Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space

by Anna McCarthy

Overview

Although we tend to think of television primarily as a household fixture, TV monitors outside the home are widespread: in bars, laundromats, and stores; conveying flight arrival and departure times in airports; uniting crowds at sports events and allaying boredom in waiting rooms; and helping to pass the time in workplaces of all kinds. In Ambient Television Anna McCarthy explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community that television generates outside the home.
Discussing the roles television has played in different institutions from 1945 to the present day, McCarthy draws on a wide array of sources. These include retail merchandising literature, TV industry trade journals, and journalistic discussions of public viewing, as well as the work of cultural geographers, architectural theorists, media scholars, and anthropologists. She also uses photography as a research tool, documenting the uses and meanings of television sets in the built environment, and focuses on such locations as the tavern and the department store to show how television is used to support very different ideas about gender, class, and consumption. Turning to contemporary examples, McCarthy discusses practices such as Turner Private Networks’ efforts to transform waiting room populations into advertising audiences and the use of point-of-sale video that influences brand visibility and consumer behavior. Finally, she inquires into the activist potential of out-of-home television through a discussion of the video practices of two contemporary artists in everyday public settings.
Scholars and students of cultural, visual, urban, American, film, and television studies will be interested in this thought-provoking, interdisciplinary book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822326922
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/16/2001
Series:	Console-Ing Passions
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Anna McCarthy is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Read an Excerpt

Ambient Television - CL

---

By Anna McCarthy

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Anna McCarthy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326830

---

Chapter One

TV, CLASS, AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN THE 1940s NEIGHBORHOOD TAVERN

Press shots of TV viewers in bars are among the earliest representations of TV spectatorship in postwar American culture. Like the scenes of deeply packed crowds outside appliance store windows and in high school auditoria photographed in the same period, such images depict TV viewing in public as a potent sense of collectivity. Although its specialized, Lacanian connotations make it a less than ideal term, gazing is the only word that really pinpoints what the people in these photographs are doing. Photo after photo captures TV viewing as a single structure of looking that binds persons in the space, a scene surprisingly close to the figures of collective domestic spectatorship captured in the image of TV's "family circle" that was so prevalent in this same period. The image of TV viewing in both sites is a tableau of faciality. Picture after picture shows us a scene of total absorption, of wide-eyed, open-mouthed people whose vision is directed toward a central point. But whereas the familial hearth pictures generally seem to adhere to rigid principles of sex balance in theirrepresentations of collective viewing, the TV audiences captured for posterity in the tavern tend to be almost all male. Often wearing hats and ties, this square-shouldered spectatorial fraternity gapes transfixed, cigarettes and drinks forgotten, in a pose often parodied in newspaper cartoons and mimed (hilariously) at the time by comedian Ed Wynn in his 1949 TV variety show.

However, despite the perception of the tavern as a masculine preserve, these images of the barstool audience sometimes reveal a woman sitting somewhere in the crowd. In figure 1 she is unusually conspicuous, sitting at the bar, wearing a boldly striped blouse, and biting her lip as she stares at the screen. This female spectator reminds us that although the prevalent image of early TV spectatorship in the tavern may be the kind of homogeneous masculine collectivity described above, it should be taken as a normative belief, not an empirical document, of what the tavern viewing experience must have been like. Indeed, her pronounced visual incongruity within this sea of men in hats is an allegory for the pervasiveness of perceptions of tavern spectatorship as a masculine phenomenon in American culture of the postwar period. Press reports invariably depicted the bar as the province of male viewers and the home the space of female ones. "The bar and grill set prefers sporting and news events," an article in Business Week reported, "and there aren't enough ... to fill television's broadcasting hours." Noting that "the studio programs designed for home listening do not appeal to the watchers in saloons," the article concluded that the audience manifested a "split personality." Newsweek reached a similar conclusion: "Other television shows feature fashion shows and special events, but bar owners find sports telecasts more popular." Business Week further surmised that the two audiences occupied different class positions. Working-class people watched in bars, whereas those with "more comfortable incomes" watched at home. Such reports also treated this large bar-viewing constituency and home viewers as very distinct audiences. Some surveys, conducted by the alcoholic beverage industry and by TV stations, estimated that most TV viewers watched from the neighborhood tavern; this led the advertising industry magazine Sponsor to conclude in 1948 that "the product using TV most successfully to date is beer"-a perception no doubt reinforced in the explicit references sports announcers on television made at the time to viewers in taverns and bars.

