Teaching the Politics of Television Culture in a “Post-television” Era

Television has changed dramatically in recent years. As the very existence of this In Focus makes clear, the shifts in television economics and technology, as well as in the medium’s social and cultural roles, have made it increasingly difficult to study or teach television as a unified object, even within a single national context. As many have noted, in the United States the disappearance of the classic network system and the program scarcity that came with it seems to have diminished television’s historical capacity to operate as the central cultural forum—or site of hegemonic negotiation—that it once was.¹ Whereas it may be possible to talk about the television of earlier eras as speaking to or struggling over such concerns as changing conceptions of gender and race, or the role of the United States in a world fraught with Cold War tensions, or the authority of the law amidst increasing crime, the vastness of contemporary TV and the fragmented experiences of its viewers can make any exploration of the medium’s social place seem unwarranted. Given this context, how might we think about television’s cultural or political role today? What is there to say about television as a cultural force, as a site for negotiations over power, when there is no one “thing” we can call television? Is it even reasonable to assume that television has a coherent social, cultural, and political influence? And if we do make such an assumption, where might we look to analyze this influence?

Such questions plague not only TV scholarship but also the ways in which we teach students to think about television. Scholars produce the works we ask our students to read, thereby setting the agenda for our classroom discussions; they shape our pedagogy in the undergraduate and graduate study of television and other media. At the graduate level in particular, trends in scholarship influence the emergent members of the field, shaping their sense of what is intellectually provocative (and marketable). The research we produce today thus augurs the future of the field, as well as the future of the media practitioners, consumers, and citizens we educate. Do questions of the cultural, the social, and the political have a place in the contemporary Television and Media Studies classroom? What might that place be, and how might we study and explore it with our students?

For television scholars such as myself, who came to the field in the 1980s and 1990s, it is nearly incomprehensible even to ask such questions. Matters of the cultural, social, and political directed the very origins of Television Studies, at least as it developed as a field of humanistic inquiry in the United States (as in the work of Horace Newcomb) and in relation to British Cultural Studies and its American manifestations (as in the work of John Fiske). In this earlier phase of the field, the study of television from a humanistic, critical, and reader-oriented perspective was an explicit intervention, an attempt to wrest television away from the world of mass communication and the more positivist, social-scientific perspective it fostered.² This first generation of US television scholars made television texts central to their analyses, but they were also concerned with “how the textuality of television is made meaningful and pleasurable by its variously situated viewers,” as well as with “television’s status as a commodity in a capitalist economy.”³ Influenced by Marxism, as well as by semiotics and ethnography, this study of television was inherently political, in that it was invested in questions of power. In the United States, television has always functioned as a vehicle for delivering audiences to advertisers, thereby serving the interests of capital, a fact that has implicated the medium in the social inequalities of capitalism more broadly. But the influence of Cultural Studies on the development of Television Studies also meant that the circulation of meanings and pleasures by those who “read” or engaged with television was also paramount. Thus the relevance of questions of power for television was not simply a matter of a determining capitalist...