Television Studies: The Basics

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415774246
• eBook ISBN: 9781136988851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Television Studies: The Basics is a lively introduction to the study of a powerful medium. It examines the major theories and debates surrounding production and reception over the years and considers both the role and future of television.

Topics covered include:

• broadcasting history and technology
• institutions and ownership
• genre and content
• audiences

Complete with global case studies, questions for discussion, and suggestions for further reading, this is an invaluable and engaging resource for those interested in how to study television.

TELEVISION THEORY

TV STUDIES 1.0 AND 2.0

The finale of The West Wing included a quick shot of a copy of Michel Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 being taken off a shelf as the office of former president Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was packed up to make way for the new president, Matt Santos ( Jimmy Smits).

(Dana Polan 2006)

I guess too much TV can rot your brain.

(Andrew Vachss 2008)

In its relentless drive to keep current … media studies has found its objects of study seemingly dictated by Entertainment Weekly.

(Bart Beaty 2009)

Technology is the opiate of the educated public … an end to poverty … equality of opportunity … a radical increase in individual freedom … the replacement of work by leisure … permanent but harmless social revolution … the final comeuppance of Mao Tse-tung and all his ilk … the triumph of wisdom over power … the end of ideology.

(John McDermott 1969)

I was losing my students in a ferment of curriculum changes that would eventually lead to the descheduling of Latin and Greek and their replacement by cultural and media studies. My refusal to sue the university, Elaine decided, was a sign of my innate weakness, a frailty that soon extended to the marriage bed.

(J.G. Ballard 2009)

“Television is vast” – both as an institution and an object of analysis (Hilmes 2005: 113). That vastness contributes to the televisual sublime already described. It’s not surprising, then, that TV studies is characterized by major debates and differences, since its analysts “speak different languages, use different methods,” and pursue “different questions” (Hartley 1999: 18). Perhaps “the most salient feature of the study of television may be its institutional dispersal” (Attallah 2007: 339).

TV has given rise to three major topics of scholarly inquiry:

• technology, ownership, and control – its political economy;

• textuality – its content; and

• audiences – its public.

Within these categories lie three further divisions:

• approaches to technology, ownership, and control vary between neoliberal endorsements of limited regulation by the state, in the interests of protecting property and guaranteeing market entry for new competitors, and Marxist critiques of the bourgeois media for controlling the socio-political agenda;

• approaches to textuality vary between hermeneutics, which unearths the meaning of individual programs and links them to broader social formations and problems, and content analysis, which establishes patterns across significant numbers of similar texts, rather than close readings of individual ones; and

• approaches to audiences vary between social—psychological attempts to validate correlations between TV and social conduct, political—economic critiques of imported texts threatening national culture, and celebrations of spectators making their own interpretations.

These tasks in turn articulate to particular academic disciplines, which are tied to particular interests of state and capital:

• engineering, computing, public policy, and “film” schools help create and run TV production and reception via business, the military, the community, and the public service;

• communication studies focuses on socio-economic projects such as propaganda, marketing, and citizenship;

• economics theorizes and polices doctrines of scarcity, and manages over-production through overseas expansion;

• Marxism points to the impact of ownership and control and cultural imperialism on TV and consciousness; and

• cultural criticism evaluates representation, justifies protectionism, and calls for content provision.

Lest this appear to be a tendentious insider’s guide, you can visit the US National Center for Education Statistics’ Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP 2000), which categorizes mass communication/media studies as “the analysis and criticism of media institutions and media texts, how people experience and understand media content, and the roles of media in producing and transforming culture” via foci on law, policy, history, aesthetics, effects, economics, and literacy (09.0102), or the British Government’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. It says that critical media literacy is essential equipment for citizenship and “mapping the contemporary” (2002) using tools from political economy, representation, aesthetics, discourse, consumption, identity, and ideology, frequently wrapped into production training (2007). The British model provides a less positivistic and reactionary set of skills, informed by social theory and progressive politics. This is in keeping with the fact that Western-European academia, for all its shortcomings, is less stitched-in than its US equivalent to either the welfare and warfare social-science bureaucracy or the high-aesthetic privilege of the philanthropic humanities and art worlds.

