Cinema Journal

This In Focus, on the current state of television and new media studies, was inspired by two recent landmarks in the history of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The first was the second anniversary of the decision by the membership to change the organization's name to affirm its support for scholarship in radio, television, and digital media. The change marked the culmination of a long campaign among television scholars and others within SCMS to recognize its members' expanded intellectual terrain. Despite the name change, however, the organization's official publication, Cinema Journal, still receives relatively few manuscript submissions devoted to nonfilm topics. While there are probably many reasons for the low proportion of television—and new media-related submissions (some beyond the journal's control), the editors hoped that devoting an In Focus to television and new media would underscore the journal's commitment to providing a venue for the best emerging scholarship in the field.

The second occasion for this In Focus section was the success of the 2005 SCMS conference, held at the University of London's Institute of Education. In addition to being the first SCMS conference convened outside North America, a record number of panels and papers addressed nonfilm topics. Furthermore, the London venue, which helped attract an unprecedented number of European scholars to the conference, also reinforced the international nature of television studies, old and new.

As television studies emerged out of the 1980s cross-Atlantic confluence of film studies, political economy, feminism, and cultural studies, among the important venues for new scholarship were the four international television studies conferences organized between 1984 and 1991 by the British Film Institute and the University of London's Institute of Education. As Lynn Spigel notes in her essay here, that those conferences and the 2005 SCMS conference were held at the same venue prompted reflection on the past two decades of television studies and on the future of the field.

It was in this context of introspection that Cinema Journal invited six senior scholars in the field of television studies to consider the current state of and prospects for television and new media studies. A handful of key questions framed their reflections: What are the proper aims and methods of television studies? What are its debts to film studies and to other humanities and social science disciplines? How should television studies relate to the emerging fields of visual studies and new media studies? How might current academic and scholarly institutions be reconfigured to support TV studies? Finally, how might the work of television scholars be brought to wider public debates over media policy, and how might such debates inform the research of media scholars? As more than one of our contributors note, [End Page 79] these questions are unusually urgent as television itself undergoes fundamental technological and institutional changes around the world.

As both Toby Miller and Lynn Spigel posit, speculation about the future of television has been a perennial theme. Such speculation reveals more about the anxieties and hopes of those offering predictions than of the imagined media future conjured up. Inviting television scholars to speculate about the future of television studies also provides a collective snapshot of a young discipline at a moment when, despite its record of substantial scholarly accomplishments, it faces fundamental questions about its proper objects and methods, and about its place in the academic institutions of education, research, and publishing.

The perennial challenges of defining the texts and methods of television studies are made more urgent in the current context of industry consolidation and technological convergence. At the same time, the current (and ubiquitous) calls for scholarly interdisciplinarity beg fundamental questions about the nature of television studies research and whether interdisciplinarity should be pursued on the level of individual articles or monographs, academic departments, scholarly organizations, or journals. As scholars continue to sort out the implications of the current forces of globalization, corporate consolidation, and textual hybridity, the tools and level of analysis appropriate to these new objects of study remain highly contested.

As the essays in In Focus testify, the past and prospective fortunes of television...