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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: Polity Short Introductions
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Television Studies provides an overview of the origins, central ideas, and intellectual traditions of this exciting field. What have been the primary areas of inquiry in television studies? Why and how did these areas develop? How have scholars studied them? How are they developing? What have been the discipline's key works? This book answers these questions by tracing the history of television studies right up to the digital present, surveying emerging scholarship, and addressing new questions about the field's relationship with the digital. The second edition includes an examination of how internet-distributed services such as Netflix have adjusted the stories, industrial practices, and audience experience of television. For all those wondering how to study television, or even why to study television, this new edition of Television Studies will provide a clear and engaging overview of key topics. The book works as a stand-alone introduction and, by placing key works in a broader context, can also provide an excellent basis for an entire course.

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Seitenzahl: 414

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

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Leseprobe

Cover

Short Introductions

Title page

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Still Television Studies?

What television studies?

A brief genealogy of television studies

Distinguishing television studies

Conclusion

Notes

Programs

Understanding the late arrival of close analysis

Prehistory and influences on the textual analysis of television

Differing motivations for analysis: aesthetics and ideology

Television studies and critical analysis

What now and next? New directions for textual analysis

Notes

Audiences

A prehistory of television studies’ engagement with audiences

The CCCS intervention

The active audience

Early fan studies

The attack on active audience theory

Television talk

The audience in the machine

Global and diasporic audiences

The ritual uses of television

What now and what next?

Notes

Industries

Influences on television industry studies: 1950–1980

Subsequent strands of industry research within television studies

Approaches to television industries studies

Areas of focus of television industry studies

Emerging trends

Notes

Contexts

Histories of television

Contextual program analysis

Notes

Conclusion

Have we made television studies impossible?

Where television studies meets the digital

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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SHORT INTRODUCTIONS

Nicholas Abercrombie, Sociology

Michael Bury, Health and Illness

Raewyn Connell and Rebecca Pearse, Gender 3rd edition

Hartley Dean, Social Policy 3rd edition

Lena Dominelli, Introducing Social Work

Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies 2nd edition

Jeffrey Haynes, Development Studies

Stuart Henry, with Lindsay M. Howard, Social Deviance 2nd edition

Stephanie Lawson, International Relations 3rd edition

Ronald L. Mize, Latina/o Studies

Chris Rojek, Cultural Studies

Mary Romero, Introducing Intersectionality

Karen Wells, Childhood Studies

Television Studies

Second Edition

Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz

polity

The right of Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2011 by Polity Press

This second edition first published in 2019 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing, Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3179-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3181-3 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gray, Jonathan (Jonathan Alan), author. | Lotz, Amanda D., 1974- author.

Title: Television studies / Jonathan Gray, Amanda D. Lotz.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Series: Short introductions | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Television broadcasting–History and criticism–History.

Classification: LCC PN1992.45 (ebook) | LCC PN1992.5 .G68 2018 (print) | DDC 791.45071–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022730

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgments

In doling out thanks, it may seem odd to start by thanking those who have made the writing of this book all the harder a task, but we nevertheless wish to thank all of our many peers and forerunners for making television studies something that is so vibrant, interesting, challenging, diverse, and nuanced that putting it in a short book could never have been and never will be a simple task, for us or for others.

More specifically, we extend heartfelt thanks to some of the field's pioneers and shining lights who at various times walked us through moments in television studies history: Charlotte Brunsdon, John Fiske, Christine Geraghty, Bruce Gronbeck, John Hartley, Henry Jenkins, David Morley, Horace Newcomb, Paddy Scannell, Ellen Seiter, and Lynn Spigel.

Other colleagues and friends who pushed us in helpful directions with criticism and friendly advice include Rob Asen, David Bordwell, Joshua Green, Matt Hills, Michele Hilmes, Derek Johnson, Lori Kido Lopez, Jeremy Morris, Sarah Murray, Aswin Punathambekar, and Serra Tinic. Many thanks, too, to Polity's reviewers for both editions.

Finally, we'd like to thank those who played the biggest roles in introducing each of us to television studies: Horace Newcomb in the case of Amanda, and Nick Couldry and David Morley in the case of Jonathan. We're proud to call these gracious, warm, and brilliant teacher-scholars our mentors and friends. The field has gained so much from their work, but so have we as individuals. We dedicate the book to them, with thanks.

Introduction: Still Television Studies?

