Make Room for TV History

Abstract

Lynn Spigel's Make Room for TV came out when I was in graduate school and was one of the most important books I read during those years of high intensity reading, writing and thinking. Many things about the book impressed me; among them, the scope of the research, the careful nuances of the argument and the flexibility of Spigel's model of media and space. I did not know it at the time, but her approach to television - addressing it not only as a vehicle for programming, but also as an object located in a social setting - would serve as a conceptual touchstone in my own scholarly work for the next eight years. What overwhelmed me first when I sat down to read the book was the clarity of the writing. I was new to graduate school and, to some extent, I was also new to pro- fessional academic prose. Make Room for TV was striking because it was such a good read. Spigel pinpointed complex social and cultural processes in elegant precise language. She told a story, but she never sacrificed analytical subtlety for the sake of narrative. Reading it, I became aware for the first time of what scholarly writing could achieve. As I write this, without opening the book, I recall the phrase 'antiseptic electrical space' and remember the great pleasure that the term gave me as a description of the fantasies of connection created by TV's promoters and observers in the 1950s. Reading the final sentences of the book now, it strikes me that they set an agenda for subsequent studies of TV that would consider its effects within social space - not only the social space of the family, but also that of a variety of institutions beyond the home. Spigel writes of 'the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set in a room' as traces of 'the details of everyday existence into which television inserted itself' (1992: 187). In focussing so elegantly on the ephemeral material culture of the medium, the book wrote out a new paradigm for TV studies. A great deal of hard work must have gone into making the prose so good. The closed world of academic publishing means that people write in shorthand coded phrases that are incomprehensible to others. It's not always easy to recognize these moments in one's own writing. Phrases