Is there such a thing as the geography of television? Since the 19th century the "televisual" never has been a discrete object but the assemblage and reassemblage of technologies within and across different social spaces and environments. Although one may choose to talk about the distinctive properties of television (e.g., as an industry, a technology, a narrative or cultural form, an audience), it is just as necessary to recognize that any definition draws strategically on examples of practices from particular locations where televisuality has been assembled, instituted, and made to matter in particular ways. Similarly, any such definition risks ignoring how these distinctive properties have always been site-specific, complexly conjoined, along with other practices, to particular environments and on different scales. Considering the televisual in this way makes untenable the notion that television has a single history and emphasizes instead that TV has been developed and deployed unevenly around the world, and that TV is as much a product of as a contributing factor to the redefinition of social space and territoriality. If, therefore, television can be said to have a geography, it is a geography produced, deployed, and made to matter in different and changing ways in and across differ­ ent places and social spaces.

     There are several interrelated ways to consider the televisual as a product of and as productive of social space. One concerns the commercial and institutional sites and networks of television production and broadcasting. Given that broadcast television emerged through the established national and local centers of radio broadcasting, its early geography of production followed radio's. Over the 1950s in the United States, for instance, national television production moved from New York (the center of national radio production) to Los Angeles (the center of film production), while various U.S. cities (more rapidly than anywhere in the world) developed and broadcast programming for their local populations. By the early 1950s most cities in the United States had at least one television station that was formed out of one of the city's radio stations and that was affiliated with a national broadcasting network whose central location was one of that nation's most prominent commercial and cultural centers. The capability, since the early 1950s, of remote broadcasting, and, by the mid- I960s, of remote recording by video, however, has meant that television, like radio, has not always had a fixed, centralized site of production. Over the late 1980s and early 1990s, the video "camcorder" (in conjunction with videocassette recorders for households) transformed the domestic sphere into a site of production for the television monitor; refashioned the television set as a technology of self, family, and domestic life; provided a portable accoutrement for personal travel; and occasionally became a resource for commercial television networks (e.g., clips on America's Funniest Home Videos, tornado-chaser videos for weather channels, and the infamous video of Rodney King's beating at the hands of the Los Angeles police).

     Besides having been organized through commercial and institutional sites, the televisual has organized physical places and concrete environments, and their relation to one another. Some of this has occurred through televisual representations (visual and narrative constructions) of places and landscapes. There is, for instance, a difference between watching a sports event in a stadium and watching it on a television screen, even though the former activity has been coordinated with the latter in the age of television. The regularization of TV images and narratives also has shaped widely held assumptions about particular landscapes and places (the household, suburb, the city, the nation) and their relation to one another. For example, since the late 1980s, the ivy-covered outfield fence and brick walls of Wrigley Field, the "home" of the Chicago Cubs, and the oldest professional baseball stadium in the United States, have become through televised broadcasts (distributed nationally via WGN) one of the most widely recognized images of Chicago. Television has been instrumental in reshaping and renegotiating conventionalized representations of places. Television coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center and of the "reclamation" of the site, for instance, has been instrumental in refashioning the identity of New York since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

     While television has been one of many technologies involved in an ongoing process of constructing the identity of places and of remapping the relation among places, television also has aspired to and/or claimed the role of cultural atlas, a compendium of places (old and recent) that have mattered for those cultures that television has organized. Televisual representations of place, as a technology of touring, most recently have been organized in the United States through channels devoted exclusively to travel and tourism (e.g., the Travel Channel), although travel and tourism-oriented programs have become integral to other channels devoted to lifestyles (e.g., MTV, E!, the Disney Channel, the Food Channel), to weather (e.g., the Weather Channel), and to the popularization of scientific exploration (e.g., the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, MSNBC' s "National Geographic Explorer").