Lately, keeping up with television has become hard work. The number of shows one wants to watch or is told one “must” watch regularly require far more hours than any of us have to spare. And yet not only are new programs constantly appearing, and old ones returning to vie for their own share of our attention, but new sources for television and new ways to watch seem also to be proliferating at pace. Amidst this torrent of new and old television, television studies has similarly been working hard to keep up, to adapt to the shifting televisual environments, and to make sense of them on the fly. Indeed, the subfield of television studies has expanded and transformed considerably in the last decade, not only because television as an object of study has experienced such dynamic transition, but also because of shifts in the relationships among television studies and related subfields.

Many are generally aware that television – the programs, how we experience it, and the businesses and technologies at its core – has changed tremendously in the last twenty years. This change has left few aspects of television untouched, and there has been so much change it is difficult to sort out how it all relates. One of the key changes has been the emergence of internet-distributed television. Broadcast signals first delivered television, and more recently, cable lines and satellite transmissions became just as common. Now internet protocols allow us to transmit video content in ways that allow very different experiences of television (no schedule, many screens) and this has encouraged substantial changes in television. We now count Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu among important sources and creators of American television, and the competition that they and other internet-distributed services have introduced has led to changes from “legacy” television services such as HBO, CBS, and Disney as well. The rise of some of these services has been brisk: by 2016, Netflix delivered more minutes of video each week to American audiences than all the channels owned by CBS, Time Warner, and Viacom.1 And in recent years, Netflix has endeavored to become a new kind of global television service.

This great change might explain why the “death” of television – predicted regularly in the first years of the twenty-first century – has not arrived. If various magazine and newspaper stories penned in these years were to be believed, we'd by now have all binned the large square boxes around which we had organized our living rooms (despite having recently upgraded them to hi-def flat screens) and reallocated the seven or so hours a day that we'd supposedly been spending with the box to texting, tweeting, watching video online, and updating our Facebook statuses. Of course we do these things, yet our social media activities have not come at the expense of television – because television too continues to evolve. New technologies make it more convenient to view and many services offer an expanded array of programs. In response, the US television industry has fed what we may look back on as an exuberant bubble of series production – offering many series that continue to stretch the boundaries of its established network-era television storytelling norms. FX Networks Chief John Landgraf called this abundance “peak TV,” and by most accounts it provided not only more television, but more good television than ever before.2

We remain in the early stages of change introduced by internet-distributed television, which has notably been a two-pronged adjustment. First, it has created entirely new sectors of the television industry about which there is much to learn. Secondly, the arrival of internet-distributed television has altered the ecosystem for all forms of television distribution. As a result, many things we once knew about television that derived from being able to access it only by broadcast signal or cable/satellite connection also must be revisited. The change introduced by internet distribution may not be an emergent future that replaces the past, but a widening of the range of practices and technologies television encompasses. Our understandings thus must incorporate these new developments, but also remain cognizant of the previous organizations and structures that persist.

Not only have the technologies and business practices of television changed. With them, the felt experience of engaging with television has also shifted, profoundly for some. Streaming services – Netflix alone reached 117 million worldwide at the end of 2017 – provide access to significant catalogues of television past and present, and how we watch those shows adjusts our experience of television in both subtle and profound ways. When entire seasons “drop” on one day, fan discussions and cultures shift from an era in which each week brought a lone episode. Viewers around the world could near-simultaneously mainline and burn through an entire season of Stranger Things within a few days of release, then share in the same social media conversations about it. And yet these new practices are not replacements: most viewing remains episode-a-week screening. In fact, all of the pre-internet ways of viewing, types of programs, and television businesses persist, so that despite our chronicle of change, the story of contemporary television is not one of the transition from one norm to another so much as the development of a multiplicity of norms, all of which have substantially eroded the uniformity long perceived characteristic of television viewing culture.

Despite these obstacles and complexities, and despite some prognosticators’ dismal pronouncements about television's future, the medium remains as relevant as ever. As 2020 approaches, we remain early in the throes of signification evolution. Some might choose to look back mournfully and construct Golden Age myths of an era of “true” television. In years gone by, particular programs may have held greater sway, as when the owners of 82.6% of American televisions watched Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, when 32.3 million Britons tuned in to watch England defeat Germany in the World Cup Final in 1966, or when the M*A*S*H finale played to 125 million Americans in 1983. But just as we could hardly announce that sports are dead simply because not everyone is playing football, so too does television remain a force to be reckoned with.

