Cinema Journal

Television is not a stable object. It has never been one, nor will it ever be one. As the most provocative work in Television Studies makes manifest, television functions less as a stable object than as an empty box into which we put our hopes and anxieties about modern life. While the content of that box certainly engages us, it’s the box itself that matters most: a discursive structure with permeable borders yet with material presence. Although always contentiously defined and regarded, it has also been the cultural nexus of much of the world for the past six decades. As the twenty-first century rolls on, however, it is also increasingly apparent that television is a box designed for a prior age of centralized, regimented, and unidirectional media distribution, and its concomitant subjectivities. Nonetheless, like the governments we elect, the roads we drive on, and the mass-produced foods we eat, TV is still very much part of the larger inherited environment in which we live. Regardless of how we define it, television, or more specifically concepts of television—as a technology, an industrial system, a set of aesthetic practices, an ideological apparatus, or even a “plug-in drug”—will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. Given that television will be there, in many forms, we must continue to pursue why and how it matters.

Throughout television’s history, and outside the medium itself, this task has largely been fulfilled in another prominent modern “box”: the university. There, despite continual doubts, fears, and dismissals of the medium, television has at least been regarded, quite broadly, and often only at a “safe” distance, as a phenomenon worthy of academic concern. Although it took until the 1970s, following the work of Horace Newcomb and others, for cultural and textual analysis of television to be accepted as a legitimate academic approach to the medium, and even longer for Television Studies, as a distinct field, to gain a modest footing in the humanities, TV has certainly always been “studied” in academia. Broadly speaking, Television Studies’ place in the academy, and particularly in the humanities, has now seemingly been won, if not in every college or university. But this position is far from secure. First, television’s perpetual cultural and industrial instability has extended in recent years into more radical reconfigurations, as the medium has migrated from domestic set to networked node, and as many long-standing practices such as broadcast schedules and broad national address have been challenged. Second, and more critically, higher education is itself undergoing its most significant transformations in centuries. Like television, Television Studies may be a box ill equipped for the emerging environment. [End Page 161]

Given these challenges, we need to consider TV’s place in higher education, and especially in the humanities, at three levels: the overarching philosophical question of education about television per se, the functions of television in the Media Studies curriculum, and the roles of television in the classroom and syllabus. While the fundamental question “What is television?” is of course critical in how we conceive of our scholarship, it is equally critical to consider how we teach this question. In other words, what does an “education in television” mean in the twenty-first-century context of potentially radical shifts in the expectations and functions of both television and higher education?

By now we all are, or should be, familiar with the current narrative of academic crisis. Many (perhaps most) of us have faced this issue directly, particularly in the past few years, in the form of curricular turf wars, resource allocation struggles, tenure battles, and shifting status, wage, and benefit policies. While it is tempting to treat this as the standard background noise of academia, it is critical to realize that the current wave of crisis, inflamed largely by the devastating 2008–2009 financial crash, may radically alter what we do and how we do it. The roots of this crisis lie precisely in long-standing structural issues, not only in higher education but also in the political economy more broadly, and their convulsions over the past few years have sent ripples...