Decentring the Broadcasting Dispositif: Educational Closed-Circuits, Military-Industrial Entanglements, and Useful TV

Abstract

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the introduction of ETV into classrooms was supported by ongoing experiments regarding the medium’s affordances and technological design: educators and financing bodies experimented with televisual forms that embraced non-commercial broadcasting, national and regional programming, and even transmissions by planes. Analysing educational television in the USA, this paper focuses on one specific dispositif, namely the televisual closed-circuit (CCTV). While the closed-circuit projects have been widely documented in the postwar period and have received some attention from television and media historians, the analytical focus has remained on educational CCTV. This paper suggests a shift in perspective that embeds the educational closed-circuit within a broader history of televisual CCTV. In addition to serving school reforms, postwar CCTV systems were frequently used in military and industrial settings, where they fostered automation, surveillance, and tele-command. The analysis of educational television through the lens of closed-circuits brings to the fore such military-industrial entanglements and their links with the educational sector, and shines a new light on the history of educational TV overall.