Television and the Meaning of 'Live' (PDF)

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.