I have been sat in my new office today (just made our big double spare room into a double office - it is really nice) reading some of the literature review that I have been sifting through with a copy of Jacques Derrida 'Archive Fever' in front of me. Maybe it was the book, maybe it was the nice environment I have created, I don't know, but I had a eureka moment, let me run it by you and see what you think.... (who am I writing this to?)
There are several Film and Media commentators out there who have started to probe at the idea that 'television produces culture'. Janet Thumim suggests that television was able not only to 'reflect cultural change in the mid-twentieth century but also to produce it'. I can't help but agree, yet I suspect that there is still more to it than this. I began wondering if television could produce culture (or in my research, regional identity) then what was producing the television? Television does not exist as a separate entity in society, it too is controlled by many forces and it is these forces that interest me. I am beginning to think that these forces, the technology that was available, the political situation, the need for commercialisation of television etc... must play a part in the production of television, which in turn produces culture.
There is more work to be done before I can claim I have any answers, but I think that I may have just hit upon one of the main research questions for this thesis at last - just how much does the production of television produce culture? and more specifically what impact did the sudden explosion of regional television in the North East and East Anglia have on the production of regional identity both internally and externally? I wonder......
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This subject exercises me too: I live in the Outer Hebrides where we go on a bit about our traditional culture. Undoubtedly we have one, but the perception of it has changed over the centuries (here and outside) and what we consider now to be the tradition is not necessarily (I believe) what it always was.
ReplyDeleteI don't think tv etc is exactly producing our (version of) traditional culture but I wonder how much developments like BBC Alba (the new Gaelic tv channel) are going to influence it... for instance are we going to lose some of the finer point of regional differences as we (maybe) strengthen Highland/Island/Gaelic culture and language in general? There are lots of points here to explore.
We run a local history website www.ceuig.com which aims to fit into the wider Gaelic thing but also be very specific to our district (population 400), while hooking into new media etc - so far so good but I wonder what effect if any it will have.
Anyway - looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
We talked about this just after you posted, but I thought that I'd add my thoughts here as well.
ReplyDeleteYou are opening up a very interesting series of questions here - about the materiality of the televisual archive. To actually investigate how the physical shape, size, speed, etc - the distribution of televisual technologies across time and space - actively produce the content that we then go on to analyse as producing so called 'society', 'culture', contemporary discourse, and so on, is, to my mind, the really exciting bit. How is the very structure of the EVENT itself shaped by the shape of the 'archive' that apparently records it?
In reply to asgerd: I would be really interested to hear more about what you think BBC Alba is doing to the local culture, what it is saying/suggesting about the region, if anything.
ReplyDeleteI would also be really interested in hearing more about the oral history work that you are currently undertaking. I was thinking about including some oral history in my thesis, but this has now been sidelined for post doc work! simply not enough room or time.
Definitely a really interesting area - keep me posted.
Actually I don't watch BBC Alba myself as I don't have a telly but there's a lot of dicussion about it, which I'm trying to make sense of for myself, so I'll let you know.
ReplyDeleteCertainly our oral history is slipping away from us, and as it goes I wonder how much we'll realise we have failed to capture. The local socs are trying to catch it in a way that replicates the fragmented, fluid and authentic nature of it, rather than tidying it into an 'account' - so far via recordings (limiting as we will lose the ability to interpret them properly), blogs and databases (both looking promising but who knows.)
We'll keep in touch!
sarah