This Day in Philosophy — 13 August: the birth of John Logie Baird

The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird was born on 13 August 1888. He built the world's first working mechanical television system; the first mechanical colour television was his too.

Baird was no philosopher. But what he made gave a new shape to one of philosophy's oldest questions.

Television: seeing at a distance#

The word itself carries a claim: the Greek tele (far) joined to the Latin visio (sight). For the first time in human history it was becoming possible to see an event without being where it happened.

For the theory of knowledge this is a new kind of testimony. Classical epistemology recognises two: seeing with your own eyes and trusting what somebody else tells you. Television opened a third category — you are seeing with your own eyes, but what you see is an image that a device has selected, framed and transmitted.

What lies outside the frame?#

The question that follows settled at the centre of the philosophy of media. A camera always looks from somewhere. What is kept out of the shot produces meaning as surely as what is let in.

Marshall McLuhan's famous formulation of 1964 — “the medium is the message” — is aimed at exactly this point. The real effect of a medium of communication, on McLuhan's account, lies not in the content it carries but in the way it reorganises our perception. Writing accustomed human beings to think in a linear and detached fashion; the electronic media returned them to a perception that is simultaneous and participatory.

Copies of the real#

That images could now be reproduced also produced a break in aesthetics. Walter Benjamin's essay of 1935 argued that in an age when a work of art can be technically reproduced it loses its aura — the uniqueness that comes of being here and now.

Benjamin does not present this simply as a loss. The dissolution of the aura tears art away from ritual and opens it to politics; the possibility is at once emancipating and dangerous.

Jean Baudrillard goes a great deal further: the reproduced image ends by taking the place of the reality it copies. The simulacrum is a copy with no original.

Baird's room#

Baird gave his first demonstration in the mid-1920s in London, in a room above a shop. Facing him was the head of a ventriloquist's dummy; the first live human image was that of an office boy from the building.

A hundred years later, most of the world watches events on screens. The question that began in Baird's room is still open: are we witnesses to what we see on the screen, or spectators of it?