Marshall McLuhan famously noted that each new medium represents its predecessors, undermining the teleological view that new technologies succeed and replace old ones. Contrary to this understanding, the “death of cinema”-rhetoric in academic and public discourses in Sweden in the 1960s blamed the demise of cinemagoing on the introduction of television (Furhammar, 2003:249). Also among respondents in an interview project focusing on cinema memories from the 1950s and 60s, television was mentioned as the direct cause of cinema’s rapid decline. This points to a strong conceptual affiliation between cinema and television, and the idea that television arrived to replace cinema. However, a closer analysis of the memory narratives suggests a more complex conceptual relationship between the two media. Television is mentioned only in the margins of the memory narratives of the respondents and seems not to have played such a significant role in their everyday lives.
Complicating the issue further, early Swedish television was modelled on the production protocols and consumption patterns of noncommercial, public service radio. Thorslund (2018:43) writes: "one could argue that television in Sweden in the 1950s hardly was a medium in its own right, being so closely linked to radio." A seminal ethnographic study of early broadcast media in Sweden confirms the affinity between the two media forms (Höjer, 1998). The overlap between the two domestic forms of broadcast media makes the threat of television to cinema ever more enigmatic.
Our paper aims to investigate how television features in memory narratives of cinema in the context of quotidian life in the late 1950s and 1960s in Sweden. The study will draw on memories collected in two large-scale memory projects, Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life and European Cinema Audiences. With a focus on cultural practices and Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols,” (Gitelman, 2006:7) we ask how cinema, television, and to some extent radio are conceived in relation to one another in hindsight, when remembering television as new.