Many regulatory bodies with responsibility for the medium have more restrictive ideas about how to study television, especially in the US. Reed Hundt, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Bill Clinton, argues that TV regulators must be “instructed at least rudimentarily in economics, antitrust, network operation, and administrative procedure” (Hundt and Rosston 2006: 33) – a drastically limited toolkit typical of the welfare—warfare bureaucracy/social-science nexus. What would be the impact if we supplemented or supplanted those skills by the labor theory of value, critiques of monopoly capital, content and textual analysis, ethnography, and effects research? This would loosen agencies like the FCC from a direct and necessary tie to the données of neoclassical economics, which define the public interest in narrow terms. It would jeopardize the hegemony of forms of knowledge that have no engagement with content, audiences, or producers, so certain is their lofty judgment that laissez-faire theory fits all. Right now, though, what matters is “up[-]to[-]date technical competence in law, engineering, economics, or other appropriate disciplines” (Hundt and Rosston 2006: 33). This has led to a dominant mixture of either extremely reactionary, pro-corporate cost—benefit analyses and technical specifications, or a faith in abstract empiricism, such that matters of minor import are elevated to great moment because they are amenable to statistical manipulation under controlled circumstances. The great labor historian E.P. Thompson made fun of this half a century ago with a famous essay summarizing faux research that he planned to publish in the mythic “ American Journal of Communicational Guphology” (1959: 4n. 3).

Fractured by politics, nation, discipline, theory, and method, this dispersed field of knowledge can be bifurcated as TV Studies 1.0 and TV Studies 2.0 – both of which are subject to the televisual sublime. Television Studies 1.0 derived from the spread of new media technologies over the past two centuries into the lives of urbanizing populations, and the policing questions that posed to both state and capital. What would be the effects of these developments, and how would they vary between those with a stake in maintaining society versus transforming it? By the early twentieth century, academic experts had decreed media audiences to be passive consumers, thanks to the missions of literary criticism (distinguishing the aesthetically cultivated from others) and the psy-function (distinguishing the socially competent from others). Decades of social science have emphasized audience reactions to audiovisual entertainment: where they came from, how many there were, and what they did as a consequence of being present.

When new cultural technologies emerge, young people are identified as both pioneers and victims, simultaneously endowed by manufacturers and critics with power and vulnerability – the first to know and the last to understand cheap novels during the 1900s, silent then sound film during the teens and 1920s, radio in the 1930s, comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, pop music and television from the 1950s and 1960s, satanic rock as per the 1970s and 1980s, video-cassette recorders in the 1980s, and rap music, video games, and the Internet since the 1990s. Each of these innovations has brought an expanded horizon of texts to audiences, such that they come to be defined both in market terms and via the regulatory morality of administrators of conscience and taste. A “new practice of piety” accompanies each “new communications technology” (Hunter 1988: 220). Moral panics emerge, in scientistic frames that are created and populated by the denizens of communication studies, paediatrics, psychology, and education, who largely abjure cultural and political matters in favor of experiments on TV viewers. This is the psy-function (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) at work. It is the heart of Television Studies 1.0.

Television Studies 1.0 also covers political economy, which focuses on ownership and control rather than audience response. Like the psy-function, this part of TV Studies 1.0 is frequently functionalist on its political—economy side, neglecting struggle, dissonance, and conflict in favor of a totalizing narrative in which television dominates everyday life and is all-powerful. TV is said to force people to turn away from precious artistic and social traces of authentic intersubjectivity by taking control of individual consciousness. The demand for television is dispersed, but its supply is centralized, so political economy regards it as one more industrial process subordinated to dominant economic forces within society that seek standardization of production. Far from reflecting preferences of consumers in reaction to tastes and desires, TV manipulates audiences from the economic apex of production. Coercion is mistaken for free will. The only element that might stand against this leveling sameness is said to be individual consciousness. But that consciousness has itself been customized to the requirements of the economy and making television programs.

There are significant...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the televisual sublime
• 1 Television theory: TV studies 1.0 and 2.0
• 2 Television institutions
• 3 Content
• 4 Audiences
• 5 How to do TV Studies 3.0
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index