HOW TO DO TV STUDIES 3.0

HOW TO DO TV STUDIES 3.0

“My” television is gone. It began to disappear (disintegrate? Dissolve? Die?) in the early 1980s, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy figuring out what had intrigued me for so long (and what became a career [job security? identity? burden?]).

(Horace Newcomb 2009: 117) [I]t is one of the great ironies of the project to challenge cultural

paternalism and celebrate audience diversity that by undermining one bit of the ruling class, it appeared to endorse the ambitions of another. Thus did post- Marxist academia give a progressive seal of approval to letting the multicultural market rip; and if, as the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises said, the ultimate socialist institution is the post office, then postmodernism and poststructuralism have persuaded post-

socialists to abandon playing post offices and take up playing shop. (David Edgar 2000: 73)

Nothing shocks me except reality television and house prices.

(Cliff Hardy, in Corris 2009: 105)

Remember the problems of TV Studies 1.0 and 2.0 described in Chapter 1? How might we go beyond that stage to account for new social relations and technologies? As we have seen, television has become an alembic for understanding society. In both Television Studies 1.0 and 2.0, TV is privileged because “it speaks about us” (Attallah 2003: 485). But it seems as if old moves are being repeated, rather than a dynamic new agenda appearing. This chapter suggests how to construct Television Studies 3.0, then provides three case

146 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS studies to illuminate infrastructures, texts, and themes. The first is

about policy, the second about programming, and the third about a topic. The resources described in the first case study are germane to conducting the analyses essayed in the second and third segments.

Studying TV today requires interrogating the commodification of textuality, the global exchange of cultural and communications infra- structure and content, the suburbanization of First- World politics, and the interplay between physical and visual power (Hartley 1999: 13).

A new formation, a hybrid, critical Television Studies 3.0, cannot accept the old shibboleths that separate political economy and cultural studies. It must realize that “programs [do] not fall out of the sky” – so we must understand their material conditions of production – and equally, that their meanings are far from “explicit and unambiguous” – so we must understand their malleable materiality as texts ( J. Lewis 1991: 23, 25). John D.H. Downing has criticized hegemonic tradi- tions of media research because “politics and power . . . are often missing, presumed dead” (1996: x). The absence of politics and power in the study of TV is no longer sustainable. Nor is the time- honored automatic extrapolation from US or UK research to understand the rest of the world, which dogs the GEM and the DEM, cultural impe- rialism as much as textual analysis, and political economy as well as the psy- function (Sreberny 2008: 9–10). Television texts and institu- tions are not just signs to be read; they are not just coefficients of political and economic power; and they are not just innovations. Rather, they are all these things. TV is a hybrid monster, coevally subject to textuality, power, and science – all at once, but in contin- gent ways (Latour 1993).

So comprehending television requires a more comprehensive interdisciplinarity than is on offer from TV Studies 1.0 and 2.0. If your background is in the social sciences, try moving beyond your

own experiences and methods to look at what history and textual analysis have to say. If you come from the humanities, take a peek at the law and content analysis. If you’re an ethnographer, try out uses and gratifications and effects studies. If you’re an audience researcher, see what political economy and environmental science have to say. If you generally work alone, try teamwork. If you only read scholarly and primary materials in one language, learn another and work with native speakers. If your thing is drama, try covering politics. If you like to focus on reality, how about looking at sport? If you want to