Over 100 million US viewers still watched nightly in the early twenty-first century, but their attention was spread over many more options. By 2017, a ratings-topping show garnered far fewer viewers than in decades of yore – a “mere” 18.5 million viewers weekly in the US alone for The Big Bang Theory in 2017, for instance – although many series held dear by their fans, such as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, rarely gathered more than 1 million. Excited and nostalgic accounts of former viewing numbers exaggerate the degree to which “everyone” was watching, erasing the many millions who never watched or cared for Elvis, World Cup football, or M*A*S*H. This longing for mass viewing forgets the many who weren't addressed by the television of the network era. Television's diversification of offerings and its audiences’ diversification of interests could be seen as a sign of the medium's maturation and vitality. We would hardly condemn the state of book publishing just because 50% of readers aren't all reading the same book. Moreover, though they achieve it less regularly, television programs – especially sports programming – still gather more mass attention than any other medium.

Television may be evolving and new technologies and services may seem to perpetually change what it is and how it might work, but this is precisely why a book about television studies matters. Alongside the story of television's development, in these pages we recount the tale of how the academic study of television developed, and of how television studies has accounted for its object's many changes, shifts, and turns. The book seeks to explain how and why television studies has evolved, and what legacy it has willed to the broader academic study of media and culture.

For the most part, television became available in the aftermath of World War II in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the US and Britain. Despite this history, though, as an approach for studying media, television studies has offered and continues to offer a lot to those interested in studying newer media and their role in society. In recent years, various new and social media have added video to their services and made the imagined boundaries between “tech” and “media” industries difficult to justify. Rather than see an exodus from the business of television by telecommunications companies, we see more companies and services offering “television” than ever before. Television is neither “beating” nor “losing” to these new apps and services in some cosmic clash of technology; rather, some of the bastions of “new” media – Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube/Google, for starters – are among television's biggest players and disruptors. In short, sectors of television overlap with sectors of new and digital media, and therefore an appreciation of how television studies has developed contributes to understanding how new and digital media work, and to understanding a broader arc of media history in general.

For much of its life, though, television studies has been a topically focused subfield within media studies, and it is there that we begin. Television has been with us for seven or eight decades, but an approach to studying it that we distinguish as television studies is a fairly recent development. The next four chapters trace the development of television studies in various traditions from the 1960s through the 1990s – when television studies emerged as an identifiable entity – to the current day. What is significant for explaining what is and isn't included in our account of this history, though, is our supposition that by the late 1990s, television studies had arrived as a legitimate subfield with its own approaches for the rigorous study of television, its own developing canon and intellectual touchstones, and its own coherency and sense of purpose. Although many books explore key ideas within television studies, few articulate a distinctive entity, and even fewer explain how and why it coalesced into this form it has. Every few years, someone in the popular press or another academic field decides that “now” “we” could or should study television, but here we show how television studies is already a mature, sophisticated entity that is on the job. We argue that far from being just a collection of work about television, a particular way of studying television now exists – which we call television studies – and in the following pages we explore the various intellectual, industrial, and sociocultural forces that characterize its distinction.

What television studies?

In the last quarter century, a set of methods and theories has cohered to constitute the broader realm of media studies, and the formation of television studies played a crucial role in the development of that approach. This book does not provide an exhaustive list of the various ways television is studied; rather, it presents an in-depth look at how an approach recognized as “television studies” developed and the primary areas it has examined. Others have studied the object of television using approaches inconsistent with television studies. Some psychologists research television in studies that, for instance, examine the relationship between viewing certain content and engaging in violent behavior, and some literary scholars examine television in analyses of the themes present in shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad; however, neither is necessarily “doing” television studies or engaging with the range of methods and theories characteristic of television studies.

The uncertain relationship between television studies and media studies derives from the variable history of how the study of television has been institutionalized. Whereas English, psychology, or philosophy departments everywhere tend simply to be called English, psychology, or philosophy departments, television studies and media studies have grown from a variety of institutional seeds and consequently can be found in a wide array of institutional homes, from radio/television/film to theater and performance studies, and from sociology to communication studies. In the United States, there has often been a more contentious relationship between film studies and television studies, whereas a greater degree of overlap between these two fields in the UK and some other countries encouraged the use of a broader term, “media studies,” even when that term is often conspicuously absent, or combined always with “communication,” in the United States. We mention this by way of explaining our use of terms to all readers, and also the roots from which some US “television studies” scholars have subsequently turned to the study of other media. But we also mention it by way of apologizing to those for whom it seems we are stuffing a bigger topic into the smaller jacket of “television studies.”

