ABSTRACT
From its earliest years of mainstream adoption, television has often been seen as a technologically deficient medium. Max Dawson describes this ideology as TV repair: the enduring notion that television’s myriad inadequacies require innovative improvements.2 To the extent that cycles of technological renewal have defined the whole history of television, we can think of TV as a perpetually new medium, regularly refreshing its identity. Since the 1950s, when remote control devices (RCDs) solved problems of unstable tuning and obnoxious and intrusive commercials, many new television technologies have emerged to redeem the console and the socially compromised experience of watching television.3 As we have seen, the improvement of the television image in the form of flat-panel HDTV sets fits within this logic.
