'Television' tag archive

Here comes the new Deadwood and the historiography of capitalism David cunningham We are swept up, are we not, by the large events and forces of our times? A.W. Merrick, Deadwood, Season 3Shown across three twelve-episode series that began in 2004, Deadwood is one of several recent television programmes to develop long, serially formatted narratives […]

( COMMENTARY Players Public service broadcasting: politics and policy Mandy Merck The media is an industry unlike any other. It informs, influences and engenders public debate. Debate and discussion over the airwaves has become a central feature of our culture and way of life. In an advanced democracy such as ours, it is important that […]

Television Fictions Quality and Truth-Telling John Mepham There is now going on a debate about the future of British television broadcasting. This debate was sparked off by issues of broadcasting policy, by specific new proposals for the financing and regulation of television broadcasting. These proposals have seemed to many to threaten the quality of television […]

Television Literacy: A Critique David Buckingham The term •television literacy’ has been increasingly widely used in recent years, both by researchers investigating the relationship between children and television and by educationalists arguingfor the formal study ofthe medium in schools. This paper discusses some of the theoretical issues which are at stake in the basic analogy […]

COMMENT Ideology and the Media: A Response Martin Barker’s examination of problems and evasions discernible in the use made of the concept of ideology by major strands of media research (Radical Philosophy 46) is timely. Media analysis in Britain seems now to be well-launched into a phase in which empirically-based studies, including studies of audience […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

practice, or realism and idealism. Different forms of it are attacked in different books. In The Clue to History Macmurray looks at the split between the theory and practice of religion; in Reason and Emotion he argues that the real distinction should be intellect and emotion, and that both are capable of rationality or irrationality. […]

Commentary Philosophy on television Ben watson Marx remarks somewhere that all true philosophy begins with the criticism of religion. If he had lived through the postwar era, he would have added: and the religion of a triumphant capitalism is television. Just as the medieval cathedral was the apotheosis of feudalism, television is the techno-exemplification of […]

Surveillance and class in Big Brother Mike wayne The television series Big Brother, for which Channel Four has contracted the rights until 2006, is in fact rather more than a television programme. It is better understood as an evolving multimedia, multiplatform technological experiment, trailblazing free terrestrial television into the brave new world of what Dan […]

Can’t reason with the pusherman. Finance is all that he understands. Curtis Mayfield, ‘Little Child Runnin’ Wild’ David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial […]