554342

research-article2015
NMS0010.1177/1461444814554342new media & societyBook Reviews

new media & society

Book Reviews
2015, Vol. 17(2) 308­–318
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444814554342
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Paddy Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live. Polity Press: Cambridge and Malden, MA,
2014; 253 pp.: ISBN 9780745662541, $26.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Lars Nyre, University of Bergen, Norway

Paddy Scannell is a media scholar who started writing about media history and media
phenomenology long before the Internet. He has always asked big theoretical questions
concerning the media, and his new book contains the most complex so far.
The book has two main parts. The first deals with Heidegger’s philosophy in relation
to television as a technology, and the second presents phenomenological analyses of the
production of television content in the Anglo-American world. Taken at face value,
Scannell’s new book is all about television: its technologies, production practices and
reception history. But there is more to it. Scannell has in fact written a philosophical
account of what it implies to experience something live and recorded in the media, not
just on television and radio, but by extension also on the Internet. It deserves to become
an important reference in the annals of media research.
The first part is a challenging introduction to the existential phenomenology of Martin
Heidegger, especially The Concept of Time, Being and Time and ‘The Question
Concerning Technology’. Time, for Heidegger, is the horizon of our being, disclosed as
such by death (p. 190). Human existence consists of ‘birth > life > death’, and conse-
quently being towards death is the fundamental experience of being human (p. 190).
What makes Scannell’s version of existentialism interesting is the fact that it is truly a
media-oriented version, formulated in dialogue with media scholars as diverse as J. L.
Austin, Paul Lazarsfeld, Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, Erving Goffman, Jacques Derrida
and John Durham Peters.
What is his media philosophy, then? ‘We now live in a totally technologized world’,
Scannell argues, referring in particular to the immediate connectivity provided by the
electricity grid, and exploited in various media for around 150 years. ‘To understand our
conditions of existence demands that we address the question of technology as constitu-
tive of the world we live in’ (p. xi). We inhabit a world of infrastructure that ‘gives unceas-
ingly, from moment to moment, hourly and daily, day in day out, the taken-for-granted
conditions or our lives’ (p. 11).
Scannell follows Martin Heidegger in saying that the essence of technology is nothing
technological – it is human. Technologies contain care structures that are organized

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Book Reviews 309

spatially and temporally. There is a constant need for creative human labour to produce
the conditions for communication in a medium, so that it is hermeneutically recognizable
for anyone at any time in the course of life (p. 77). Scannell compares the dull inertia of
a closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance tape with a television programme to
show how much care goes into a television programme. ‘Liveness’, Scannell writes, ‘is
the worked at, achieved and accomplished effect of the human application and use of
technologies whose ontological characteristic is immediate connectivity’ (p. 99).
Scannell is a positively minded media existentialist. When distinguishing between the
recorded and the live, he argues that a recording redeems the living moment from death.
‘The past comes to life and lives again. I can stop it at any moment. I can rewind and
replay. I can fast forward. In the living moment itself we cannot do this’ (p. 97). Scannell
considers the recorded and the live to be existentially important care structures provided
not only by television but also by all the other electronic media. The living moment has
always been fraught with problems. ‘There is a danger in everything we say and do: a
possibility, every time, of performative failure and unanticipated and unwelcome conse-
quences’ (p. 97). Electronic media organize the living moment for us, Scannell argues,
and reduce its existential strain. ‘Post modern technologies […] are not life threatening,
but life supporting’ (p. 93). This positive phenomenology is downright inspirational, and
it is easy to see its relevance for new media.
While the first part is purely philosophical, the second part tries to exemplify histori-
cally how the meaning of ‘live’ has been constructed in Anglo-American television.
Television programmes are analysed with a liberal use of screen shots that illustrate
camera angles and misé-en-scene, for example, showing the awkward Jacqueline and
John F. Kennedy interviewed by an even more awkward Ed Murrow in a two-screen
solution on CBS in 1953. Murrow’s clumsy behaviour makes visible the careful prepara-
tions needed to naturalize such interviewing and demonstrates that they were not fully
developed at this time. Scannell also analyses the television coverage of the 9/11 events
in New York to show how a set of established care structures can break down – if only
for a short time. These analyses uncover the hidden labour implicated in the live and the
recorded. These histories display good phenomenological handicraft, but are overall less
inspired than the theoretical speculations that dominate part I. Instead of recounting the
past, Scannell should have looked forward to the tremendous work of ‘naturalization’
that goes on to create a ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ experience of the Internet and its diverse
media forms. But at least he makes us aware of their existential dimension, and I am sure
younger researchers can apply his insights fruitfully to the Internet.
My biggest problem with Scannell’s argument is his way of being normative. He
flatly refuses to engage with critical theory because, he claims, it always analyses televi-
sion and the other media as if they were all a big problem: ‘a social disorder or pathology
in need of critical academic diagnosis and corrective treatment’ (p. 178). I am not con-
vinced by Scannell’s rejection. I think he should have dealt head on with the potentially
unjust or politically unsavoury dimensions of television, not least because of his own
observation that a lot of hidden labour goes into shaping a medium as something normal
and ‘for anyone’. This labour too is bought and sold on a market, and some have more
investment capital than others, and use it for superficial, narrow-minded and egotistical
purposes. Scannell romanticizes the way television was shaped during the age of public

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310 new media & society 17(2)

service broadcasting and presents the past as an age when everyone who worked in the
media was responsible, well-meaning and innocent. He considers ‘eye-witnessing’ to be
a morally superior position that broadcasters occupy on behalf of us all and praises the
media for doing ‘immediate, instinctive repair work to the torn and damaged fabric of
everyday existence’ (p. 207) during turbulent times. It is too bad that Scannell refused to
reflect on the inequality of communication built up during those early years.
In conclusion, Paddy Scannell has written a spectacularly interesting book. His utterly
improvable theory about the experience of the media is refreshing in an age of narrow-
minded empirical papers and politically correct critical perspectives on media. I really
believe in his theoretical project, and I lament and forgive its weaknesses. Scannell is on
a half-crazy visionary trip that reminds me of Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. Write on,
Paddy!

Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle (eds), The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting
a Critical Theory of Commercial Media. Peter Lang: New York, 2014; xv + 328 pp.: ISBN
9781433123597, $40.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Lee Artz, Purdue University Calumet, USA

This collection of 18 essays grappling with the audience commodity theses and its appli-
cation to digital communication is a worthy offering to the dialogue on social media and
political economy, demonstrating again that there is no singular genius that discovers or
creates knowledge. It is always a collective undertaking.
Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle’s ambitious project to revive and update the
theory of the audience commodity opens with seminal works, including Dallas Smythe’s
‘blind spot’ essay on how commercial television produces audiences for sale to advertis-
ers; Graham Murdock’s reply insisting economic production of audiences does not
explain the ideological production necessary for capitalism and class power; Eileen
Meehan’s clarification of the audience commodity as ratings data, not audiences per se;
and Sut Jhally and Bill Levant’s pithy fusillade against commercialism that casts TV
watching as an economic activity. Another nine essays appear in three sections grappling
with social marketing, data collection, user-generated content (UGC) and other changes
wrought by digital commercial media.
Aptly subtitled a ‘revisiting’, several contributors accept the conceptual slippage dis-
cerned in Smythe and Jhally/Levant’s overreach on audience-as-commodity, making audi-
ence power analogous with labour power (p. 259), a slide that directs much of the discussion
on consumers as producers. Smythe’s observation that TV networks produce audiences to
sell to advertisers launches conceptual leaps that imagine audiences ‘working’ by being
watched and subsumes all human activity as production in a global capitalist factory.
Philip Napoli notes that advertisers have become more sophisticated in their purchases,
desiring not just audiences but ‘audiences that are engaged in the content they consume’
(p. 119). TV networks now argue that audiences using social media to engage with pro-
grammes have more ‘value’ (p. 123) – challenging Nielsen ratings of audience exposure

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