These discussions of television viewing in its earliest years are striking in their emphasis on location as the basis for knowledge about the audience. In the 1940s, given the novelty value of television, it seems likely that the audience watching in public drinking establishments was highly diverse, comprising gawkers and other unconventional spectators for whom the TV set, rather than the sports events often displayed on it, was the main attraction. But journalistic coverage of TV in bars nevertheless described such sites in very particular terms, as masculine arenas of white, working-class, urban culture. This is not in itself surprising. Not only was the thick-accented tavern drunk something of a cultural stereotype, parodied on radio by vaudeville performers like Wynn, but the white working class tavern was popularly depicted as the site of community values in urban public culture-amythic site revered and celebrated by writers like Damon Runyon, as well as newspaper nightlife columists like New York's Earl Wilson. But the press's narrow focus on a particular version of the tavern audience does highlight the rhetorical value in associating TV viewing places with particular social groups and with particular configurations of collectivity and sociality as well.

Although they are unlikely to be true, such speculative links between the audience's location and its identity illustrate a wider ideology that continues to define much commercial discourse about television outside the home, namely, that there is a direct correspondence between social space and social subjectivity. Today's industry rhetorics of site and spectatorship are, to be sure, far more precise in their representation of this correspondence -the short-lived "Trucker TV" network, for example, targeted truck drivers at highway rest stops-but the construction of the tavern audience as a masculine, sports-viewing collectivity in the postwar years is exemplary as an early institutional fiction that used the habitual character of public spaces as a way of "knowing" the TV audience located out there on the other side of the screen. But the public discourse on tavern spectatorship in this period is also an opportunity to explore the field of cultural politics that comes into being through such spatial constructions of spectatorship. As I will detail presently, the debate and conjecture sparked by the arrival of the bar as a new venue for sports spectatorship gave expression to wider concerns about, and actions against, workingclass leisure and entertainment in the postwar period.

In this respect the words and images through which we can trace television's arrival in the bar also reveal how uncertainties about the TV set's effects took on the accent of the social conflicts that defined the bar as a cultural space. As in the home, TV in the tavern occasioned questions about the medium's exact nature as an object in social space and as a window to other places-as a piece of talking, gaze-channeling furniture that needed to be integrated into the routines of everyday life within its location. But in popular and professional press coverage of tavern viewing, one can quickly discern how these questions about television's role in bars were at once comparable to those expressed around home viewing yet quite distinct in the meanings they assigned to particular televisual phenomena. Television's ability to collapse distinctions between public and private space in each location, for example, was judged to have very different effects, depending on the environment in question. Broadly speaking, one could say that whereas at home TV threatened to bring the anonymous and unpredictable realm of the outside world into domestic familial space, in the tavern TV provoked concerns about the "privatization" of the bar by undermining its traditional, masculinist ideals of free entry and conversational democracy-a concern that remains active, in different ways, around TV's presence outside the home to this day. By noting the points where the postwar construction of television spectatorship in these two arenas overlap and diverge, we can start to distinguish the broader mechanisms of site-specificity that suture television as an object and a spectacle into the human processes of its immediate environment.

