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