The Public Box

Not the best title, I know. I don’t care. I can’t lure you into reading this post with a witty tag-line. I accept that. I don’t have any ‘out-there’ remarks that make me seem far superior to the subject matter I’m discussing. I don’t know how to apply these McCarthy, Gitlin, and Barnouw reading to the TV I’m watching because I haven’t been watching a lot of TV lately. I can apply it to the television I’ve been making, but saying that sounds odd. To “make TV” seems to put too much emphasis on the fact that TV originates from a source and opens the door to questions about that source. I’ll apply the readings to the TV I’ve been programming.

I’m the student cable television manager, and do not take that to mean in any way that there is a full-time cable television manager or that there exists ‘student cable television’ on campus. My job is to program the university’s educational access channel, and let me just say that they programming available isn’t entertaining. It’s difficult to do this when I’m fairly certain that the public sphere has been dissolved. In broadcasting ing ‘the public interest’ it seems as though TV has encapsulated the ‘public sphere’ and slowly compacted and shrunk it down until it fit nicely into a 15” TV box. Sure, some public sphere has escaped TV’s control, but I would say that in retreating out of the broadcast box, they public sphere was broken into so many tiny pieces that we have what are more accurately called “public bubbles.” People still talk, but it’s done in much smaller numbers and separated groups. The discourse rarely coalesces into a form that forces its way into mainstream print and broadcast news. So the job of programming educational lectures out to the community often seems inescapably pointless. People watch TV to be entertained, they do not look for a public sphere in TV.