This chapter pursues this opportunity, focusing on how a range of American cultural texts, from a beverage industry trade journal to the newsletters of social reformers, represented the screen's power to configure, and reconfigure, social relations in the bar. Television's emergence in the neighborhood tavern, as in the home, embodied contradictory cultural sensibilities and forms of social power. The tavern was a cultural arena in which liberatory ideals of democratic socializing met the privatizing forces of commerce and insular expressions of community. It was a space where the disciplinary desires of social reform constantly bumped up against the sediment of local practices, of explicit and implicit norms of behavior and socializing. It was a masculinist utopia in many ways, and yet its parodic representation in the press and popular culture of the postwar years reveals how often perceptions of this masculinity hinged on class contempt. The following account of television's arrival traces how TV gave expression to these and other contradictions that defined the tavern as a cultural space. It is a history in which class-based forces of social regulation feature prominently; the social questions TV raised for both the denizens of the tavern and its critics were intimately linked to the longer history of the bar as a working-class social space. Specifically, the prevailing discourses on TV's ability to alter space and to structure leisure time in the bar were inseparable from the institution's historical evolution as a space of working-class leisure and its position in the moral geographies of reform movements. When, at the end of this chapter, we visit a tavern that has managed to weather changes in neighborhood culture far more damaging than the arrival of TV, the extent to which anxieties about television's arrival prefigured larger structural changes in urban working-class lives will be apparent.

As I will argue, the history of tavern spectatorship in the 1940s is also a history of how very localized rhetorics of screen and place come to embody more diffuse processes of power and regulation. The debates over the tavern screen anticipated concerns about the impact of collective sports viewing on the economics of leisure that arose with the postsatellite rise of the commercial sports bar. In each case the thrill of the crowd was seen as the key to the bar as a reception context, and it introduced an intangible and even threatening element to the way other institutions of visual entertainment and recreation-baseball and movies in the case of the 1940s tavern, commercial sports broadcasting in the case of the sports bar-interpreted the TV viewing experience as a form of competition. Anticipating more contemporary concerns about TV's intrusion in various public places, the postwar tavern screen is thus a valuable lesson in how to think about the social impact of the TV screen in public places today.

Commerce, Culture, and the Tavern Public Sphere

The rise of satellite networks designed for drinking establishments in recent decades was not the first occasion for the commercial exploitation of a barstool TV audience. In the postwar years TV manufacturers quickly realized that the characteristic spatial arrangement of the bar gave rise to very particular viewing conditions. A number of companies developed large-screen receivers (both projection and "direct view") to accommodate the bar's collective viewing situation. Whereas larger companies such as DuMont, RCA, Philco, and GE added these models to their existing lines of home sets, at least one company, the United States Television Manufacturing Corporation, specialized in receivers for public places. One model, the "Tavern Telesymphonic," had a nineteen-by-twenty-five-inch screen and retailed for two thousand dollars. The tavern TV market also encouraged the early participation of alcoholic beverage companies in TV advertising. Even before the days of network broadcasting, Beverage Media, the trade journal for New York tavern owners, was filled with advertisements from local breweries announcing the sports events they were sponsoring on TV. Such advertisements addressed the tavern keeper as the proprietor of a convivial space for sports spectatorship, promulgating the image of tavern viewers as a masculine collectivity.

Such conceptions of the neighborhood tavern as a masculinist space reflected some of its enduring characteristics as an institution. Internal, informal systems for vetting entry and participation in tavern culture on the basis of gender as well as age were common in this period. The potential for hostility toward women in the tavern is vividly conveyed by the content of the following "humorous" signs found posted above the bar and collected in a 1947 survey of taverns in Manhattan and the Boroughs of New York:

Danger! Women Drinking Notice! No Back Room Here for Ladies Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies No Unescorted Ladies Permitted at Bar

Although no legal interdiction barred women from the tavern, signs like these would severely limit their participation in the social life of taverns in working-class neighborhoods. Still, this does not mean that women were entirely absent from tavern culture. One sociological study in this period found that "women were more likely to affirm the importance of the tavern in providing a meeting place and satisfying unmet social needs." One woman even stated, "If my daughters are eventually going to drink I would rather they go to the tavern than to go to private places." Her implication, presumably, was that the visibility of the tavern as a space allowed the watchful eye of the community to monitor the activities of women and men therein.

