Tele-viewing before Television in Interwar Italy. Predictions of a Future Media Practice

Abstract

This article focuses on discursive accounts on tele-viewing that predated the actual introduction of television in interwar Italy. It aims to reconstruct and conceptually frame how tele-viewing, as a social practice to be and a specific manifestation of the t elevisual, was predicted in public discourse in ways that cannot be reduced to what was later commonly referred to as ‘television’. To do so, it draws its sources mostly from newspapers and specialised periodicals published between the mid-1920s and the 1940s. After distinguishing the different types of media prophecies at stake, we focus on the role played by “wireless imagination.” Later on, we comment on our corpus of source materials, demonstrating how tele-viewing was envisioned by the press alternatively as a domestic practice (home-delivered service) or a military one (remote-controlling). Finally, we explain how the early apparatuses publicly exhibited at Milan’s Trade Fair in 1933 resized the visitors’ expectations, sobering the excesses nurtured by wireless imagination.