Abstract
The authors of From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable argue that their book is a novelty since it shifts the focus of scientific attention from a comparison of media systems towards a comparison of media cultures. This approach is tested on a sample of five socialist states in Europe – USSR, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Television culture is the sole research topic, although the authors believe that variables used in its elaboration could be applied to other media cultures as well. But, other media – newspapers and radio – are not studied. In the final section of the book, the authors are still convinced that television keeps a dominant position among all communication channels in the high digitalized environment: ‘. . . even in the West television viewing has continued to increase in the new millennium despite the parallel proliferation of digital and mobile media’ (p. 318). However, this claim is highly questionable because the decline of television and its culture in favour of digital platforms is obvious all around the world. We all see that television is not the same as it was during the 20th century. New generations use it as only one of the many applications on their smartphones with the programme produced by Internet providers rather than by TV companies. Consequently, the extensive debate about television culture in the book comes a little bit late, although it has a historical significance. The authors are aware of this inconsistency since they argue that ‘. . . the key problem with the original model is its outdatedness: namely the fact that it can no longer account for the nature of media events in the post-broadcast, globalised, digital and mobile media world’ (p. 44). This fact certainly has influence on the dimensions, which the authors later use to analyse socialist state television and its culture.
This is not a disadvantage of the book because its subject matter is television culture in socialist countries during a limited period of time, namely the Cold War. For three decades (1960–1990), the state-owned medium had its specific trajectory in a separated area of the world. Television was subverted by the communist party elites with the aim of disseminating the relevant ideologies. Within the given time and space limits, it was possible to compare television culture in five socialist countries. Based on the most crucial facets, the TV systems in the selected countries are classified into three main television types: market state socialist, reformist state socialist and hard-line state socialist (p. 59). Still, despite the fact that they were underpinned by the same political project, some differences occurred between the five countries during the Cold War television transition period. The role of the medium was shifting from time to time (1968, 1980 and 1989) determined by crisis and the reforms of the respective political systems and economies blurring the boundaries of established types.
In a rather long historical review, the book describes the fast growth of television in socialist countries passing through the same phases in all of them, regardless of the year of beginning. The differences that appeared were mainly related to the technological infrastructure: the introduction of a second channel, the choice of colour standard (Sequential colour with memory (SECAM) or phase alternating line (PAL)), membership in broadcasting associations (European Broadcasting Union (EBU) or Intervision) and so on. These technical changes were not important enough to provoke societal outcomes worthy of comparison. Therefore, the authors introduce the concept of television culture aimed at encompassing the symbolic reality made jointly by TV technology, broadcasters’ activities and the receiving behaviour of the audiences. How is television (media) culture defined? It is defined as a collection of ‘. . . patterns of ideas and practices tied to specific forms of mediated communication, which shape processes of meaning-formation across instances of production, reception and use’ (p. 28). After settling on the analytical field, the authors turn to the question of how to examine television culture empirically. To compare variations in the five selected examples, Mihelj and Huxtable propose a set of seven key dimensions: publicness, privacy, gendering, transnationalism, temporal orientation, extraordinary temporality and secularization. These dimensions are discussed briefly before the second and third parts of the book are abundantly loaded with empirical examples.
The dimension of publicness is seen as encompassing the public sphere and the public mission. After a long theoretical discussion, the authors ‘argue that the specific political, economic and cultural constellations that emerged under state socialist rule gave rise to a distinct form of a semi-public sphere which was subjected to party state intrusion’ (p. 136). Inside the socialist countries, opposing voices on television were muted but became more influential with the proliferation of video recorders and cross-border viewing. In sum, criticism and deliberation in socialist countries were restricted in scope and happened only partially in the public sphere. The public mission of television was treated as an outcome of the medium’s functions similar to those of public broadcasting: information, education and entertainment. In this regard, the authors note small differences between the perceptions of the public mission of socialist state television and public service broadcasting in the West. Socialist state television was inferior because of the unattractive entertainment it offered which was even more desirable from an audience perspective. On the other hand, the political masters of TV insisted strongly on the inclusion of educational and cultural content suitable to serve ideological goals. ‘As a result, all television cultures in the region were marked by a disjunction between the perceived public good and actual audience desires’ (p. 127).
The dimension of privacy has two aspects as well. The first is domestication, after domestication, a process of television adoption as a private, home medium. Due to the poor living standards, few elite citizens and public institutions owned a TV set in the early years of TV growth. Therefore, collective viewing or watching TV with friends or neighbours was a common practice. The statements of people interviewed for the purpose of writing the book reveal this paradox. Of course, it was a historical anecdote after a few years. The second aspect of the privacy dimension looks for patterns of privatization prevalent in television programming. Individuals, family and community members have appeared on small screens hand in hand with the increasing popularity of typical TV formats – series and serials. The number of shows which depicted private life in socialism was ever rising and popular among audiences, thus improving TV entertainment at the same time. ‘. . . serial fiction in state socialist countries, much as in the West, often focused on family life and personal relationships. Yet it never adopted all of the distinguishing characteristics of soap operas – in particular the open-ended narrative structure, the melodramatic plot, and the distinct orientation towards female audiences’ (p. 160). The scarcity of soap operas aimed at housewives was a region-wide phenomenon.