This sense of the tavern as a community hub marks the tavern's historical role as a neighborhood public sphere. Working-class neighborhood bars, before and after prohibition, were a hub of male (and sometimes female) recreation and social interaction. The author of the above-cited study of bar signs in New York characterized the tavern as a place "frequented by men and women who call each other by first names, who know what their drinking companions work at, the number of children each has, whether so-and-so is getting married, and who, in short, feel comfortable, natural, and at ease in each other's company." Regular customers thought of their local taverns as informal social clubs rather than as places to get drunk: "Many who wish to drink may do so at home or in other private ways," one patron noted. "Often [the tavern] is the only place a man can go unless he belongs to such clubs as Madison, Club, Elks club, et al., and including country clubs." This was echoed by a number of patrons, who felt that "everyone is equal in a tavern-whereas schools and churches all have their caste systems." The tavern was thus understood as a social institution distinctly more democratic than others, practiced by its patrons as a nonhierarchical social space.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Ambient Television - CL by Anna McCarthy Copyright © 2001 by Anna McCarthy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Public Lives of TV 1

Part I. Histories and Institutions

Rhetorics of TV Spectatorships Outside the Home 27

1. TV, Class, and Social Control in the 1940s Neighborhood Tavern 29

2. Gendered Fantasies of TV Shopping in the Postwar Department Store 63

3. Out-of-Home Networks in the 1990s 89

Part II. Places and Practices

Reading TV Installations in Daily Life 115

4. Shaping Public and Private Space with TV Screens 117

5. Television and Consumption at the Point of Purchase 155

6. Television While You Wait 195

7. Terminal Thoughts on Art, Activism, and Video for Public Places 225

Notes 253

Works Cited 287

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

Ambient Television offers a long overdue consideration of television spectatorship through a study of television's strategic positioning in a variety of public environments outside the home. Anna McCarthy's superb historical research has unearthed much fascinating material which will be of interest to artists and media critics. Anyone wishing to understand more fully our ever expanding media culture will benefit from McCarthy's astute analysis and historical insights into television's complex place in the public sphere.”—John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum


“An entirely original book, Ambient Television is brilliantly conceived, researched, and argued. Scholars in material culture, media history, and television studies are likely to recognize this virtuoso treatment of TV outside the home as an instant classic.”—Andrew Ross


“An unusually rich, ambitious, and engaging work. McCarthy has produced a significant piece of scholarship that will have wide impact upon the way television is taken up in the academy and elsewhere.”—William Boddy, Baruch College

From the Publisher

Traditionally conceptualized by both its critics and supporters as existing almost entirely in the private realm, television now shapes and often dominates public spaces, from sports bars and CNN's airport network to TVs in restaurants and beauty parlors. In this engrossing book, McCarthy, assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University, documents the enormous social and political impact on our daily lives of television's public presence. In lucid, if academic, prose and with a keen eye for historical detail and telling examples, McCarthy describes how televisions in 1950s taverns (viewed by the media as white, working-class, urban male enclaves, though many bars served diverse clientele) evolved into more upscale sports bars in the late 1980s. She also shows how "visual merchandising" (i.e., televisions located in department stores) functioned in the 1940s to direct the "irrational shopper" through the "rationalist architecture" of the stores. Drawing heavily on such theorists as Raymond Williams and J rgen Habermas, critical studies of merchandising and marketing, and trade journals, McCarthy's argument is fluent and convincing. Attuned to quirky and revealing juxtapositions such as religious images and icons placed next to televisions in stores and restaurants she astutely explains television's function as a disseminator of information in places like doctors' waiting rooms. While television's effects on public consciousness have long been a focus of sociologists and psychologists, McCarthy's eye-opening, scholarly work breathes new life into the debate over TV's ubiquitous influence. Photos. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly