Memo - Oct. 26 - Television One of the most amazing things about television is the speed with which it was adopted into Americans' homes and lives in the postwar years. Before World War Two, television was nonexistent as a medium of entertainment in the home. But as Lynn Spigel notes in the introduction to her book, in the seven year period from 1948 to 1955 televisions were installed in almost two-thirds of American households. Her book Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America gives us a chance to think about what this drastic change meant. Quite a few of you have proposed studying the "impact" of one phenomenon or another in your research papers. I have tried to point out how difficult it can be to measure and analyze something as abstract and elusive as "impact." This, however, is exactly what Spigel attempts to do in this book.  How does one take stock of "impact"? Spigel does so by focusing on the relationship between television and family life in the years when commercial television was first introduced, and many of the social meanings of the new medium were still up for grabs. She explores this by analyzing the way that people thought, wrote, and debated about television in the pages of popular magazines, and she argues that these debates and discussions had a strong influence on the shape that TV (as communications medium and as social practice) ultimately assumed. Some questions to consider: In what ways did television reinforce the traditional values of the "family circle"? In what ways did it strain those values? Television may have been part of major changes in American families in the postwar period, but a technology alone cannot cause changes to occur. What were other important factors? Spigel is particularly concerned with "anxieties" and "contradictions." What were the most important of these, according to Spigel? What did they reveal about how the fabric of American life was changing? In the early years of the Cold War, what were the political implications of such intense social focus on home, "togetherness," family, and television? What did television have to do with the political ideology of the Cold War? How was your personal experience growing up with television different from children of the late '40s and 50s? Are any of the anxieties and contradictions that Spigel writes about still important today?