As we talk of US–UK divides, we should also explain why these two countries and their television systems and scholars hold sway over this book. Part of the reason here is simply personal – we trained in the American (Lotz) and British (Gray) systems, and thus many of our more familiar points of reference are American or British. Another cause results from these countries’ early endeavors in television and the fact that these national contexts offered more television to study early on. However, this book's focus on these two systems is also due to their considerable role in the development of television studies. Both countries have produced more scholarship on television from an earlier date than have others, and because the two countries’ scholars began to cross-germinate ideas at an early stage, each reinforced the other's prominence in the literature. This is not to say that other countries have been absent from the tale of television studies: the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and Australia in particular have often contributed significantly to the development of television studies, especially given the free flow of ideas and intellectuals between these areas and the US and especially the UK. And while the brand of media analysis conducted in other countries has at times worked in different veins, at other times it has greatly informed trends and paradigm shifts in American and British television studies. Linguistic barriers have limited the easy flow of ideas across other national borders, and have thus – as with many fields of inquiry – allowed Anglophones a position of centrality. Moreover, given the high reputations and funding enjoyed by certain American and British universities, many graduate students from around the world have come to them for training, and have either stayed to work within American–British television studies, or returned to their home countries with an American–British training and frame for their work and pedagogy. For a variety of reasons, then, the US and UK model has enjoyed a certain centrality, and has featured prominently in the history of television studies. That said, an increasing number of scholars are now turning their attention to global television and media, exploring parts of the globe that have been absent from television scholarship for far too long, and considering media's mobility across national borders with greater care and attention. As we tell the story of television studies, therefore, we will be keen to examine ways in which it has of late dealt with its global frontiers.

Hopefully these paragraphs offer enough introduction of our key terms, though we have yet to offer much description of what television studies includes or entails. We continue to expand these ideas in the next section, in which we delve into these issues in greater depth by providing an abbreviated history of the development of television studies. We now go back to the 1960s – which really isn't very long ago relative to other fields of study – to trace how and why television studies developed. Television studies very much responded to its context, particularly the sociohistorical milieu of the times and the existing dominant ways of studying and thinking about other media such as newspapers, radio, and film.

A brief genealogy of television studies

Despite attempts by many observers during its history to pin it down as a single, knowable entity, television is many different things. The medium, in other words, is not the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously suggested, since the medium is many things to different people, and its messages are infinite.3 As such, when scholars, activists, parents, policymakers, and watchers began to discuss television, these discussions took a wide variety of forms and occurred in multiple sites. Here, we may draw a parallel to “new” or digital media today. Almost every department on the campus of a good university will have someone wrestling with ideas of new and digital media: philosophers may ponder how they change our relationship to reality or embodiment, women's studies professors may ask about how gender works online, education departments may study how new and digital media can be used in classrooms or for other forms of learning, anthropologists may study nascent forms of community, economists may study new and digital media regulation and commerce, and so forth. So too did the study of television spring from multiple seeds. Just as the current expansion of digital communication into all realms of public and private life demands study from a varied group of special interests, so was television's arrival into public and private life in the 1940s and 1950s greeted by significant interest and concern.

Television, like any new invention, entered societies that had established norms of social relations. It also entered societies that had experience with other media and art. Both of these realities figure prominently in early conceptualizations of television and understanding how and why television studies developed as it has. A first consideration is that as television was introduced in the US and UK, it was presented as a popular form of media that was meant for use in the home – meaning a device that was supposed to be accessible to people of all ages and classes. This led people first experiencing television to understand it as much more like radio, somewhat like film (which targeted broad audiences, but required one to leave the home), and less like art forms such as the symphony or theater that are engaged out of the home and more likely to be accessed by narrower populations of the economically privileged. But television's positioning as a popular medium – a medium of the people – was also crucial to how it was understood and studied (or not studied). The fact that television was a popular medium contributed to establishing many initial presumed biases against it as being unsophisticated, simplistic, and, in the US, crassly commercial.