     The televisual also has contributed to the organization and physical construction of places and concrete environments, and their relation to one another. There are very specific features of television's material infra­ structure and circulation: the location of studios and transmitter towers; the use of microwave relay or satellite stations; cable strung from poles or buried under­ ground; the uneven reliance upon antennae, cable, or satellite dishes for reception in the same neighborhood and in different parts of the world; and the local, regional, national, and global scales of broadcasting systems. Television sets, as an accoutrement of households and other interior spaces, have contributed to the design and organization of domestic and leisure spaces. The portability of television, not only within interior spaces but also outdoors (away from electrical outlets) or in automobiles and planes, has accompanied a broad renegotiation of mobility and of the relation between private and public activity spaces. In one respect, then, television viewing has been about one's relation from an inside to an outside, to somewhere else-that is, a tour from one's home, residential district, city, nation, or hemisphere. In another respect, however, the increased portability of the video camera and the television monitor has involved television's integration into technologies of travel and transport. Television viewers have formed cognitive maps of environments they inhabit in part through their engagements with particular televisual mappings of social space from particular places and through their capacity for moving about with portable forms of screen media such as television. Furthermore, through the circulation and consumption of representations of places, and through networks of distribution, the televisual has been instrumental in shaping concrete, material relations among places: for example, as a technology of mass suburbanization and "mobile privatization" during the 1950s and I960s; as a burgeoning national net­ work that realigned regions (as when the three major U.S. television networks broadcast civil rights demonstrations occurring in the South during the early 1960s while southern stations instigated local blackouts of those national broadcasts); and as a basis during the 1980s for the emergence of certain cities, such as Atlanta, Georgia, as new centers within a national and global cultural and tourism-oriented economy.

     The spread and containment of the televisual have been fraught with political conflicts and inspired legislation over a variety of sites, borders, and kinds ofter­ ritory. Campaigns to regulate the consumption of pornography, for example, have found television's place in the domestic sphere to be particularly alarming. In this case, regulating television involves politics and technologies for regulating the relation of the domestic sphere to an outside. In the case of the nation­ state, the implementation of national coding of broadcast signals (e.g., NTSC, PAL, or SECAM) has served as an invisible border against the international flow of television broadcasting, or (as in the case of Latin America) as a means of facilitating the transnational circulation of Spanish-language television. In Western Europe, for instance, where there was a significant diversity of broadcast frequency codes, these televisual borders began to erode with the increased reliance upon satellite broadcasting, which occurred concurrently with efforts to organize a European Union. Still, language and other cultural differences have deterred a European televisual formation, and the difficulties faced in legislating and regulating the cultures of a "European television" have been a recurring impediment to actualizing the European Union or of treating television as merely another commodity in a European common market. The uses of television among Australian aboriginal communities have not only raised issues of autonomy, territoriality, and governance within and among these communities but have been the subject of the Australian government's efforts to implement policy regarding "national" broadcast space. And along with the impact of transnational tele­ visual flows on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tele visualization of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 attested to the capability of television to conjoin a global audience in an event that signaled a profound transformation in geopolitical borders. Moreover, that event also served as an occasion for national commentators and audiences to reformulate national cultural maps of the world. As these instances affirm, the location of television is organized through emerging and residual social and cultural formations, of which the televisual is one. However, the location of television is also organized through policies and commercial interests bent on preserving, or dismantling, residual formations or on nurturing or containing emerging ones-or on co-opting both.

     The history of the televisual, then, is a history of how various sites and environments-domestic, urban, rural, regional, national, or global space-have shaped and been shaped through the place of television in a broad array of everyday activities. Emphasizing the sites and (overlapping or conflicting) territories of the televisual makes it impossible to conceive of a uniform and universal history of television. For instance, the televisual only became central to the formation of social relations and to everyday life after World War II, a period characterized by a broad restructuring of cities and of the relation between domestic space and the outside world. As Raymond Williams has noted, the expansion of cities and the proliferation of suburbs hastened at this time. The developments were sustained by technologies such as telephony, a greater reliance upon automobile travel, and broadcasting, all of which were supposed to facilitate flows to and from these new settlements. Williams's observations describe a general set of conditions, however, that were more common in North America, Britain, and Australia during the 1950s and I960s than in other parts of the world. That is, the observations explain why television became more quickly and deeply embedded in the everyday life of some places, amid certain historical convergences, rather than others.

