이 연구는 ‘나치 TV’의 정체성의 변화과정을 탐색한 작업들을 통해 미디어 역사 분야에서 부상한 ‘구성주의적’ 접근을 소개, 이해하는 데 목적을 두고 있다. ‘문화적 테크놀로지’로서 나치 TV의 개발과 고안은 선행했던 전화, 라디오, 그리고 영화의 속성들을 재매개화한 TV 기술의 등장과, TV에 대한 기존의 문화적 상상들, 그리고 이해관계를 달리하면서 TV 연구에 개입하던 사회세력들간의 경쟁과 같은 요인들의 접합을 통해서 (재)구성되었다. 하지만 전쟁발발과 함께 정치적 선전을 중시하는 정치권력의 개입이 결정적 요인으로 부상하면서, 나치 TV는 산업화 이전의 전통적 가치들을 이상화하는 파시스트 이데올로기와 ‘동시성의 테크놀로지’로서 TV의 기능을 접합시키려 했던 반동적인 근대화의 수단이 된다.
This study attempts to introduce a 'constructionist' approach to media history which is an emerging intellectual and methodological trend. This study, in particular, traces the development and social experiment surrounding TV under Nazism as a complex and evolving media form. The so-called 'Nazi television' embodies an interesting test case in that its historical emergence, development, and the shifting identities had been modeled on, and remediated through the preceding media forms - telegraphy, radio, telephone, and cinema as well as through particular cultural representations surrounding these media.
Constructionist approach in media history has been formatively influenced by radical historiography, cultural studies, and alternative media history. Constructionist approach attempts to contextualize the intertwining relations between technology, social power, cultural imagination, and social practices. It takes media technology as a historically complex ensemble or an articulation of various elements and factors that are composed of cultural representations, social pressures, and political interests that continuously (re) shape the development and emplacement of particular media technology in society.
Institutionally, several social forces intervened into the social use and installment process of German television during 1935 ~ 1944. Different forms of television's social use were presented and, at the same time, struggled over by the various players: private developers, politicians, different government branches that had envisioned and experimented on different uses of television. Postal ministry, allied with TV developers planned to use TV as a radio-like mass medium and electronic consumer item that could be sold to homes. The 'social egalitarian' wing in the National Socialist Party envisioned a 'democratic' and ideal use of television technology that could be shared by fellow workers at a reasonably affordable price. The Propaganda ministry experimented to use television as a powerful ideological vision machine that could disseminate political messages and televise political rallies in real time. Impressed by the television's radical role as a long-anticipated 'technology of simultaneity', the Propaganda ministry emphasized and implemented on the public viewing model of television, which was utilized more like cinema, through which reception process could be regulated and little aberrant interpretations by the spectators were expected to take place. These competing discourses and interests formed important aspects of television's identity in Germany during 1935 ~44. Yet with the breakout of the World War II, the propaganda ministry's version finally took over and set the very use of television under Nazism.
From the viewpoint of constructionist approach, the case of Nazi TV case shows that among multiple factors that shaped the identities and social uses of television differently, political interests were a defining factor. It also shows that the politics of television technology as a hybrid ensemble entailed two contradictory impulses in Nazi Germany: fascist ideology that romanticized the cultural tradition of Germany and a persistent techno-vision that glorified the use of electronic technologies. Nazi TV, then, epitomized a telling case of 'reactionary modernization'.