In his highly influential essay “A Cultural Approach to Communication” (1975/1989), James W. Carey introduced his thesis that our understanding of communication has been dominated by two distinct perspectives. The transmission view of communication emphasizes the distribution of messages in space for the purpose of exercising control, while the ritual view emphasizes the role of communication in creating shared values and belief systems necessary for maintaining societies over time. The essay consists of two parts, the first discussing the historical dominance of the transmission view and the second showing how the ritual view can be developed into a model with which to better understand the complexity of communication.

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of television as a global medium. One way of demonstrating the powers and possibilities of television was the production and airing of transnational broadcast events. In order to produce these, national broadcast organizations had to engage in joint production of such events. The article examines two such events: Gagarin's return to Moscow after orbiting the earth in April 1961 and the more well-known Our World' broadcast 6 years later. At the time of their production, these broadcasts were seen as crucial moments in television history, as prototypes of what could be expected of television in the future. They also relied on extensive cooperation between broadcast organizations in socialist and Western countries, organizations that to a large extent shared the same production values but also had to negotiate competing visions of the geography of modern communications networks. The broadcasts discussed in this article thus provide the opportunity to reflect upon the shaping of television history and global media memories. Based on case studies of the planning and production of the broadcasts, the article argues that global power relations have shaped the remembered history of television and therefore must be part of our understanding of it.

The sharing of expertise and know-how was an important practice in the early days of television production; delegations from national broadcasters visited each other to negotiate agreements concerning co-production and programme exchange. On one such occasion, in spring 1956, the BBC visited Soviet Central Television and their production facilities in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. Using that visit as vantage point, this article examines production values and professional ideologies in relation to the material spaces of television production. The article argues that the British delegation’s encounter with (un)familiar spaces of television production forced them to articulate their own production values in relation to material spaces. The final discussion suggests that the tensions provoked by the discrepancy between production values at Soviet Central Television and at the BBC may inform the main currents of television studies and television history. 

This article historicizes the emergence of television satellite infrastructure by exploring a key moment: a 1967 transnational satellite broadcast called Our World, that was to reach viewers across the northern hemisphere, including the USSR. Drawing on archival sources that reveal extensive negotiations among the producing sides, we find that Our World's claimed creation of "global presence" was indeed, as Lisa Parks has argued, a fantasy of modernization tied to temporal and spatial hierarchies of modernization, but one neither exclusive to the West nor uncontested by the show's socialist participants. We argue that the program's temporal claim to conquer space via liveness required the constant assertion of spatial hierarchies and conflicting temporalities, based on unequal and unpredictable material infrastructures, personal relationships, and rival symbolic claims. We describe these temporalized and spatialized conflicts as "geographies of liveness."