THE TIMID GIANT: THE EARLY DAYS OF CZECHOSLOVAK TELEVISION

This article describes the early days of television in Czechoslovakia (from the first experiments, through trail broadcasting, to the beginning of the 1960s) from the perspective of the meanings attributed to it in the press and in the television’s documents. The example of Czechoslovakia in the 1950s provides one with a special opportunity to have a look at the ways the new medium was being presented to a particular socialist society and at the attempts to define it and incorporate it into the existing cultural model. The objective of the article is to reflect on the role attributed to the new medium, from the perspective of the social reality’s division into the public and private spheres through the reconstruction of the TV and press document’s image of television. The reconstruction allowed for the identification and description of the essential metaphors and phrases used in in the dominant discourse in order to describe the new medium and thus integrate it in the socialist reality.