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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 appropri- ate 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 abs- tract 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 televis- ual 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 develop- ments, 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

26 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS 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 regula- tory morality of administrators of conscience and taste. A “new practice of piety” accompanies each “new communications tech- nology” (Hunter 1988: 220). Moral panics emerge, in scientistic frames that are created and populated by the denizens of commu- nication 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, dis- sonance, 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 prefer- ences of consumers in reaction to tastes and desires, TV manipu- lates 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 ties in TV Studies 1.0 between the critical- theory tradition, which calls for a resistive consciousness through artistic rather than industrial texts, and political economy, which calls for diverse ownership and control of the industry. The first trend is philosophical and aesthetic in its desire to develop modern- ism and the avant garde, the second policy- oriented and political in its focus on institutional power. But they began as one with lamen- tations for the loss of a self- critical philosophical address and the

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