Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture

by Cecelia Tichi

We all talk about the "tube" or "box," as if television were simply another appliance like the refrigerator or toaster oven. But Cecilia Tichi argues that TV is actually an environment--a pervasive screen-world that saturates almost every aspect of modern life. In Electronic Hearth , she
looks at how that environment evolved, and how it, in turn, has shaped the American experience.
Tichi explores almost fifty years of writing about television--in novels, cartoons, journalism, advertising, and critical books and articles--to define the role of television in the American consciousness. She examines early TV advertising to show how the industry tried to position the new
device as not just a gadget but a prestigious new piece of furniture, a highly prized addition to the home. The television set, she writes, has emerged as a new electronic hearth--the center of family activity. John Updike described this "primitive appeal of the hearth" in Roger's Version :
"Television is--its irresistable charm--a fire. Entering an empty room, we turn it on, and a talking face flares into being." Sitting in front of the TV, Americans exist in a safety zone, free from the hostility and violence of the outside world. She also discusses long-standing suspicions of TV
its often solitary, almost autoerotic character, its supposed numbing of the minds and imagination of children, and assertions that watching television drugs the minds of Americans. Television has been seen as treacherous territory for public figures, from generals to presidents, where
satire and broadcast journalism often deflate their authority. And the print culture of journalism and book publishing has waged a decades-long war of survival against it--only to see new TV generations embrace both the box and the book as a part of their cultural world. In today's culture, she
writes, we have become "teleconscious"--seeing, for example, real life being certified through television ("as seen on TV"), and television constantly ratified through its universal presence in art, movies, music, comic strips, fabric prints, and even references to TV on TV.
Ranging far beyond the bounds of the broadcast industry, Tichi provides a history of contemporary American culture, a culture defined by the television environment. Intensively researched and insightfully written, The Electronic Hearth offers a new understanding of a critical, but
much-maligned, aspect of modern life.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

A fresh start for every new book, and author Tichi's zest for America's Gilded Age and its boldface names draws this seasoned writer to a crime fiction series while uncorking the country's cocktail cultures on the printed (and ebook) page. Tichi digs deep into the Vanderbilt University research library to mine the late 1800-1900s history and customs of Society's "Four Hundred," its drinks, and the ways high-stakes crimes in its midst make for a gripping "Gilded" mystery series that rings true to the tumultuous era. The decades of America's industrial titans and "Queens" of Society have loomed large in Tichi's books for several years, and the titles track her recent projects:
• Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us)
• Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America
• What Would Mrs. Astor Do? A Complete Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age
• Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Golden Age
• Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Roaring Twenties.
• A Gilded Death (crime fiction)
• Murder, Murder, Murder in Gilded Central Park (crime fiction)
• A Fatal Gilded High Note (crime fiction)
Cecelia is at work on a fourth in the series, “A Gilded Free Fall.” She enjoys membership and posting in Facebook’s The Gilded Age Society. You can read more about Cecelia by visiting her Wikipedia page at: https://bit.ly/Tichiwiki or her website: https://cecebooks.com.

