Kit Hughes, professeure en Visual & Media Culture à l’Université d’État du Colorado, a récemment publié l’ouvrage Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor chez Oxford University Press. La chercheuse y propose une autre histoire de la télévision en examinant son exploitation dans le cadre du travail, où le médium contribue à l’efficacité industrielle mais aussi à consolider certaines idéologies et au développement économique de l’entreprise. Ce déplacement du regard hors des industries médiatiques commerciales ouvre des perspectives intéressantes sur l’histoire de la télévision en permettant notamment de l’aborder comme une technologie de contrôle et de management.
Présentation:
Television has never been exclusive to the home. In Television at Work, Kit Hughes explores the forgotten history of how U.S. workplaces used television to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and manage the hearts, minds, and bodies of twentieth century workers. Challenging our longest-held understandings of the medium, Hughes positions television at the heart of a post-Fordist reconfiguration of the American workplace revolving around dehumanized technological systems. Among other things, business and industry built private television networks to distribute programming, created complex CCTV data retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used video cassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. In uncovering industrial television, the book reveals how labor architectures shaped by these uses of television were foundational to the rise of the digitally mediated corporation and to a globalizing economy.