Since television as a technology is related to various twoway 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 socioeconomic 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 littleknown distinct alternatives deserve mentioning since they highlight what television might have been  in a different social context