The third dimension – gendering – was introduced by the authors to underline the significant involvement of women in waged labour in socialist states. Therefore, designation of television as a ‘feminine’ medium, as it used to be in the West, was not applicable in the socialist countries. Television culture was not aligning gender relations with the private–public divide. ‘political elites in state socialist Eastern Europe all professed a commitment to women’s emancipation, even though realities on the ground often remained far from idyllic visions of equality painted by official discourse’ (p. 37). However, the dimension of gendering was not studied further in the second and third parts of the book, as others were.
The fourth dimension – transnationalism – had two key aspects – openness and the programme’s origin of television output. It is known that socialist countries were closed societies preventing free flow of goods, people and information. Accordingly, the information function of their television was focused on media events approved for presentation by controllers and censors. With the arrival of satellite TV, video recorders and thanks to the spillover of TV signals from other territories, the closed nature of socialist television was in regression even during the Cold War era. One of the most interesting questions was how rich the transnational programme flow was through the TV channels of the five compared countries. To give the answer supported by empirical facts, two sets of data were collected and analysed. First, data on all the programmes broadcasted on national channels during 1 week samples at 5-year intervals in the period 1960–1990 and second, data on all fictional TV series emitted from 1961 to 1990. The share of imported programmes out of the total television output was the lowest in the USSR (5.2%) compared with Yugoslavia standing at the opposite end of the spectrum (27.8%). The share of imported serial fiction out of the total output was also the lowest in the USSR (35.9%) and the highest in Romania (90.6%). ‘While Romania and Yugoslavia relied overwhelmingly on imports from Western Europe, North America and Australia, East Germany and the Soviet Union imported most of their foreign programming from the state socialist world’ (p. 185). According to Mihelj and Huxtable, the variations discovered were determined by the size of the respective economy, by the relative core–periphery position of the state, by the transnational orientations of the respective television systems and by the programme’s acceptability among audiences.
The temporal orientation of television culture is the best elaborated dimension, thanks to the authors’ rich stock of sources (interviews, programme schedules, archives, political documents, etc.). Part III is entirely dedicated to the times of state socialist television. There are three time tracks under consideration: everyday time, history and extraordinary time. The first time track analyses the mass ritual of television viewing and its consequences day by day; the second time track deals with future oriented and teleological passage of time embedded in television schedules; and the third aspect describes extraordinary events in which television took part.
The daytime television schedule was intended to disseminate knowledge and skills that would help viewers to participate in the march towards a classless society in the future. Evenings were reserved for cultural refinement, political discussions and relaxation. Television professionals in socialist countries believed in the transformative power of the medium, trying to align watching routines with political values. Educational and children’s programmes were scheduled in accordance with school timetables. In comparison with Western TV, another significant difference was the absence of any kind of religious content. Even more, the most popular TV products were televised in the nick of time with religious ceremonies to keep people at home. Therefore, the authors conclude ‘While television was successful in instilling everyday routines underpinned by communist vision of the future, these routines rarely fed into a sense of live participation in revolutionary progress’ (p. 209).
During the previous century, television was one of the strongest contributors to historical awareness and collective memory. Apart from jubilees and mass gatherings which were transmitted live, television movies and serials were frequently used as testimony of the continuity of the socialist revolution. The authors explain how historical dramas were used for that purpose by retelling the most popular serial fictions in five countries. The sample of items is partly biased because the five series that are chosen confirm the authors’ conclusion: ‘Each features a heroic plot involving personal transformation and sacrifice: each story line centers on one or more protagonists who start as ordinary individuals caught in the maelstrom of history but gradually transform into heroes . . .’ (p. 251). Despite rather long and true descriptions of these series, for people who did not live in socialist countries, this narrative must be hard to understand. This kind of plot was not the only one, and it faded from serial fiction programme as time passed by.
The extraordinary time dimension covers media holidays and media disruptions. To mark ideologically important dates, state television in socialist countries abandoned usual working routines to broadcast special programming. This activity was a pre-planned and carefully arranged spectacle. The authors call these media events media holydays. They did not include airing of religious celebrations at all. This explains also the dimension of television culture designated as secularization. It was a common and continuous trait of socialist state television in all countries sampled. On the other side, there were some media events that were causing disruptions leading either towards consensus or conflict in society. Tito’s and Brezhnev’s deaths are given as examples of planned, consensual, extraordinary media times. Some other events were unexpectedly leading towards conflictual disruption. The martial law in Poland and the so-called Romanian Revolution are elaborated upon as unexpected, conflictual media events. The fall of the Berlin Wall was ‘A largely consensual but unexpected disruption’ (p. 286) for East German television. In sum, the section about the extraordinary times of socialist television is more of an historical than theoretical narrative.
The book is a compendium of texts in which some pages are unnecessary. Each book’s section starts with an outline of its content and ends with conclusions. Therefore, a degree of repetition of the same findings arises. But, this book will be an indispensable reference for anybody who intends to write or study media history. Who else should read the book? Experts in media and culture, sociologists of everyday life, historians and political scientists. For students and common readers, especially born after the Cold War, the book would be peculiar, uneasy to comprehend and too extensive.