Broadcasting originally meant sowing seeds broadly, by hand. It is, in other words, not only an agricultural metaphor, it is also one of optimistic modernism. It is about planned growth in the widest possible circles, the production, if the conditions are right, of a rich harvest. The metaphor presupposes a bucket of seeds at the centre of the activity, the existence of centralised resources intended and suited for spreading — and reproduction. The question to be looked into is why a new technology that transmitted words and pictures electronically was organised in a way that made this agricultural metaphor seem adequate. Since television as a technology is related to various two-way forms of communication, such as the telegraph and the telephone, it is all the more striking that, from its very early days, it was envisaged as a centralised mass medium.

However, transmission to private homes from some centralised unit was simply in keeping with both economic structures and the dominant ways of life in modern and modernising societies. Attempts or experiments with other forms of organisation in the long run remained just that attempts and experiments. Two little-known, distinct alternatives deserve to mention since they highlight what television might have been in a different social context.

Experiments with two-way television as a possible replacement for the ordinary telephone were followed up, so to speak, by radio amateurs in Britain in the early 1930s. Various popular science journals, such as Radio News, had detailed articles about how to construct television transmitters and receivers and, throughout the 1930s, experimenting amateurs were active in many parts of the country. But Big Business, represented by the British Radio Manufacturers Association, in 1938 agreed upon standards for television equipment and channel regulations which drove the grassroots activists out.