For nearly 60 years, television defined and transmitted American values and culture, joining such traditional forces as family, church and government. The act of watching television functioned as “social glue” through its creation of shared experiences among the country’s varied racial, religious and economic groups.

“There were some wonderful consequences from the invention of television. What radio did before it, television did to an even greater degree,” said Mary Ann Watson, a professor of film and telecommunications studies at Eastern Michigan University. “Television fueled the belief that we had a common national destiny.”

But in her newest book, Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience in the 20th Century, Professor Watson posits that the Age of Television has passed. Its demise was brought upon by a fracturing of the audience itself, pulled away by the proliferation of cable channels, VCRs and the Internet. In fact, television’s already waning role as a transmitter of shared values ended, she says, semi-officially on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The terrorist attacks on that day hastened the Internet’s eclipse of television as the primary news source. When television didn’t have updated information, people would go to their computers,” she said. “For me, that event seemed a natural bookend, marking the end of the ‘American television experience.’ Things were different after that.”

In the book, she studies the past six decades of entertainment and news programming and how each defined what it meant to be an American. “In a sense, TV wrote the social script and defined for us what we accepted as common values,” said Professor Watson, who started teaching at EMU in 1990.
The book also examines TV’s influence in areas such as sexuality, the workplace, the family and crime. Using this approach, she explores how changes in American life, from the anti-war movement to the pursuit of women’s and civil rights, shaped what we saw on TV.

“I think television was the main accelerant for these changes in American society,” Professor Watson said. “Other social forces were at play but television was the ‘certifying’ influence. It’s not that television was the only force, but it shaped the landscape more than any other mass medium, including radio, book publishing or the print world of magazines and newspapers.”

Still, the story of American television in the 20th century is a story of lost and missed opportunities, she said. “People predicted that TV was going to be something that benefited mankind. We hear the same thing about personal computers,” she added. “But, in this country, the great potential of TV technology was overwhelmed by commercialism – and the public interest standard eventually became meaningless.”

The book, by Blackwell Publishing, is a second edition of an earlier work. The first edition was published in 1997 as part of a series examining several topics defining the American experience since the end of World War II, including family, church and government. But the book’s content reached only into the early 1990s. Appeals from readers and fellow scholars encouraged her to update the book with research that covered TV through the remaining years of the 20th century.

The book is Watson’s third. The first was The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years, published in 1990 by Oxford University Press. During her teaching career at EMU, Watson has won numerous academic honors, including the Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Scholarly and Creative Activity in 2003. Her opinions on television and its influence on American culture are widely sought, and she is a frequent presenter at conferences. In April, she appeared on a panel at a Howard University conference titled “African Americans in Film and Television: 20th Century Lessons for a New Millennium,” and on a media ethics panel titled “The Jury and Jenny Jones” at the Broadcast Education Association convention.

Despite her strong opinions, Professor Watson believes TV still inspires and informs. But most of its current successes are found on public television, where documentaries and in-depth coverage still reign. “Public television is TV as civil thinking. It’s TV geared toward citizens, not consumers. It’s TV saying, ‘We’re all in this together, let’s figure out the best thing for our democracy,’” she said.
So what does the future hold? “The academic term is ‘convergence.’ Television sets and computers will merge,” she explains. “Even now, a youngster isn’t concerned with whether he’s watching a DVD, a network or cable show, or something on the Internet or playing a video game. It’s just something on a screen.”

Even amid her criticism, she teaches her students that they can still shape the future. “Television isn’t a force of nature. It’s a creation of individual minds. What I hope is that students who are interested in going into a career in mass media realize they have a choice in any creative endeavor,” she said. “You can appeal to peoples’ most noble instincts, or you can appeal to the most base. Unfortunately, many people now feel that appealing to the most base – the Jerry Springer instinct – is what makes you money. The wages of trash are high, but the dividends of humane work have a much longer payoff."