Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 1 – what do we study when we study television?
“Television has long since fallen from its pedestal. From the mass audience’s point of view, the medium’s deepest social purpose is to pass the time, to distract people from themselves and to stimulate or tranquilise by whatever means it can. Perhaps it doesn’t do…to take it too seriously.”
• Hugh McKay, “Seriously, TV is a bit of a laugh”, The Australian, March 11, 2000.
“The industries of mass culture…encourage mass deception and control consumers. They provide an affirmative culture to regressed subjects. They encourage passivity and by craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish they inaugurate a mindless harmony”
• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
“Television studies is the relatively recent, aspirationally disciplinary name given to the academic study of television.”
• Charlotte Brunsdon, “Television Studies,”
“If there can be said to be a single assumption subtending the analysis of television in cultural studies it is that television is fundamentally heterogeneous and polysemic.”
• John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987).
“The boundaries between television and computing, between television and telephony, even between television and the electrical system in the ‘smart house’ of the future, are making it increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of television as a discrete technology.”
• Graeme Turner, “Television and Cultural Studies: Unfinished Business,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 4 (2001): 381.
“We are also faced with the claim that television has had its day, that the web is the future. That may be. But I suspect it will involve a transformation of television rather than its displacement. TV started in most countries as a broadcast, national medium dominated by the state. It was transformed into a cable and satellite, international medium dominated by commerce, but was still called ‘television.’ A TV-like screen, located in domestic and other spaces and transmitting signs from other places, will be the future. It may even be that television as a word comes to take over what we now call ‘new media’.”
• Toby Miler, “Hullo Television Studies, Bye-Bye Television?” Television and New Media, vol. 1, no. 1 (2000): 5.
“Ironically, however, just at the moment when a body of literature seems somewhat ‘there’ (or ‘there’ enough to be called television studies), the whole question of TV’s future – and with that the future of television studies – is shaking things up again. For some this can be anxiety provoking, for others liberating, for still others both.”
• Lynn Spigel, “Television Studies for ‘Mature’ Audiences,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (2000): 408.