In addition to being compared with other existing forms of entertainment, leisure, and art, and assessed to be a popular form of media, television was recognized as a media form with the ability to communicate ideas widely. Thus, understanding why television has been studied in various ways requires acknowledging the history of media study that predated television's arrival. Experience with radio events such as the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and particularly the media propaganda surrounding World War II gave rise to a research paradigm focused on investigating media effects. Significant work in this area predated television, and much of what was understood about media effects was quickly applied to television. Meanwhile, generations of humanities instruction in universities and secondary schools had conditioned people to see fiction and art as possibly offering keys to enlightenment, and had thus sought to draw distinctions between accepted, elite culture and the alleged mindlessness of popular narratives that circulated in pulp fiction, comic books, radio plays, and so forth. Yet as exhibited by the oft-cited examples of Shakespeare and Dickens – both popular in their day, yet later “rescued” as elite culture – the supposed hard-and-fast lines between elite and popular culture are in fact marked by considerable tension. Given television's popularity, the medium quickly became a key battleground for discussions of what constituted “culture.”

Various approaches to studying television were heavily influenced by: (1) the cultural and political unrest of the 1960s, which led many to believe in the significance of media in inspiring broad social change or in offering more subtle and complicated, less overt impediments to such change; (2) the earliest ways of studying media, such as newspapers and radio, which focused on explaining the propagandistic dangers of media; and (3) attitudes of disdain toward television as mass culture that were shared by academics and the populace. The significance of the late 1960s cultural revolutions – particularly for the college-aged cohort that was the first that had grown up with television – was impressive enough to outweigh the latter two factors, which had led to the tendency to disregard television viewing as important, or to believe that it had uniformly negative effects, if it was deemed significant at all. As John Hartley notes, television was hated by many academics, and by many in upper middle-class society, even before it existed, as a long tradition of fearing any new popular medium's assault on high culture prefigured a common response to television. Without too much exaggeration, he writes that “the successful student was the one who could catalogue most extensively the supposed evils associated with television, although of course these evils only affected other people, possibly because the students were not encouraged to watch TV themselves, only to opine haughtily about it.”4 Thankfully, though, in the wake of the 1960s, a different type of student began to develop alongside the telephobes.

The immediate perception of television as a popular media form and its understanding relative to other preexisting media are contextual features that were largely established before anyone began considering the serious and systematic study of television. Throughout the remainder of this section, we trace how various early approaches to studying television influenced the formation of television studies, as well as the effect of the particular social, historical, and national contexts of these efforts to understand the medium. We organize the key intellectual influences on television studies broadly as social science approaches, humanities approaches, and cultural studies approaches. In addition to synthesizing their influences here, we return to the specific influences of each in subsequent chapters in discussing how they affected particular objects of television studies.

Social science approaches

The terminology of “social science approaches” is on one hand exceptionally broad; however, as in the case of the companion terminology of “humanities approaches,” these monikers prove generally useful in organizing the realm of intellectual approaches to media that predate television. By social science approaches, we mean to indicate the empirical research done in psychology, sociology, and budding communication departments. Overwhelmingly, this research tradition focused on attempting to answer questions about the effects of media or their influence on audiences and societies. Early social science approaches saw television as a medium of popular communication in the tradition of radio and, somewhat, newspapers. Attitudes toward and expectations of such pretelevisual media prepared television's introduction; although, for reasons still unclear today, television was quickly regarded with even greater suspicion and disapprobation than its predecessors.

For the sake of brevity, we do not extend as far back historically as is perhaps possible in preparing the development of television studies. This story might begin in the 1930s with the studies of sociologists and psychologists who provide the precursors to the field of communication with their studies of the effects of radio and film.5 The predominant social science research paradigm in the decades prior to television's arrival sought to prove radio, film, and newspaper to have strong persuasive power over those who used them. As television actually became available, however, the previous flurry of effects studies – much based around the work of Paul Lazarsfeld and Harold Lasswell – slowed as the outcomes of this research showed the media to work in far more complicated ways than early hypotheses assumed.6 By the time television arrived in the 1950s, social science research moved toward models and theories that presumed media to be less powerful than earlier assumptions; as communication scholar Elihu Katz explains, researchers came to argue “that media content was filtered by interpersonal networks, by individual need, and by selectivity in exposure and perception.”7 Although this research went on both in the US and Britain, particularly with regard to wartime consequences of media, Katz describes this earliest social science research as “surely an American science.”8

