'Television is a means for approaching the goal of possessing the entire sensible world once again in a copy satisfying every sensory organ, the dreamless dream; at the same time it holds the possibility of inconspicuously smuggling into this duplicate world whatever is thought to be advantageous for the real one. The gap between private existence and the culture industry, which had remained as long as the latter did not omnipresently dominate all dimensions of the visible, is now being plugged.” Theodor Adomo wrote this in the early 19505 in his Prologue to Television. He is referring to the ‘gold fever’ that, since 1948, had gripped American television appliance manufacturers and the purveyors of audiences to the advertising industry. Aggressively expansionist, within a very short time they had succeeded in occupying the living spheres of North Americans with this new piece of furniture and, in just a few years, had made it the focal pointofcommercial mass culture.

The establishment of the hegemony of radio/television functions as a hinge in the history of the audiovisual discourse. It connects the forms of public (film) amusements which, already under attack in the 1920S and 1930s, were in a state of advancing disintegration and the flourishing development of the new media for singularised individuals and decentralised groups. The supremacy of television lasted for approximately three decades and, at the time, it seemed as though nothing could relativise it. In the USA and England, television's dominion began immediately after the greatest war of organised annihilation in recent history and, by the mid-197os, had already passed its peak.

By that time, the market for private receivers in the most advanced TV-nation of the world had already reached saturation point. In 1974, 97 per cent of U.5. households had at least onc television set; in the following four years, the industry was only able to increase this percentage by 1 per cent. The sets were switched on for an average of a good 6 hours a day, so an increase there was hardly feasible. Further expansion of broadcasting seemed to have become impossible. The federal states of North America were covered with a dense network of terrestrial stations.