     To say that the televisual lacks a discrete, continuous history is not to ignore that there have in fact been certain historically parallel, converging, and interdependent developments. For instance, the televisual developed through certain spatial logics and arrangements that had underpinned geopolitics since the 1920s. Television technology, along with the development of telephony and radio technology, all continued to be crucial in the social organization and conceptualization of national territory and sovereignty after World War II, such that the "national" could be defined as a networked space with a single center of cultural production (as London was to Britain, Hollywood to the United States, or Rome to Italy). Although the geo­ graphic connection between Hollywood film and television production after World War II deepened the global paths for distributing U.S. television programs, the global distribution of U.S. television was relatively meager before the 1980s because of the nationalized structures of broadcasting around the world. The rapid and widespread reliance upon cable and satellite technologies after the mid- l 970s contributed to the erosion of a geography of broadcasting that had remained relatively intact since the 1920s. Throughout the 1980s, national broadcasting systems' competition, often with expanding local, regional, or "private" foreign companies, began to reconfigure that model of the nation. During the 1980s, some cities became equally or more aligned to flows outside their national boundaries than had previously been the case. And while in the early 21st century the increased reliance upon Internet sources of news and upon extranational television news sources have challenged the prerogative of national broadcasting systems as arbiters of "national represen­ tations," national television broadcasting (most notably the efforts in Western national television broadcasting after September 11, 200l, to brand al-Jazeera television as an unreliable source of news, while simultaneously relying on its images and news accounts to help cover the "war on terrorism") continues to occupy a position of authority grounded in the historical experience of viewers as well as broadcasters.

     Since the late 1940s the development of the televisual has occurred through a changing set of relations between the home and other sites and spaces, through making certain environments available and open to certain populations (TV as a technology of settlement and "home"), through practices of social segregation (TV as a technology for maintaining distance and the "proper" place of populations, social classes, and identities), and through the maintenance of a broad social arrangement (a distribution/agreement) as televisual community. In part, this has been a process of linking the home to a circuit and assemblage of sites, vectors, and spaces (TV as a technology that matters in shaping a broad social arrangement). It has also been a process of aligning new domestic spaces, in new settlements, with already built (but, in the wake of resettlement, changing) places and spheres of community. The role of television in colonizing and expanding the domestic sphere and mediating new and old places (and other flows between them) has not just involved the material networking of homes. It has also been contingent upon television audiences' investment in and mobility between the home and other sites. Such an investment has only partially to do with "watching television," but everything to do with television's role in mediating the places of everyday life. It has occurred in part through television narratives about settlement and domesticity. These narratives have mythologized certain architectural ideals of domestic space and domestic space's relation to other spheres.

     The set design of ranch homes in TV westerns in the United States during the early 1960s, in series such as Bonanza, High Chaparral, The Virginian, or The Big Valley, contributed, for instance, to concrete and imaginary relations of suburban homes to suburban settlement. These sets drew upon the western genre's mythology of settlement for an era of planned development, appropriating the postwar ideals of other domes­ tic narratives and domestic design magazines to valorize a "ranch" style (on a grander scale than most early postwar "ranch homes") for 1950s and early 1960s suburban "settlers." Television comedies produced in the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1960s rarely involved characters who abandoned or ventured too far outside the suburbs. Contemporaneous crime series, such as Peter Gunn, were set in an inner city where vice and eccentricity were made to seem beyond the realm of everyday life in the suburbs but, through television, having a vital connection to the domestic, suburban domain. At other times, U.S. television narratives (indeed whole series) have been about displacement and resettlement-a televisual discourse about television's changing relation to a changing material and symbolic environment (e.g., the Gold­ bergs' move to suburbia during the early 1950s on The Goldbergs; the Clampetts' move from a "simple," rural America to the suburban dream-world of Beverly Hills, California, in the early 1960s on the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies; or the Jeffersons' move "up" and out from Queens, New York, to Manhattan in the mid-1970s on the sitcom The Jeffersons).