This shift, however, was fairly short-lived as the historical context of the times aided in the reassertion of models presuming more powerful effects.9 Just as real-world experience with the rise of the Nazi Party before World War II led to studies that supposed the powerful propaganda effects of media in the 1940s, the Cold War and context of social upheaval and questioning during the 1960s again led to suspicions that media must be responsible for shifting social attitudes. With regard to the American context, Katz explains, “The beginning of the revival of theory and research on mass communication came in the early 1960s when the black revolt, the youth revolt, women's liberation, the Vietnam War, and ultimately Watergate led to second-thoughts about television.”10 In the UK and Europe, many of these revolts were also under way, though added to them were numerous labor disputes, strikes, and clashes, and, as with the US, the role of television in mediating citizens’ understandings of and reactions to such developments was a key concern for all parties. However, rather than focus on the wide range of identity issues at the core of much of this social examination, government funders particularly seized on concerns about the consequences of violence depicted on television. In the late 1960s, in the US, the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence funded at least twenty-five studies with one million dollars, and as Katz explains, “there is no doubt that the pump-priming of the Committee gave new life to media research.”11 In the UK, as Philip Lodge recounts, Home Secretary R. A. Butler found himself under pressure to respond to complaints regarding television's effects on youth delinquency, and thus pushed for a Television Research Committee (TRC), through which the government funded numerous analyses of the medium. Though these studies would range in focus, and would in time reject the solitary interest in youth and crime, a clear trace of the nature of the government's initial concerns remained in the TRC being accountable to the Prison Department of the Home Office.12

Some of the most notable influences of this research tradition developed during the late 1960s and 1970s. In the US, George Gerbner became one of the leading social science voices and worked to construct an adequate methodology for examining the consequences of television violence. Founding the Cultural Indicators Research Project, Gerbner, who understood television's force as that of a storyteller, remains best known for his explanation of televised violence's effect as creating “mean world syndrome.” Rather than looking for direct and immediate effects, Gerbner's concern was with how the steady diet of crime and violent television led viewers to imagine the world as a more fearful and scarier place, and what the consequences of those fears might be. Gerbner engaged in public discussion of his research and testified before Congress in 1981. He was particularly concerned about television because of its central role in cultural storytelling, and his later work was critical of US television's emphasis on telling stories only of certain types of people and of the consequences of exclusion for others.

A similarly politically motivated research initiative began in the UK with the founding of the Glasgow University Media Project in 1974, which received its early funding from the Social Science Research Council. With their controversial publication of Bad News in 1976, a group of media scholars in Glasgow, including Brian Winston, John Eldridge, and Greg Philo among many others, took aim at analyzing television news with a particular focus on its coverage of industrial relations.13 The question of bias in coverage of the trade unions was particularly controversial at this time, and the coverage by television news became a particular flashpoint because of the public funding of the BBC and its mandate to serve the citizenry. Similarly, commercial television at the time maintained that it offered an unbiased presentation of news, but the analysis of the Glasgow Group indicated the many ways that practices presumed to be standard and objective contributed to perceptions of information that were arguably quite biased. The analysis of the Glasgow Group led to intense debate between researchers and broadcasters that was important in drawing attention to the previously unexamined norms of television news, the constructed nature of “news,” and the consequences of news provision that does not interrogate its process and norms.

The importance of the social science approach to studying media is arguably primarily as an influence that television studies responds against. Television studies does not take up the quantitative, positivist, and experimental research central in this early social science work, nor does it presume the negative effects of television that led to the government funding that has supported this tradition. Rather, many of television studies’ earliest architects were suspicious of the cultural and artistic factors disregarded in this preliminary research and sought to counter the simple story about negative media effects that pontificating legislators and cultural commentators drew from, despite the availability of much more sophisticated and nuanced social science research. Just as television was perceived from its origins with suspicion because of its apparent mass appeal, it was also understood as a bad object because of the social science tradition that had spent years trying to explain media influence.

Nevertheless, one of the primary challenges faced by those who sought to seriously engage in the study of television was legitimating their object of study, and many of television studies’ earliest voices have reflected on how helpful the tradition of social science approaches proved in establishing that television was culturally, socially, and politically relevant to the lives of viewers, even if it went about exploring this relevance through different methodological tools.14 Social science approaches also contributed to the more sociological emphasis that has been far more central to television studies than cinema (although this influence also came from cultural studies), and contributes to the emphasis on a contextual understanding that remains a hallmark of television studies today.

