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The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television by Horrocks, Chris
by Horrocks, Chris | HC | Good
US $7.42
ApproximatelyS$ 9.54
Condition:
“Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, ”... Read moreabout condition
Good
A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including scuff marks, but no holes or tears. The dust jacket for hard covers may not be included. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with minimal creasing or tearing, minimal pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. No missing pages.
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Item specifics
- Condition
- Good
- Seller Notes
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Weight
- 1 lbs
- Product Group
- Book
- IsTextBook
- No
- ISBN
- 9781780237589
- Book Title
- Joy of Sets : a Short History of the Television
- Publisher
- Reaktion Books, The Limited
- Item Length
- 8.2 in
- Publication Year
- 2017
- Format
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- Illustrator
- Yes
- Item Height
- 0.9 in
- Genre
- Design, Technology & Engineering, History
- Topic
- Social History, General, Television & Video, Furniture
- Item Width
- 6 in
- Number of Pages
- 256 Pages
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Reaktion Books, The Limited
ISBN-10
1780237588
ISBN-13
9781780237589
eBay Product ID (ePID)
228541152
Product Key Features
Book Title
Joy of Sets : a Short History of the Television
Number of Pages
256 Pages
Language
English
Publication Year
2017
Topic
Social History, General, Television & Video, Furniture
Illustrator
Yes
Genre
Design, Technology & Engineering, History
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
0.9 in
Item Length
8.2 in
Item Width
6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2018-493605
TitleLeading
The
Reviews
The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television hides a useful survey history of the TV receiver behind a tongue-in-cheek title. With a strong British bias, this offers a breezy survey of receiver design, primarily in Britain and the United States over the last eighty years or so. . . . This centers on the receiver as an art object, albeit a useful one., Horrocks offers a glimpse into how television sets developed from the meeting between technology and culture, becoming both familiar and alien objects in our lives. He asks that we look more closely at them and, in doing so, see them afresh. At a juncture when the future of the television set is being called into question with the arrival of smaller, portable screens, this is a timely contribution. Dotted with interesting vignettes, The Joy of Sets is a wide-ranging and well-researched book, which provides an unconventional perspective on TV., Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets. , Television, reveals cultural historian Horrocks in this compact chronicle, has tangled roots. . . . Along with sets, from Baird's 1928 'Noah's Ark' televisor to today's ultra-thin screens, Horrocks examines the technology's military uses, the ethical furor over content, and its uses as a symbol in art, film, and literature., [This] study brilliantly investigates the impact of the remote control and the way in which TV was portrayed--sometimes menacingly--in art film and literature. . . . The book is beautifully illustrated, containing many fine color pictures of TV sets from the 1920s to the present day. There are comprehensive notes and the title benefits--unlike similar publications in this under researched field--from a thorough, six-page, bibliography. However, the real strength of this title is that it encourages the reader to think about the television set as an object of popular material culture and an inspiration for art as well as a mere technical receiver of images., From the start, Horrocks argues, television was 'inseparable from its material form.' (The key to the book is found in its subtitle, with its easily missed definite article; this is a cultural history not of television but of the television.) It was inseparable from before the start, in fact. The author begins not with claim and counter-claim about which national hero-inventor made the whole thing possible--if you think it was John Logie Baird it says more about where you were brought up than about the history of television's invention--but with television's prehistory.
Table Of Content
Introduction 1 From Fantasy to Physics 2 Inventing Television 3 Television at War 4 Consuming the Receiver 5 Alien Television 6 Space Ship, Black Box, Flat Screen 7 Art Against Television Epilogue: The Ends of Television References Bibliography Acknowledgements and Photo Acknowledgements Index
Synopsis
It is a modern activity, one of the primary ways we consume information and entertainment, something we'll do over dinner, at a bar, or even standing on the street peering into a store window--watch TV. Many of us spend countless hours in front of the tube, and even those of us who have proudly eliminated it from our lives can probably still rattle off the names of today's most popular shows. But for as crucial as television viewing is in modern culture, the television set itself, as a ubiquitous object in our environment, rarely captures our attention--turn one off and it seems to all but disappear. In this book, Chris Horrocks tells the story of the television set, exploring its contradictory presence in our lives as both a material object and a conveyor of illusory images. Horrocks begins in the nineteenth century and television's prehistory as a fantastic, futuristic concept. He follows the television's journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments in electro-magnetism to the contested accounts of its actual invention, looking at the work of engineering pioneers such as Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird. Unboxing sets all across the world, he details how it arrived as an essential consumer product and began to play an extraordinary role as a bridge between public and private life. Horrocks describes how the console and cabinet themselves expressed status and good taste and how their designs drew on cultural phenomena such as the space race and the avant-garde. He discusses how we have both loved it for what it can provide and reviled it as a sinister object literally controlling our thoughts, and he shows how it has figured in other cultural realms, such as the work of artists like Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Finally, Horrocks laments the death of the cathode ray tube and the emergence of the flat-screen, which has reduced the presence of the television as a significant material object. Altogether, The Joy of Sets brings this most elusive object into crystal-clear critical and historical focus., We watch television for hours at a time, but the television set is never itself the object of our attention. We forget the tv is in our room as we engage with images from afar. How do we account for such an everyday piece of furniture? This book focuses on the tv set's contradictory presence both as a material object and as a receiver of images.Chris Horrocks traces the prehistory of television as a fantastic vision innineteenth-century culture, and charts its emergence through the fears anddesires that society projected onto this alien presence in the living room.He follows television's journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments with electro-magnetism, through itscontested 'invention' by heroic figures such as Baird and Farnsworth, to itsarrival as essential consumer product. Along the way the tv acquired a significance and role that advertising, literature, and cinema amplified.The tv appears in culture as a sinister object capable of controllingthought, monitoring its audience, and causing mental and physical harm.The design of the television console and cabinet imbued it with signs ofstatus and good taste, and more radical designs drew on the space race andavant-garde design. The set has even become a radical medium in the workof artists Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Yet the television as a classicobject began to disappear once the cathode ray tube became obsolete andflat-screen versions merged with the wall. The Joy of Sets brings this mostelusive object into critical and historical focus for the first time., We watch television for hours at a time, but the television set is never itself the object of our attention. We forget the tv is in our room as we engage with images from afar. How do we account for such an everyday piece of furniture? This book focuses on the tv set's contradictory presence both as a material object and as a receiver of images. Chris Horrocks traces the prehistory of television as a fantastic vision innineteenth-century culture, and charts its emergence through the fears anddesires that society projected onto this alien presence in the living room.He follows television's journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments with electro-magnetism, through itscontested 'invention' by heroic figures such as Baird and Farnsworth, to itsarrival as essential consumer product. Along the way the tv acquired a significance and role that advertising, literature, and cinema amplified. The tv appears in culture as a sinister object capable of controllingthought, monitoring its audience, and causing mental and physical harm.The design of the television console and cabinet imbued it with signs ofstatus and good taste, and more radical designs drew on the space race andavant-garde design. The set has even become a radical medium in the workof artists Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Yet the television as a classicobject began to disappear once the cathode ray tube became obsolete andflat-screen versions merged with the wall. The Joy of Sets brings this mostelusive object into critical and historical focus for the first time.
LC Classification Number
TK6653
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