Cultural cosmopolitanization and the politics of television in 1960s Ireland

Many long-term perspectives on television tend to reduce the medium to a vehicle of social control. Here, following the figurational approach of Norbert Elias, the ambivalent meanings that the advent of television evoked, as discussed by politicians in Ireland during the 1960s, are examined. The consuming public were used as a discursive resource to either justify the introduction of television into Irish homes, or claim its inevitably deleterious effects. Politicians introduced a national television service as an emotional response to the existing British service and its imagined capacity to erode the nation. National distinction was embedded in the historical colonizer–colonized relations between Ireland and Britain. Television came to be considered as a medium of modernity and as a vehicle for the visual display of global commodities enticing emigrants. This we-feeling of national decline produced a positive emotional valence with other nations and global processes.