“Fighting the Uncertainty of Tomorrow”: Explaining and Portraying the Social Security System on French Television for Schools

This contribution analyses in detail a series of instructional television programmes for schools produced between the 1950s and the 1980s on national health insurance and the French social welfare system (known as Sécurité sociale). We consider the televisualization of health issues from two alternative perspectives: school television as a type of public health service and access as a matter of social welfare and public health. We investigate how these television programmes, which focus closely on social welfare administration, sought both to educate captive school audiences as future citizens and to shape and form their attitudes towards it.

Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Video

For as long as television has been a darling of the commercial entertainment industries, it has been an object of interest for educators and businesses. The same can’t be said for media studies, which has long focused on the former mode—the domestic medium and the popular art—at the expense of the latter. This article corrals sources written in the 2010s from within the field, as well as research from scholars in education, sociology, management, and training. It begins with analyses of nontheatrical film used to train workers, educate students, promote capitalism, complete work processes, and other applications that television would take up beginning in the 1940s. It then addresses resources that would be equally helpful to scholars of educational and industrial television: useful television theory, archives, and trade publications. The remainder divides industrial and educational television into their own sections to allow for a more granular look at the key debates and practices articulated to each. Industrial television (ITV) comprises a wide range of uses. In the postwar era, goods producers used closed-circuit television (CCTV) to extend workers’ oversight of expanding manufacturing operations. Around the same time, larger corporations began experimenting with theater television for shareholder meetings and special training events. Videotape (1956) made television financially accessible for more companies that used the open-reel format for taped self-observation. The watershed moment for ITV was the introduction of the videocassette (the U-matic became available in 1971), which dramatically expanded both users and uses of the medium and supported an ITV-programming publishing industry. Eventually ITV—in the form of business satellite television (BTV, mid-1980s–1990s)—would provide national and international employers the capability to beam morale-boosting and informational messages to its employees in a period of globalization and worsening working conditions. Educators took advantage of many of these same televisual affordances, although to different ends. Resources here focus on educators’ experiments with novel modes of audiovisual pedagogy, as well as their attempts to bend CCTV, videotape, and broadcast to fulfill instructional needs and address crises in American public education, from teacher shortages to racialized inequalities. One of the major narrative arcs of educational television (ETV) is the battle for dedicated broadcast frequencies and the founding of American public broadcasting. Not only did these victories establish a foothold for educators within broadcasting (who continued to use the medium for direct instruction, though these applications were overwhelmed in the turn to broad cultural-uplift programming and funding shortages), they provoked debates over the capacity of commercial television to inform and educate. While PBS is well covered elsewhere, included here are sources that illustrate the contours of discussions that sought to define the meaning of “educational” television.

Public policy and the digital deadline: The implementation of the Digital Addressable System (DAS) in West Bengal

The introduction of the mandatory Digital Addressable System (DAS) with strict, phase-wise deadlines for different provinces within India has compelled us to reconsider not only the television apparatus itself but also broadcast policies, television industry, content and reception. The introduction of DAS can be posited within a series of similar public policies starting from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) project in 1975 to the more recent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or Aadhaar project and Digital India campaign, all folded into the developmental rhetoric of the welfare state. The rollout of DAS provides the site to explore the relationship between the government, neo-liberal market and digital technologies that underscores the contradictions which are constitutive of modernity, and invests in the study of the neo-liberal cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this conceptual framework, this article would focus on West Bengal as a case in point to read the implementation of mandatory DAS both as a site of hegemonic projects embodying promises of neo-liberal development and of the incongruities that are inherent in them. While the union government claimed that any cable television service provider who does not switch to digital signal within deadline can be penalized and the equipment confiscated, the state Government said that they would launch an agitation if analogue cable signals were blacked out after the deadline for cable digitalization and thus, the deadline was extended for several months. The confrontation over cable digitalization in West Bengal offers a site to explore in what way, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated digital ecosystem of governance, as the modern states would like to conceive, it is loaded with internal contradiction. My inquiry moves across a range of discursive locations and registers, aiming to explore in what way various local stakeholders negotiate in this policy implementation? How does DAS help theorization of a changing relationship between the market, digital technology and the developmental modern? While raising these questions, this article would try to explore in what way DAS can be located within the historical trajectory of techno-cultural rhetoric of public policy and how it invests in the shifting political economy of broadcasting in India.

TICCIT: Building Theory for Practical Purposes

In 1971 the National Science Foundation contracted with the MITRE Corporation (MIT Research Corporation) for the production of an experimental system to test the computer-assisted delivery of information and instruction to homes: the TICCIT system—an acronym for “Time-shared, Interactive, Computer-Controlled Information/Instructional Television”. The networking concept of TICCIT linked minicomputers through coaxial cables to color television sets. The theoretical design challenge was that the agreement with NSF specified that the instructional component of TICCIT would be learner-controlled. TICCIT system specifications produced a type of instruction that adapted moment-by-moment to the choices of the learner.