     That television has played a mediating role amid the flows of people reshaping cities has also been evident in the postcable/postsatellite era when television became an invaluable instrument in the "revitalization" projects of certain cities. Particularly in the United States, where cable/satellite broadcasting first became widely established, Chicago and Atlanta transformed local network affiliates (Chicago's WGN and Atlanta's WTBS) into "superstations," capable of broadcasting across the United States via satellite and the rapidly expanding cable companies. Through sports broadcasting in particular, these superstations maintained a circuit of fans and thus of potential tourists to cities that were concurrently attempting to "rehabilitate" their old commercial centers as new tourist sites/sights through "restoration" projects. Wrigley Field became a nationally circulating image of a pre suburban Chicago, and Turner Broadcasting's ownership of and regular recycling of Gone With the Wind functioned similarly for the contemporaneous "restoration" of the area surrounding Atlanta's Peachtree Street as a retail/tourist center. In both instances, the televisual worked to spatially redefine and to reimagine the relation of current development to an urban past. Since the 1970s the modifications to these cities have developed alongside the construction of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and the initiation of the Disney Channel that promoted the theme park, and alongside the Nashville Network's promotion of the city of Nashville, Tennessee, as country-music mecca and museum. Through television, these cities emerged as "new" centers of national popular culture (after New York and Los Angeles), while their reproduction of an urban past already partially constituted a televisual and cinematic past. These urban "revitalization" projects precipitated and were fueled by a reterritorialization of national and global economic flows, by the movement of people (as "settlers" or "tourists") to these cities, and by broadcasts from them.

     The flow of television broadcasting via cable, fiber optics, and satellites has affected the geographic features of the televisual and its environment in a variety of ways. It has brought traditional broadcast television into close relations with the paths and flows of telecommunications and telematics, although these convergences have been fraught with commercial and political conflicts over territory. It has occurred amid a redistribution of people and economic/cultural capital. Not every home and not every nation and few rural areas are equally connected to these potentially global flows. To the extent that new modes of transmission and new industry alliances have made the televisual a global formation, this formation is at best tenuous sustained through various conjunctions and divisions among the domestic, the urban, the rural, the regional, and the national. Furthermore, recognizing only the global flow of television risks ignoring how the movement of people from one part of the world to another often involves their "assimilation" into a new environment, shaped politically, economically, and culturally, at least in part, through televisual mediation of their new sense of place and/or their relation to their former homeland. This has occurred through Spanish­ language television broadcasting across the Western Hemisphere; through television produced by and for Iranian exiles in Los Angeles; through television broadcast via satellite by the Italian RAI foreign service to Italian-American audiences in New York; through video rentals and pirating for video playback where there are no broadcasts for immigrant audiences; or through audiences whose sense of place is bound up with their consumption of television that arrives from abroad (e.g., Europeans watching Dallas or Australian aborigines watching Difj' rent Strokes).

     The televisual has always been appended to particu­lar sites and located within particular environments, mediating various spheres of sociality. However, the current interdependence of television with telecommunication and telematics suggests that what has been known so far as "the televisual" was composed of spatial formations and forms of spatial modeling whose effectivity belonged to a vanishing set of environmental conditions. In certain respects, the first wave of televisual technologies emerged within established infrastructures, networks, and environmental conditions. Through these conditions the televisual flourished as a means of spatially organizing social relations. How­ ever, the flow of images and the formation of dis­ courses through the current technological convergence have already been predicated upon changing concentrations and dispersals of economic and cultural capital, and cultural capital, after all, is the basis for accessing these flows, as opposed to merely inhabiting an environment conditioned by them. Despite the enthusiastic proclamations about the democratizing potential of new technological convergences, then, access to global media flows is still unequally distributed at the level of home and region. The televisual thus remains as a residual formation, still an organizing feature of homes, cities, and nations, even as their relations are once again being redefined spatially through technologies appended to television. In another sense, however, the emergence of Internet technologies involves a deepening of concerns about managing distance that has made televisuality an ideal and objective since the 19th century.