Towards an Expanded History of Television

This Living Book has several objectives. First, it aims to show the generativity of research on an object, television, still in search of academic and institutional legitimacy. Secondly, it intends to promote and extend a historiographic renewal that has been observable for the last fifteen years: in this sense, our ambition is to lay the foundations for an expanded history of television at the intersection of media archaeology, intermedial perspectives, and a comprehensive analysis of vision and remote communication.

This approach is the fruit of "Beyond Public Broadcasting. Towards an Expanded History of Television in Switzerland” (Au-delà du service public. Pour une histoire élargie de la télévision en Suisse). Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation and co-directed by the two authors, François Vallotton and Anne-Katrin Weber of the University of Lausanne, the project has nourished three doctoral theses and a website, which notably won the 2020 Memoriav Prize. The present anthology also allows us to return to the historiographic and theoretical context that served as a backdrop for our communal reflection; a long introductory article offers a critical assessment of television studies in Switzerland. As for the anthology proper, it is intended to be a vade mecum that we hope will be valuable for anyone working or teaching in the field of media history.

Emblem of the consumer society for some, vehicle for a new era in the history of communications for others, television has gained an important place not only in cultural practices but also in historical discourse of the second half of the 20th century.⁰ Recently, however, the medium has undergone a spectacular transformation that tends to blur the rather circumscribed definition that both the public and the analyst had accepted over time. The domestic device embodied in the metaphor of the "window on the world" has given way to multiple forms of distribution and consumption, nomadic or fixed, ‘round the clock, and on-demand. Moreover, the recent changes to television have profoundly impacted its associated modes of production, political and economic actors, programs, and more broadly, its aesthetic at their very core.¹

These new configurations alter the way we look at the "small screen". In the public discourse, we speak of the disappearance of the medium or its dissolution in connection with the digital convergence of production on the one hand, and increasingly fragmentary programming, consumed individually, on the other.² In the scientific discourse, these very rapid transformations tend to foster those perspectives that focus on logics of rupture and radical otherness. For example, the American media specialist Amanda Lotz dedicated a work in 2007 to the "television revolution".³ Taking up Umberto Eco's canonical opposition between paleotelevision and neotelevision, which we might describe as "supply-side television" versus "demand-side television", Lotz narrates the medium's transformations from the 1950s onwards in three stages, each of which refers to a set of specific technologies and modes of reception. Thus, the years 1950-1980 - the era of "network TV" in the United States - were characterized by the quantitatively and temporally limited broadcast of television programs intended for a mass audience. The following years until 2000 saw the emergence of "multichannel TV". Made possible by new technologies such as satellite and cable, this phase broadened content options and allowed for niche programming. Television's third "age" - that of the all-digital and media convergence - is definitively shattering traditional definitions of the medium, which is now shared between several platforms and technologies. According to this model, the history of television can be described as the gradual evolution from a medium with fixed contours (public/commercial television in the family living room) to a medium managed by multiple content providers and dispersed among our cell phones, computers, and other devices.

Operating as a quick sketch of recent changes, this three-stage narrative is challenged by scholarship that underscores television’s continuous instability. In these works, historical perspective reveals a medium that is in fact in constant transformation and whose economic and technological stability in the years immediately following WWII represents the exception rather than the rule.⁴ The present anthology intends to contribute to this historiographical discussion by highlighting the complexity and diversity of televisual systems well beyond the traditional distinction between private and public institutions. It also wishes to take into account a new periodization of the medium that in many recent surveys no longer begins with the first essays of the Scotsman John Baird but rather situates the appearance of the device within a longer history of different forms of remote transmission going back at least to the last third of the 19th century.⁵ While privileging interdisciplinary views and approaches, we have selected papers with one common denominator: their authors put historically and methodologically grounded insights into dialogue in order to deconstruct the image of a monolithic medium or of a linear and homogeneous evolution.

To envision television’s flexibility from a historical perspective, we mobilize the notion of an "expanded" history. As we set forth below, this notion allows us to think an inclusive history of the medium, namely a history attentive to the margins of television institutions, to intermedial exchanges, and to the continuous transformations of practices and technologies. Contrary to the notions of "post" or "neo-" television, the notion of "expanded" television does not postulate a succession of media models but underlines the historiographic and methodological necessity of thinking television outside the fields traditionally assigned to it, i.e., mass media and public broadcasting, and even outside of the framework of domestic reception.

This conceptual framework is linked to a research project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation entitled Beyond Public Broadcasting: Towards an Expanded History of Television in Switzerland (Au-delà du service public : pour une histoire élargie de la télévision en Suisse), which we co-directed from 2016 to 2021. The focus on the Swiss audiovisual field was intended to allow the concrete experimentation of an approach that sought to distance itself from institutional and program history in order to shed light on the multiple appropriations of televisual techniques by actors located on the margins or outside of public service. Three axes, each of them taken up by a doctoral student, constitute the different approaches to the subject: the technical dimension emphasizes the impact of new forms of distribution, in this case satellite, on the media landscape’s reconfiguration; the social dimension examines the professionalization of the director's role and the mapping of individual careers spanning public broadcasting and private enterprise, television and film, or even national and international productions; finally, the discourse analysis component focuses on television’s staging of and by itself in the context of the audiovisual sector’s liberalization and of media policy developments at the federal level. The notion of an "expanded history of television" is implemented on these three levels with the explicit invitation to integrate marginal actors or failed initiatives; similarly, the archives consulted for the project substantially exceed the bounds of regional and national television.

Approaching the History of Television: An Object in Search of Legitimacy

Despite rather important advances in recent years and divergent situations in different national contexts, the study of television history has long suffered from a general lack of legitimacy within the intellectual sphere, and more specifically, the academic one. Historically, interest in this object first emerged from the anxiety it generated.⁶ Thus, in Great Britain in the early 1960s, James Halloran, then active in adult continuing education, was invited by the Secretary of the Home Office to assess of the media’s effects on juvenile delinquency. His study - which strongly relativized this influence - would lead to the creation of the Centre for Mass Communication and Research at the University of Leicester. At the same time, it took the rise of cultural studies, particularly at the University of Birmingham, and feminist studies to bring consumer media out of its academic ostracism. This interest in popular practices and the distancing of an approach to mass culture analysis that sees its objects in terms of alienation and acculturation represent major milestones within the field of media and cultural studies. Nonetheless, severely deprecating views of the cultural industries epitomized by Richard Hoggart’s writing⁷ would contribute to the enduring association of a medium like television with productions of lesser value, whose only ambition is to capture attention in the name of commercial and advertising logics. This is the same criticism Pierre Bourdieu delivers with particular force at the College of France in his (televised!) lectures published under the title On the Television.⁸

Television’s stigmatization - relatively common to mass media, a fact to which comics or, more recently, video games attest - is reinforced by its initial status as family media, generally associated with a female public. The latter, according to the dominant representation of gender relations, is allegedly easily seduced by culturally minor productions. Television is seen as having attributes suitable to reach and adapt to this specific audience, i.e., it tends to support distracted and intermittent listening compatible with the execution of domestic tasks and to offer programming that mixes entertainment and publicity. It will take many years and the emergence of a new feminist historiography to get these productions, often wrongly described as feminine, out of the ghetto to which they had been relegated and to emphasize their very diverse receptions, which were much less passive than previously admitted.⁹

For all these reasons, unlike cinema, which attained the status of “seventh art”, television did not undergo the process of artification.¹⁰ Certainly, the notion of "eighth art" - for the few who remember it - includes "media arts", meaning radio, television, and photography. However, the "small screen" suffers the symbolic domination of the "big one": the image is of inferior quality; it does not offer the same level of attraction as the magnetic environment of the theatrical projection; its biased and partial definition as a live medium tends to emphasize its ability to capture reality rather than its artistic dimension. Some publications have tried to bring atypical approaches to television to the fore through consecrated figures, for instance, television’s integration into the field of modern art by someone like Jean-Christophe Averty or Jean-Luc Godard with his use of video.¹¹ However, the artistic and innovative dimension of television, to which works of Gilles Delavaud or Guillaume Soulez in the francophone context attest, has not been sufficient for the term "telephilia" to enter into common usage. This situation can also be explained by the absence of intermediaries capable of contributing to the television’s legitimization over time, as exemplified by the disappearance of the tele-club movement. This movement was as ahead of its time as it was short-lived.¹² In opposition to the dominant idea of television as a popular rather than artistic medium, the new wave of works on "quality TV" must not go unmentioned. The notion of "quality TV" covers a diverse set of audiovisual productions but has the merit, in the scientific literature, of updating knowledge about the construction of value both at the level of the broadcasters and that of the programs.¹³

Switzerland does not escape this broader context. The institutionalization of (historical) studies on television remains limited in spite of the fact that, with the advent of the video tape recorder but more generally with audiovisual equipment found in lecture halls and auditoriums, television and video have long been abundantly mobilized in the classroom and in very diverse disciplines.¹⁴ In addition to the question of archives to which we will return, two factors help explain the lack of scientific and historical reflection on television. As in several neighboring countries, television studies has mainly been the domain of other disciplines, starting with sociology and, in the German-speaking world, Medienwissenschaften, which took off in the 1980s. If we add to this the reluctance - until the 1990s - of Swiss historians to tackle post-1945 history, it is understandable that the study of electronic media has not generated much interest from academic institutions. A second explanation can be found in the more generally underdeveloped state of the history of communications and media. As Peter Meier has shown in a thematic issue of the Revue suisse d’histoire devoted to media history, this field has enjoyed little institutional recognition in Switzerland. Though audiovisual sources are invoked with more or less regularity, reflections on the emergence and development of media, methodological studies, and approaches going beyond the monographic are rare.¹⁵ The situation at the end of the twentieth century, however, suggested a promising turn. In 1989, Yves Collart, a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, founded the Centre d'historiographie et de recherche sur les sources audiovisuelles (CHERSA), which granted special attention to the study of television. In 1994, Collart was one of the moderators of a one-day symposium organized by the Swiss Historical Society devoted to the subject of audiovisual conservation. This symposium led to the creation of Memoriav, an association that has managed a network of institutions interested in the preservation and promotion of archives in the fields of photography, sound, film, and video since 1995. However, it was not until several years later that this first breakthrough could create a lasting effect. The CHERSA found neither a successor nor institutional continuity after Yves Collart's retirement. A center for the history of the audiovisual that draws upon significant synergies between the history and film departments is progressively developing within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lausanne.¹⁶ The project Towards an Expanded History of Television (Pour une histoire élargie de la television) is one of its manifestations.

Writing the Story of Television: From the Commemorative Object to an Expanded History

Given the above, it is not surprising that television historiography in Switzerland appears to be somewhat anemic; an assessment that is also reflected in the weak academic institutionalization of television studies, with no professorship is currently dedicated to the medium. For a long time, the majority of historical publications have been the result of commemorations or various anniversaries proposing a chronology of the "great" moments of television.¹⁷ Often written by agents close to the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (Société suisse de radiodiffusion et television, henceforth SSR) and taking advantage of access to the institution's iconographic sources to illustrate major events, these publications contribute primarily to the memory of the public broadcasting service, reminding the readers of their (first) memories as television viewers. As part of an institutional and, in this case, regional history, works such as Show - Information - Kultur. Schweizer Fernsehen von der Pionierzeit ins moderne Medienzeitalter¹⁸, " 50 Jahre Schweizer Fernsehen " : Chronik : Hauszeitung von SF DRS¹⁹ or La TSR a 50 ans : album de famille : 1954-2004²⁰ gather key moments of one of the company’s entities, omitting however a national or international contextualization. A welcome exception is the book Voce e Specchio. Storia della radiotelevisione svizzera di lingua italiana, which, while privileging the regional focus, places this history in a much broader media and historical context.²¹

In a more "intimate" tone, the (auto)biographical writings of radio and television personalities reveal individual trajectories that have marked audiovisual history in Switzerland. The portraits of Roger Schawinski (Einer gegen Alle: das andere Gesicht des Roger Schawinski and Wer bin ich? ²² ) and those of Raymond Vouillamoz²³ or of Leo Fischer, proponent of the first Swiss cable network (Leo Fischer: die Erinnerungen des Schweizer Kabelfernsehkönigs²⁴), certainly make it possible to reconstitute aspects of national or regional television history but lack the scientific rigor and in-depth problematization that characterize academic studies.

Research carried out since the mid-1980s within the various Swiss institutes for Communication and Media Sciences has nourished an abundant gray literature mainly oriented towards the political and social analysis of the effects, significance, and functions of mass communication. These studies privilege sociological approaches to the contemporary media landscape and focus more on a systemic analysis than on historical approaches. This is the case for Medienlandschaft Schweiz im Umbruch. Vom öffentlichen Kulturgut Rundfunk zur elektronischen Kioskware, co-authored by Werner A. Meier, Heinz Bonfadelli, and Michael Schanne within the framework of the Swiss National Science Foundation Project, "Cultural Pluralism and National Identity" (“Pluralisme culturel et identité nationale”)²⁵ (NRP21). This study provides an overview of the Swiss media landscape a few years after the introduction of the Local Broadcasting Ordinance of 1982, which led to the abolition of the SSR monopoly on radio and television broadcasting. Conceived as a scientific contribution to the contemporary debate on the links between public broadcasting and cultural identity, the work is geared towards a pragmatic assessment of media politics in Switzerland, including the SSR and "new media" (private radio, satellite, paid television). This work launched several studies, often comparative, on the specificity of the Swiss audiovisual landscape and on the terms and conditions of its liberalization.²⁶

Published under the aegis of the Institut für Publizistikwissenschaft und Medienforschung of the University of Zurich in 1998, the volume Fernsehen DRS: Werden und Wandel einer Institution marks the first introduction to the history of the SSR.²⁷ Bearing the subtitle A Contribution to Media Historiography as Institutional History (Ein Beitrag zur Medienhistoriographie als Institutionsgeschichte), this work explicitly claims to be based on historical methodology, but limits its analysis - like the majority of works for the "general public" - to the development of regional institutional television, in this case Swiss German broadcasting. The launch of a vast national research project that led to the publication of the collective work La radio et la télévision en Suisse : histoire de la Société de radiodiffusion SSR²⁸ proved an especially important milestone. Initiated by the director general of the SSR at the time, Antonio Riva, this project stands out for its scope - three volumes constituting a total of 1,000 pages, a study that spans almost 20 years -, its ability to unite a multidisciplinary network of researchers from all linguistic regions of the country, and for the total intellectual freedom enjoyed by the authors. Beyond the synthesis it offered, this vast project would be closely linked to the classification and digitization of the public broadcaster’s paper and audiovisual archives. The organizing principles of the volumes vary. The chronological logic favored in the first part is then replaced by a thematic approach that enriches the institutional perspective with transversal views on technical developments, links with politics, cultural issues, and the history of programs.²⁹ In this sense, following a more general historiographical trend on the international level, the three-part publication intends to transform a "history of media" (“histoire des médias”) into a "history through media" (“histoire par les medias”)³⁰ by demonstrating the potential of audiovisual sources for a social, political and cultural history of Switzerland. For example, the history of the SSR is a privileged observatory for the analysis of neoliberalism and its effects on the dismantling of public broadcasting.  More broadly, and as many recent studies have shown, the history of television is a fascinating vehicle for thinking about the construction and reshaping of gender relations through the analysis not only of programming but also of reception and consumption practices.³¹ Attention to televisual everydayness highlights its ambivalent character, which includes the reinforcement of patriarchal values as well as strategies for evasion and resistance.

This first attempt at an "expanded history of television" is limited, however, by a normative definition of the medium, which reduces it to a domestic mass media structured by the public broadcasting service. It is therefore necessary to reference other scholarship, in this case three recent PhD theses that have been major milestones for the larger paradigm shift that we intend to illustrate with this publication. First, we would like to mention Caroline Meyer's research on the Eidophor, a device for projecting the television image in a closed circuit and on a large screen.³² The Eidophor embodies another dimension of television less oriented towards the production of programs than towards educational uses and the retransmission of major events. Developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) before being commercialized by the Basel-based pharmaceutical company Ciba, it testifies to Switzerland’s role in the development of alternatives to public broadcasting in terms of technologies, distributors, and audiences.