Humanities approaches

Early efforts to understand television that developed from humanities traditions did so with limited interaction with the social sciences. There are arguably three main threads of early television study that emerged from humanities fields prior to television studies: literary studies, film studies, and medium theory. In his history of broadcast research written in the 1970s, Katz reflected that, in the 1960s, “humanities re-entered the field of popular culture via linguistics, and joined with the anthropologists and literary critics who were won over by the new semiology.”15 Such intellectual perspectives were well suited to the study of television – at least for those intrigued by the storytelling of the medium – although justifying critical engagement with a “popular” medium proved more challenging.

The humanistic study of television was also slow to develop, in large part because it was continually subjected to criticism as the “boob tube” or “idiot box.” Arguably the most famous statement about television to this day was Federal Communications Commission chair Newton Minow's attack on 1960s American commercial television as “a vast wasteland,” filled with mindless, cheap fare. Whereas the humanistic tradition of studying art and literature was deeply rooted in an interest in “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold's formulation, and in culture that would uplift and enlighten society through providing images of beauty, Minow's and many other critics’ attacks on television suggested a medium devoid of anything worth studying as a complex expression.16 This humanistic tradition held considerable sway over universities, but is all the more evident in high-school English classes, wherein Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, or the like are examined in depth as important contributions to human thought and as reflections on the human condition. Few saw television's early programs as worthy of similar treatment. Instead, television often played the role of whipping post for humanists who would point to the medium as a sign of the supposed costs for society of abandoning the study of what they asserted as more noble fare: if we gave up teaching Shakespeare to youth, so went the argument, we'd risk wall-to-wall cheap entertainment and would, in Neil Postman's infamous words, “amuse ourselves to death.”17

Such criticisms still exist today, all too easily trotted out occasionally, and are a central reason why television criticism or media literacy is so rarely taught in schools. But their centrality within the humanistic study of art and literature was radically destabilized in the 1960s and 1970s by the rise of critical approaches that went beyond cataloguing or evaluating cultural products’ “beauty” or inner truths, and instead focused on how they constructed and/or maintained ideology and ideas of “common sense,” beauty, or truth in the first place. A wide range of theories and approaches to the study of culture were added to the humanistic tradition by scholars influenced by Marxism, critical race and gender studies, psychoanalysis, rhetoric and discourse theories, post-structuralism, and eventually postmodernism. All of these theories opened up new ways to explore television and other media, and new ways of finding deep structures of meaning, many of which were not predicated on an interest in the cultural product as a monument to enlightenment, and several of which explicitly challenged and sought to deconstruct the product's authoritative claims. Hamlet was no longer simply a monument to expression and beauty; it could be explored for its gender constructions, for a pronounced enactment of the Oedipal complex, as a resource for discussing attitudes toward madness and/or depression, and so forth. As critical theory transformed what could be done with art, literature, and media, it similarly shifted notions of what was appropriate or inappropriate to study. Television programs, in short, were now definitively open for analysis, and given their popular status, some critics regarded them as especially rich for study.

Also based nominally in literary studies was arguably television's most renowned academic commentator, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's theories of television hit a nerve in sixties popular culture as a generation tried to make sense of the televised era in which they found themselves, rocketing him to fame. His broad, rather spacey, philosophic writing style and penchant for sound-bite observations of the media led to a cameo appearance in Annie Hall and an interview by Playboy, and he is still quoted to this day for coining the term “global village” and for his dictum that “the medium is the message.”18 McLuhan had been influenced by political economist Harold Innis, whose The Bias of Communication and Empire and Communications had considered how various empires had grown from the powers allotted them by their careful management and control of the dominant media of the time, through what he called “monopolies of knowledge.”19 Similarly, then, McLuhan's work asked how media as technology – and not their specific programs, industries, or audiences – shaped culture. Infamously, for instance, he distinguished between “hot” and “cool” media, the former being those that did all the interpretive work for their audience, the latter those that left something to the imagination, and he analyzed the Kennedy–Nixon debates as damaging to Nixon in the “cool” environment of television that “rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of processes rather than products,”20 yet complimentary to the preeminently cool Kennedy, while opining that radio listeners had supposedly favored Nixon because Kennedy's cool façade played poorly on this hot medium.

