What is television? In an age where television and an e-book may be read on the same screen, where do we draw the line between the two?

In 2020, Netflix unveiled an audio-only mode.

Not event television in the traditional sense, that is special sports broadcasts and season premieres and finales that gain wide attention. By event television, I refer to the most mundane, or perhaps not mundane but the most everyday of events.

Television was born from radio, and today has converged with film and the internet. However, television maintains unique qualities as a medium of physicality, domesticity, and sonic primacy in spite of its vision-moniker.

Cinema, in its purest form, commands, or at least expects, a viewer

While ‘film’ gets its name from a means of recording, which later becomes a means of playing, television variably refers to a means of transmission, or the physical box that plays that transmission. Thus television is defined by movement and physicality, in contrast to

Film takes a physical form and projects it into an ether, the screen.

Television takes a physical form, projects it into the ether, and recieves it as the concrete, the television set.

Television is an architectural medium.

Massive infrastructure is required to transmit it. It exists within an architectural box, the television set.

Television allows for the most literal interface of any electronic medium. Like radio, it allows for the audience to move out of its own volition. Like film, it allows for a ‘face-to-face’ interaction.

Television is a variable medium: it may be

The engagement of the viewer with television, as a medium, is quite variable. One might watch without sound, while another might listen without watching. Subtitles allow the former, while a Netflix ‘audio-only’ feature foregrounds the latter. And still others may ‘watch’ television without watching at all—turned away, or asleep through a program.