SSecond, Dominique Rudin's thesis focuses on Swiss counterculture and its use of video, mainly in the context of the youth protests in Zurich in 1980.³³ This look at collective production, often a refusal of official television, covers a field of research that is fairly well delineated in the context of the American Guerrilla Television and with regard to community television in other national spheres, but which remained in the shadows in Switzerland until now.³⁴ It opens new perspectives linked to new modes of production associated with lightweight video and to the development of a critical approach conferring a new role to the medium as it was reappropriated by non-professionals.

The third approach to this "expanded history" is Anne-Katrin Weber's PhD thesis on the television exhibitions of the interwar period, which is scheduled for publication in early 2022.³⁵ Already the editor of an acclaimed collective volume, La télévision, du téléphonoscope à YouTube³⁶, which reflects the revitalization of approaches and the chronological dilation of studies on television, the researcher here proposes another "sidestep". From a discussion of television's specificity, we move to the analysis of the medium's location in public space. In this respect, the industrial exhibition, like museums, schools, or department stores, constitutes a relevant observatory. Beyond the comparative approach to interwar television in Germany, Great Britain and the United States, the study shows the essential role of exhibitions in the invention of differentiated uses, not yet mainly oriented toward domestic viewing. This focus on modes of appropriation and consumption has a heuristic value that goes beyond the chosen geographical and chronological framework: it invites us to take neglected devices and prototypes into account while emphasizing a history of possibilities that clearly breaks with the traditional, teleological history of media.

At the international level, the history of the industrial television and closed-circuit television (CCTV) represents an emerging field for the renewal of television studies. Inspired by the historiography of "utilitarian cinema", the works in this category analyze the use of television in the fields of industry, science, research, the army, or medicine.³⁷ They show that, parallel to the definitive rise of television as a domestic mass media in the post-war period, it was also conceived on the model of a closed circuit that links camera and receiver in an audiovisual loop. CCTV or industrial television is the result of military research conducted during the 1940s. Its technology responds to demands to increase its adaptability through simplification and miniaturization; its field of application includes the automation of industrial manufacturing processes but also traffic management, the streamlining of information systems in libraries, or the surveillance of indoor and outdoor spaces. As a highly flexible device used in non-domestic settings and for purposes ranging from military to educational, the closed circuit perfectly illustrates the need - and the urgency - of writing an expanded history of the television medium.

Opening Up the History of Television, Rethinking the Toolbox

In other words, an expanded history of television aims not only to study the most exploratory configurations of the televisual medium, but also to envision displacements, which concern both the periodization and the very definition of the object of study. Thus, considering an expanded history of television invites us to be attentive to the multiple transformations that historically characterize the medium and to construct an analysis that moves between the center and the margins of its developments. Consequently, the contributions to this anthology make us see the history of "a multidimensional media".³⁸

Overall, the expanded history of television relies on recent scholarship engaged in methodological revitalization; two fields of research have been particularly valuable for our reflection. The first, media archaeology and its multiple branches in the Anglo-Saxon and German-speaking academic landscapes, offers an invitation to explore heterodox, even forgotten objects of media history. Going against technological and institutional histories based on a linear notion of "evolution" and "progress", media archaeology explores the margins of "traditional" mass media - radio, cinema, television - and brings multiple experiments and other failed or ephemeral developments to light.³⁹ Insisting on the "unspoken" and the "unseen" of media history, the archaeological approach recalls the technical, economic, and cultural flexibility of the medium by including not only machines, but also discourses and imaginaries in its analysis. In the field of television studies, a significant number of works can be associated with media archaeology, even if their authors do not always claim this filiation.⁴⁰