McLuhan's charisma and celebrity helped in some ways to legitimate the academic analysis of television and the simple notion that the medium might be more complex and worthy of analysis than was supposed by many who saw it as two-dimensional. But his medium theory also created something of a dead end, by freezing television in time and place, making its 1960s North American iteration seem natural and inherent, and eliding vast differences in programs, audiences, and industries. To make sense of television in anything more than a catchphrase, we must be willing to study how various programs work, how companies function differently, and how audiences behave in complex, not wholly predictable ways. McLuhan's aphoristic declarations tended to disallow careful textual, audience, or industrial analysis, thereby vastly limiting their utility. An academic analysis of television needed to be able to advance beyond troubling, bizarre declarations such as “most TV stars are men, that is, ‘cool characters,’ while most movie stars are women, since they can be presented as ‘hot’ characters,”21 and so McLuhan's impact on television studies as a flourishing field proved to be small.

Elsewhere in the humanities, though, a certain brand of film studies and of “screen theory” was being born. If the social sciences tradition risked focusing overmuch on the audience with its examination of media effects in a manner that disregarded the intricacies of the program under analysis, the humanistic tradition outside McLuhan and followers often risked fetishizing the program and forgetting contexts of production or reception. The humanistic tradition had long refused to discuss audiences and assumed that a powerful cultural product would have the desired effect – such as of uplift and enlightenment – on those who engaged with it. Screen theory – developed in film studies as a way of examining the ideological work of film, and discussed further in Chapter 1 – saw media as creating and disciplining their own audiences, attributing greater significance to the screen than to the individuals watching it. Production was also marginalized in importance within screen theory. And finally, screen theory was often fondest of film, whether because film was still a favored art form, and/or because its address to large groups in a darkened room served as a better breeding ground for theories of the screen constructing its own audience, leaving television still sidelined and of lesser importance.

The study of television also emerged within the humanities-based areas of communication, namely rhetorical studies and criticism. However, it was only in the 1970s that the classical discipline of rhetoric truly shifted primary focus away from public address to include the analysis of popular culture, by which point television studies had begun developing in its own right. Thus, while rhetorical analysis certainly preceded television studies – by many hundreds of years – it was less a precursor to the founding of television studies than a contemporary.

Overall, the humanistic tradition developed in some key ways that diverged from what would become television studies by attending closely to art, literature, film, and other cultural products, but eschewing audiences, contexts, and conditions of production. However, television studies’ interest in understanding how programs work, how they create meaning, and in developing a series of tools for analyzing everything from a program's words to its images, and from more explicit messages to suggested and implied meanings, all stemmed directly from the humanistic tradition. Some of the early foundations of television studies were published in the mid- through late 1970s. Horace Newcomb's TV: The Most Popular Art appeared in 1974, as did Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form, while John Fiske and John Hartley's Reading Television was published in 1978.22 Many regard these books as the first scholarly monographs on television and as the first defining publications of television studies, although they were written in such a way that they could also reach non-academic audiences. All three examine how television tells its stories and the relationship of those stories to the society that produces and consumes them. Like several others trained in humanities disciplines such as literature and the then-nascent film studies, Newcomb, Williams, Fiske, and Hartley turned to television as an important object of study, and their serious treatment of television as storyteller and mythmaker with great cultural significance helped create a space to engage in intellectual consideration of television.

Cultural studies approaches

A third key seed from which television studies grew, one that Williams had helped nurture, and one that was in full bloom when Newcomb's and Fiske and Hartley's books were published, was planted at the University of Birmingham in England when then Professor of Modern English Literature Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1964. A triumvirate of Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture (1957), Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958), and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) had boldly argued against the longstanding tradition of studying elite, “high” culture as the only culture worthy of analysis.23 Instead, Hoggart founded the CCCS as a site for the examination of popular culture, arguing that culture and the creation of meaning were not restricted to the upper classes alone. As committed neo-Marxists, many within the CCCS shared a concern for the effects of the industrialization of cultural production, and they also showed considerable interest in the media as an apparatus of state control and of maintaining bourgeois, patriarchal culture. Hence, rather than study cultural products (“texts”) as works of art from which we should glean as much enlightenment as possible, the CCCS approach sought to explore texts’ varying roles within society, especially as purveyors of power. Moreover, the CCCS refused to regard texts as mere “conveyor belts” that unproblematically transferred ideas from producer to consumer, nor did they regard audiences as mere dupes; thus a great deal of their efforts were expended studying exactly how power and ideology worked at the level of the text.

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