Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor By Kit Hughes *Television at Work *explores the forgotten history of how U.S. workplaces used television to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and manage the hearts, minds, and bodies of twentieth century workers. Challenging our longest-held understandings of the medium, Hughes positions television at the heart of a post-Fordist reconfiguration of the American workplace revolving around dehumanized technological systems. Among other things, business and industry built private television networks to distribute programming, created complex CCTV data retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. In uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice, *Television at Work *reveals how labor arrangements and information architectures shaped by these uses of television were foundational to the rise of the digitally mediated corporation and to a globalizing economy. Of particular interest to media historians and scholars of useful cinema, Television at Work: - Showcases a lost history of television at work that broadens our understanding of what television is, what it can do, and whom it serves - Re-examines several "keywords" of television studies (flow, immediacy, time-shifting, narrowcasting) in the context of non-commercial use - Complicates traditional notions of audience labor by revealing the importance of television as a labor and management technology outside of the commercial media industries Comments: “With this book, Kit Hughes has moved television studies forward by leaps and bounds. At last, we have a detailed scholarly account of television technologies as *useful media *in the American work place. Hughes shows us twentieth-century television’s institutional impact, the related new management philosophies, and the re-shaping of labour conditions and business practices that resulted. *Television at Work *is a stunningly original work and a must-read for media historians.” - Charles R. Acland, Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University. “Kit Hughes’ *Television at Work *is a brilliant history of how television function as a workplace technology. Hughes not only provides a remarkable window into shifting relations between corporations and their workers across the 20thcentury; she also reconceptualizes the history of television and many of the key concepts—flow, immediacy, narrowcasting—that have defined its uses. Exquisitely researched, beautifully written, and highly persuasive in its claims, *Television at Work *is a vital contribution to US media history.” – Allison Perlman, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, University of California Irvine. Published by Oxford University Press: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/television-at-work-9780190855796?cc=us&lang=en&# Kit Hughes is assistant professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University. -- Dr. Kit Hughes Assistant Professor Communication Studies Colorado State University A239 Behavioral Sciences [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu