social/tech, intent/content, and transmission/reception produced "in fact, a new social complex of a new and central kind."