Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets.
Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in
The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include
Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and
Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000).