The second, the notion of the viewing and listening dispositif, provides a powerful heuristic tool for a detailed study of numerous televisual applications. In particular, the propositions of François Albera and Maria Tortajada have made possible the establishment of an internationally recognized research hub that brings together researchers from Cinema and Media Studies.⁴¹ Defined as a conceptual schema connecting media technology, media user-spectators, and media content, the dispositif allows us to apprehend media’s multiple configurations on three levels: material, textual and cultural; it is also attentive to the epistemological dimension of media as producers of (audio)visual knowledge. While offering a rigorous framework for analysis, the dispositif makes it possible to think media forms that are a priori different together. The concept of the device thus favors the decompartmentalization of television history, from big screen television to bi-directional television by way of VHS and television for medical use.⁴²

If the two approaches each refer to a circumscribed body of research, they nonetheless both participate in the renewal of media history, which they consider in an "expanded" light. Both underscore the epistemological importance of television history’s openness to the multiple technologies and practices existing beyond a history of programs, on the one hand, and of the public broadcasting service on the other. From a pragmatic point of view, these approaches also invite us to extend our fields of archival research and to integrate new sources that do not emanate from the television institutions themselves. As part of our Beyond Public Broadcasting project, we have assembled a map of the archives we consulted in our research. This cartography is marked by the geographical and thematic fragmentation of the archives enlisted and reflects the expansion of our questions and objects of interest. Including international (ITU), local (Vaud cantonal archives), and national archives (federal archives), as well as those held by associations such as the Protest Archives (les Archives contestataires) in Geneva, this cartography constitutes an important tool for future explorations of an expanded history of television in Switzerland.    

Embodying the History of Television: Selection Criteria and Table of Contents

For this collection, the selection of the texts obviously depends on their accessibility in terms of rights. We have favored texts in English and French for practical reasons; we recognize that, although we are very much interested in a global and transnational approach, German-speaking, Portuguese-speaking or Spanish-speaking papers are missing from our selection. Though the impossibility of translating certain texts for the present publication limits the representativeness of certain choices, we have favored several existing translations in order to promote the geographical and linguistic decompartmentalization of media history and to encourage students to integrate and cross-reference the different schools and critical traditions.

It is also necessary to add that our table of contents could not represent all the dimensions of contemporary television historiography. As has been stated, our selection illustrates above all a series of approaches giving theoretical substance to the notion of "expanded television". Insofar as this idea seems to us representative of a particularly dynamic research movement, we hope that it will be able to stimulate researchers and students interested in a cultural history of the audiovisual in a global and intermedial perspective. We also hope that this frame of reference will lead to further Swiss case studies that extend our own research project, the first results of which can be found on the project’s dedicated website.

Finally, each section is complemented by a website, which offers resources both in terms of literature and audiovisual sources; as the present volume attests, research on television is increasingly written via the use of multimedia, which allows this research field to act as a laboratory for new modes of writing history.

The first section, "Methods", privileges the sources that are in our eyes essential to the recent historiography of television but also more widely of media studies. While many of them are part of the field of media archaeology mentioned above, these studies cannot be attached to a one-dimensional approach but rather constitute as many complementary insights having as a common denominator the decompartmentalization of the object "television". All the contributions initially make a case, implicitly or explicitly, for the pluralization of the term to reflect the way that, in every historical period, television has assumed multiple unstable identities in constant reconfiguration. These methodologies, while distrusting technological determinism, aim to integrate the technical and scientific parameters that condition media development into their analysis. They do so in close dialogue with practices and modalities of appropriation by the public, which would make or break certain innovations. From this perspective, a major emphasis is placed on certain experiments and on the context of technical "domestication" but also on failures, setbacks, and discontinuations. Two other elements common to these texts need underlining: on the one hand, a lengthening of the traditional periodization, which ceases to be limited to the small screen’s entrance into the home and places this moment within a longer history of remote transmission and communication; on the other hand, the consideration of new sources that surpass the framework of media and institutional actors to integrate, for example, industrial and technical exhibitions, public sites of reception, or advertisements in the popular (women’s) press.