Reviews

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A. Mcluhan argued that tv was an environment--it is all surrounding yet evades perception. Every environment is mediated. For example we are conditioned to view the Grand Canyon with awe and reverence by all the travel guides we see for it. TV is also shaped or mediated by a number of texts.
B. The main argument here is that the TV environment must be made visible. It documents the ways in which the public (defined as middle class white Americans) was prepared to accept a new technology of mass communication into their lives. The documents the book uses are cartoons, advertisements, periodicals and fiction to show the meaning of TV for Americans.
C. Television has been shaped by American values of individualism, domesticity, and patriotism. It has also been shaped by Cold War ideology.
D. Two generations of TV viewers. The first was those who TV was a discontinuity. They were the ones who remember seeing their first TV. The second generation were those born after 1955 who actually lived with TV.
II. Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears; Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America
A. Chronology: 1890s-1920s
B. Trees, animals, engines
1. William Carlos Williams said we are in a new era of trees, animals, and engines
2. The structural components of these phenomena were identical. All were integrated systems of component parts
3. Magazine machinescapes
a) American magazines brought images of technological values and accomplishments into middle class American living rooms
b) “Ladies Home Journal”, “Good Housekeeping”
4. Wolves, Wheels, Pistons, Petunias
a) Fiction also reflected the emphasis on technology
b) Ex. Jack London who was not a technological enthusiast even had a mixture of nature and technology in his writings
c) London’s White Fang is the chronicle of the accommodation of a wolf to civilized life
d) The perceptual boundary between nature and technology was disappearing
5. Natures mechanisms
a) Nature was then conceived of as component parts
b) Darwinism saw nature itself as an engineer
c) The body and the machine were alike in that they were both dynamic systems of interrelated parts
C. Instability, Waste, efficiency
1. Instability
a) The dialectical antithesis to nature was instability
b) Calculating instability was a major occupation of American writers (literature)
c) Journalism was another source of instability with the daily papers showing natural disasters
d) Upton Sinclaires , The Jungle portrays the workplace as an unstable environment “the beef boners hands are criss-crossed with cuts”
e) William James (founder of psychology) proclaimed that instability was the defining state of the human organism
f) Technology was turned to overcome the instability of nature--this encouraged everyone to become his or her engineer
2. The New Utilitarians
a) They rejected the notion of instability
b) Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward claimed that the U.S> could become a utopia by rejecting wasteful ways and embracing efficiency
c) Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class was an indictment of waste
d) Veblen and Bellamy were the 2 writers who introduced waste and efficiency as the cultural key words of the new utilitarians
3. Waste
a) Waste meant dysfunction and danger, exhaustion of finite resources, to fail to take advantage of, squandering or useless expenditure
b) With waste went the concept that redesign was always possible
c) In The Jungle there was the hope for redemption as the novel ends with a socialist polemic
4. Efficiency
a) Efficiency is the ratio of work done or energy developed by a machine according to the energy supplied to it
b) Taylor was the father of efficiency
c) Taylor brought in the importance of the ideas of productivity, economy, efficient motion, speed.
d) By 1900 these were important qualities for the arts
e) Efficiency societies were formed
D. The Engineer
1. Looking Backward, looking forward
a) Engineers began to show up in literature
b) Emerson saw him as the representative man of the era, a symbol of efficiency and stability
c) The Tom Swift books by Victor Appleton exemplified engineering for boys
d) The engineer became a hero in fiction by becoming the slayer of waste
2. Civilizer of our century
a) From the 1910s on the engineer entered fiction
b) The heroes were typically civil engineers living roughneck lives in the American outback
c) They were visionaries and idealists
d) There was a millennial fervor in all of this (1000 year period of harmony)
e) The key figure to bring about this millennium was no longer the statesmen, the poet, or the minister--it was the engineer
f) Power had passed from theology through politics to technology
g) The key in this was the apparent engineers imperviousness to corruption
h) This popular image diverges from historians findings who had bitter personal rivalries
i) Herbert Hoover. He was an example of the self made success of an engineer
E. Danger and opportunity
1. Wright’s Blocks, Alexander’s Bridge
a) The gear and girder world of the engineer affected artists (poets, novelists) in 1 of 2 ways--they saw it as a danger or an opportunity
b) Frank Lloyd Wright typifies those who were optimistic. Art could regain contemporary power by exploiting the potential of the machine
c) The danger was seen by Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge. She felt excluded from the engineers world.
2. Danger
a) The struggle between Wright’s blocks and Alexander’s bridge was one version of a larger struggle--literature and technology (the writers and the engineers)
b) Sherwood Anderson thought that technology was dangerous to literature
c) Anderson’s Poor White presents the dilemma of 20th century America between blocks and bridges
3. Opportunity
a) Dos Passos and Hemmingway found that the engineers machine and structures provided opportunities for innovation in form and style
b) Dos Passos invigorated the novel with engineering design. He used structures and machines as the organizational model for his novels
c) Hemmingway brought engineering values into prose style. The values of engineering were shown in his tight functional prose