Television studies

Last updated

Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass communication research, which tends to approach the topic from a social sciences perspective. Defining the field is problematic; some institutions and syllabuses do not distinguish it from media studies or classify it as a subfield of popular culture studies.

Contents

One form of television studies is roughly equivalent to the longer-standing discipline of film studies in that it is often concerned with textual analysis yet other approaches center more on the social functions of television. [1] For example, analyses of quality television, such as Cathy Come Home and Twin Peaks , have attracted the interests of researchers for their cinematic qualities. However, television studies can also incorporate the study of television viewing and how audiences make meaning from texts, which is commonly known as audience theory or reception theory.

History

Charlotte Brunsdon argues that television studies is an "aspirationally disciplinary name given to the academic study of television." Since it is a relatively new discipline, Brunsdon notes that "...many of the key television scholars are employed in departments of sociology, politics, communication arts, speech, theatre, media and film studies." She argues that television studies developed during the 1970s and 1980s "...from three major bodies of commentary on television: journalism, literary/dramatic criticism and the social sciences." Critical methods for television have been "...extrapolated from traditional literary and dramatic criticism." [2] Horace Newcomb argues that television studies scholars often need to justify their academic focus: "[T]he mere suggestion that television needs analysis itself requires supportive argument." [3]

As a result, television studies is marked by a great deal of "disciplinary hybridity." Perhaps because television scholars are approaching the subject from so many different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, there are many debates about how television should be understood and conceptualized from a political and methodological point of view. Another impact of the disciplinary hybridity is the diversity in the types of studies carried out. Early television studies included histories of television, biographies of television producers, archival research by historians, and sociological studies of the role the television set played in 1950s homes.

In television studies, television and other mass media forms are "...conceptualised within frameworks" such as "...ownership; national and international regulation of media production and distribution; professional ideologies; public opinion; [and] media audiences." As the field of television studies was being developed, it was influenced by the medium's longstanding issue of invoking "distrust, fear and contempt", as a purported cause of social ills. As well, television scholars had to prove that television was different from other "mass media", often by pointing to how television differed from radio and cinema.

In the 1970s and 1980s, television studies developed three strands of commentary:

The social science stream examined the social function and effects of television and analyzed the role that television plays in the social order and the public sphere. Some television scholars applied Marxist frameworks or the "critical sociology of the Frankfurt School". Since the 1970s, feminist television scholars have focused "... on programmes for women and those which have key female protagonists", such as Julie D'Acci's study of the police drama Cagney and Lacey and the "...now substantial literature on soap opera." Television studies in the 1990s includes "work on the definition and interpretation of the television text and the new media ethnographies of viewing" and histories of "production studies" - how television shows are developed, financed, and produced. [2]

While some predicted the end of television (or at least of the broadcast TV), some scholars claim that television "has never been so healthy and triumphant as nowadays". [4]

Television scholars

Scholars who principally work in television studies include:

See also

Museums

Journals

The following journals are either devoted to television studies or, at the least, frequently include TV-studies essays.

Related Research Articles

Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.

Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy that includes the ability to access and analyze media messages as well as create, reflect and take action, using the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world. Media literacy is not restricted to one medium and is understood as a set of competencies that are essential for work, life, and citizenship. Media literacy education is the process used to advance media literacy competencies, and it is intended to promote awareness of media influence and create an active stance towards both consuming and creating media. Media literacy education is part of the curriculum in the United States and some European Union countries, and an interdisciplinary global community of media scholars and educators engages in knowledge and scholarly and professional journals and national membership associations.

Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. A. Richards</span> English literary critic and rhetorician

Ivor Armstrong Richards CH, known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.

Semiotic democracy is a phrase first coined by John Fiske, a media studies professor, in his seminal media studies book Television Culture (1987). Fiske defined the term as the "delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to [television's] viewers." Fiske discussed how rather than being passive couch potatoes that absorbed information in an unmediated way, viewers actually gave their own meanings to the shows they watched that often differed substantially from the meaning intended by the show's producer.

David Gauntlett is a British sociologist and media theorist, and the author of several books including Making is Connecting.

Animal studies is a recently recognised field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars who engage in animal studies may be formally trained in a number of diverse fields, including art history, anthropology, biology, film studies, geography, history, psychology, literary studies, museology, philosophy, communication, and sociology. They engage with questions about notions of "animality," "animalization," or "becoming animal," to understand human-made representations of and cultural ideas about "the animal" and what it is to be human by employing various theoretical perspectives. Using these perspectives, those who engage in animal studies seek to understand both human-animal relations now and in the past as defined by our knowledge of them. Because the field is still developing, scholars and others have some freedom to define their own criteria about what issues may structure the field.

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It was first originated by Joseph Meeker as an idea called "literary ecology" in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthropology of media</span> Scientific study of the creation of mass communications and its workers

Anthropology of media is an area of study within social or cultural anthropology that emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media.

Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, and new media. He is author of three books, Genre and Television (2004), Television and American Culture (2009), and Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and co-editor of How To Watch Television.

John Fiske was a media scholar and cultural theorist who taught around the world. His primary areas of intellectual interest included cultural studies, critical analysis of popular culture, media semiotics, and television studies.

Robert Hodge is an Australian academic, author, theorist and critic. While best known as a semiotician and critical linguist, his work encompasses a wide, interdisciplinary range of fields including cultural theory, media studies, chaos theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism and many other topics both within the humanities as well as science. He is currently a professor at the University of Western Sydney.

Joseph Carroll is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is now Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Transnational cinema is a developing concept within film studies that encompasses a range of theories relating to the effects of globalization upon the cultural and economic aspects of film. It incorporates the debates and influences of postnationalism, postcolonialism, consumerism and Third cinema, amongst many other topics.

Andrea Lee Press is an American sociologist and media studies scholar. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology, and Chair of the Media Studies Department, at the University of Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horace Newcomb</span>

Horace Newcomb held the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabody Award in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia from 2001 through June 2013. Prior to this, he was a member of the Board of Jurors from 1989 to 1995.

Sense-for-sense translation is the oldest norm for translating. It fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation.

Cultural studies, also called the cultural sciences, is an interdisciplinary field or scientific branch that examines the dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.

Audience studies is a discipline and field of study, a sub-set of media studies, that investigates the processes of media audiences using different methodologies to test and develop theories of audiences' processes of reception. Much of the field borrows concepts from literary theory and research approaches from cultural studies. The primary media of study are film and television and the field intersects in many ways, including its methods used and its focus on everyday media audiences, with fan studies. Audience studies emerged as a field in the early 20th century as a form of market research, but slowly, with the rise of film studies, became popular in an academic context.

Charlotte Brunsdon is a professor of film and television studies at the University of Warwick and researcher. She was one of the principal researchers of the Nationwide Project.

References

  1. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2004). Television Studies. In Horace Newcomb (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Television[second edition]. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2299–304.
  2. 1 2 Television Studies
  3. Horace Newcomb, “The Development of Television Studies,” in A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), p. 16.
  4. Buonanno, Milly (2016). "Thematic Issue on The End of Television (Not Yet): Editor's Introduction". Media and Communication. 4 (3): 95. doi: 10.17645/mac.v4i3.661 .

Further reading