Media Rituals and Memory: Exploring the Historical Phenomenology of American Local Television

Abstract

For more than two decades during the mid-20th century, local entertainment television shaped daily experience across the United States. Although often viewed as trivial by historians, these extinct television genres offer valuable insights into the relationship among media technology, historical consciousness, and cultural memory. Emergent theories of historical phenomenology help facilitate and expand such insights. The phenomenological perspective, which focuses on the sensory experience of media technology in historical settings, illustrates how audience memories inform the historical significance of this programming. The present study utilizes insights from ethnographic data and historical recordings to fortify its findings.