The exploitation of new sources is at the heart of the second section entitled "Imaginaries". At stake in this section is a reflection on the contribution of utopian literary and graphic sources, or science fiction, to think about the possible uses of a given media system. We should not limit ourselves here to a reading underscoring the predictive capacity of the authors in question. More importantly, their texts bring the interdependence of imagined and realized media into relief. Moreover, the hybrid character of any media production and specific manifestations such as live transmissions can be emphasized to integrate television within an intermedial network of devices. We can observe this phenomenon in the oft-cited example of the telephonoscope imagined by the novelist and illustrator Albert Robida (1848-1926). Combining the properties of the theatrophone, which allowed the audition of plays in the home, and of the projection lantern, the device allows the user live access, through voice and image, to spectacles or information, or to enter in direct communication with third parties. As Gabriele Balbi and Simone Natale have shown, media’s imaginary dimension is just as heuristically fruitful as a place for thinking the possible applications of a media already in use (the radio, for example) as it is for reflection, dystopian or nostalgic, on the supposed disappearance of a platform, for instance, when we speak about the death of the book or the end of television.⁴³

The third section, "Machines", returns to a history of televisual technical devices. But while this history is often limited to early television and to the passage from the mechanical to the electronic system, this series of articles revisits the narrative of one immutable technique and of inevitable broadcasting modalities. In the post-war period, cable imposed itself as an alternative broadcasting mode to the Hertzian before the satellite inaugurated an era of retransmissions on a global scale. Echoing the historical approach of infrastructure studies, the technical dimension of these communication networks must always be articulated alongside a reflection on the political and economic stakes of their control and on the new forms of representation that they authorize. On another level, an intermedial perspective leaves behind the genealogical, teleological approach that still dominates the historiography of technologies and of media. Rather than conceiving of these as part of a continuum characterized by the ideas of improvement and progress, this perspective highlights the technological transfers that take place between different media and underscores the interdependence of the world of communication and related sectors, in particular military industry. This dimension takes on a very particular resonance in our contemporary world with the multiplied uses of the drone as an instrument of surveillance and weapon of destruction but also as a camera for aerial shots increasingly mobilized in television productions.

With the fourth section, "Transmissions", we address the television productions and broadcasts that generally escape mainstream readings, which tend to focus on the development of programs for large-scale audiences in the context of private domestic reception. However, since the end of the 1960s, more voices have been calling for an exploration of alternative television programming to that of public broadcasting channels and large networks. The advent of lightweight devices such as the Sony Portapak camera allowed non-professionals to appropriate television technology and to develop other constellations of interactive exchange between producers and consumers. In Switzerland, as in many other countries, video would become one of a set of countercultural tools tied to the political protests that characterize the end of the 1960s. However, the principle of collective viewing, which contributes fully to this participative approach, is not specific to this historical moment. The experiment, rather short-lived, of tele-clubs, - associated with the very beginnings of the television and a still experimental period - aimed to connect this new spectatorial practice with village sociality. This approach was generally facilitated by the teacher insofar as the receiver set was installed in the school. The development of educational television as a pedagogical vehicle, but also the pilot experiments aimed at training pupils in the use of filmic media including sound, constitute a fascinating investigative terrain. If the screen’s presence has been multiplied to a formidable extent since the 1980s, there is still a relative dearth of studies on the various modalities of the audiovisual’s integration into the school classroom or the university lecture hall, from light projection to the closed-circuit television studio.

This aspect brings us to the last section, "Teaching (with) Television". The least quantitatively dense, this subsection honors what makes the Living Book unique, namely the possibility it gives to the reader to propose his or her own texts to enrich the anthology. These articles should thus encourage teachers working in the field of television history to share their daily experiences. Here, we are particularly interested in the use of audiovisual material and, perhaps above all, the "invention" of new narratives to enhance the value of historical research. The period of resource scarcity has been superseded by the current profusion of audiovisual sources made possible by the multiplication of web platforms, patrimonial or commercial. How can we sensitize students to the particularities of each archive and teach them to take the specific characteristics of the audiovisual archive’s production, preservation, and consultation into account? How to establish new types of reports that offer both the desired rigor in terms of citation and an attractive integration of analytical text and documentary resources?

These are some of the questions we wish to explore with the aim of further reinforcing the attention paid to audiovisual sources. In this sense, an expanded history of television is undoubtedly the right ferment to renew our practices, both pedagogical and editorial, via new formats but especially via the invention of new modalities for our own historical narratives.