Core Response 2: Lipsitz meets Williams

For my second core response I would like to point out and discuss a contradiction I found between the Lipsitz’s reading (“The Meaning of Memory”) and the Williams’ reading from week 1 (“The Technology and the Society”). While I cannot definitively claim that Lipsitz assumes a perspective of technological determinism—largely because his focus is on identities and culture—his argument is built on a similar fault line. To take an historical perspective on television, Williams claims, we must treat the technology as the convergence of possibility and necessity in the contemporary culture. In Williams’ other works he argues that cultures have embedded “structures of feeling” which emerge in conjunction with other social forces. 

Rather than trace the effects of television, Lipsitz looks at representation and consumerism, saying, “For Americans to accept the new world of the 1950s’ consumerism, they had to make a break with the past” (p. 75). In his claim, Lipsitz frames consumerism as if it were an inevitable social aftermath of the second world war. His argument continues: “Government decisions, not market forces, established the dominance of commercial television” over theater TV, educational TV, etc. (p. 76). By structuring these around the agenda of the Federal government, Lipsitz marginalizes the social forces promoting alternative forms of television prior to the establishment of the medium’s mainstream. 

Implicit in the article’s framing, Lipsitz commits a post hoc fallacy about American consumerism, and Williams will help us tease it out. If we look at the emergence of consumerism as the convergence of possibility and necessity, we can see that there must have been a nascent consumerism within American culture that existed before—but may have been exacerbated by—the popularization of television. After the war, America set about disentangling its production boom from wartime scarcity. The nation’s production boom may be seen, then, as a form of social possibility. New production processes could be applied to non-wartime goods and commodities. In conjunction with the possibilities of production, wartime rationing ended and scarcity of goods lessened. The citizen, then, has more freedom to seek out the necessities they have previously gone without. This conjunction is essentially the jumpstart for Lipsitz’s conception of consumerism, where the forces of television and social identification snowballed into a mass consumer society. By omitting a negotiation with the wartime culture’s structures of feeling, Lipstz’s article falsely frames consumerism as an inevitable and corrupting force.