Television and the Meaning of 'Live': An Enquiry into the Human Situation

by Paddy Scannell

This book is about the question of existence, the meaning of ‘life’. It is an enquiry into the contemporary human situation as disclosed by television.

The elementary components of any real-world situation are place, people and time. These are first examined as basic existential phenomena drawing on Heidegger’s fundamental enquiry into the human situation in Being and Time . They are then explored through the technological and production care-structures of broadcast television which, routinely and exceptionally, display the situated experience of being alive and living in the world today. It shows routinely in the live self-enactments of persons being themselves and the liveness of their ordinary talk on television. It shows exceptionally in television coverage of great occasions and catastrophes as they unfold live and in real time. Case studies reveal the existential role of television in salvaging the possibility of genuine experience, and in revealing the world-historical character of life today. To explore these questions, the agenda of sociology - its concern with economic, political and cultural life - is set aside. Being in the world is not, in the first (or last) instance, a social but an existential question, as an existential enquiry into television today discovers.

Passionate and sweeping in scale, this new book from a leading media scholar is a major contribution to our understanding of the media today.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Paddy Scannell is professor emeritus in the department of communication studies at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Dragoș · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scannell's book is a bit clunky in its first half, dealing with Heideggerian phenomenology in an explicative, entertaining but overly long and analytical way. It gets a bit looser in the second half in his actual empirical/analysis work building on the care structure and for-everybody-as-somebody concepts that he draws out (from Heidegger) in the first half. One thing to appraciate about Scannel's book is that it draws and enters dialogue with an impressive array of thinkers, from Goffman to Katz and Dayan, apart from the omnipresent Heideggerianism.

[Bernie4444 · Rating 5 out of 5]

If It Looks Like a Duck and It Quacks Like a Duck…

I was going to write a detailed description and reason to read this book. Then I realized that Paddy Scannell earlier wrote a highly technical textbook on communications. It explained the ins and outs and how-to’s focusing on TV and radio. That book was “Media and Communication” (Jun 30, 2007).

Now he is attempting in this book to show that live TV and radio are an intricate part of life and not an abstract study. However, in the process of doing so, he cites a bevy of philosophers, phonologists, and the like. He left out Alfred Korzybski.

Following the footnotes and references can be a course unto itself as the insight that is presented in this book. There are monochrome pictures to support many of the Case studies.