Page 221 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Television No other medium can match television for the volume of popular cultural
texts it produces and the sheer size of its audiences. As such, television is one of
cultural studies’ longstanding interests. Television is a resource open to virtually
everybody in modern industrialized societies and can be grasped as a significant
resource in the construction of identity projects. It is a source of popular knowledge
about the world and brings us into mediated contact with ways of life other than
our own.
While television can be valuably understood in terms of its political economy,
cultural studies’ main contribution has been through textual analysis and audience
research. Cultural studies writers have sought to study television as a socially and
culturally informed activity that is centrally concerned with meaning so that the
main focus of interest has been on the interplay between texts and audiences. Here
texts are understood to be polysemic, that is, they are carriers of multiple meanings
only some of which are taken up by audiences. Consequently, differently
constituted audiences will work with different textual meanings. Audiences are
understood to be active creators of meaning in relation to texts and do so on the
basis of previously acquired cultural competencies forged in the context of language
and social relationships.
The founding work on television within cultural studies during the late 1970s
and early 1980s was concerned with the production and reproduction of ideology
in the context of a hegemonic model of cultural power. Here ideology is bound up
with the broader role of television in cultural reproduction. However, the generation
of ideology was not seen as an outcome of proprietorial manipulation and
conspiracy but of the routine attitudes and working practices of television staff.
There had been a tendency to understand the reproduction of ideology in audiences
as a passive process of ‘hailing’ or injection in the manner of a hypodermic needle.
However, the development of the ‘active audience’ paradigm during the 1980s
demonstrated that audiences were creators of meaning not simply passive dopes.
The notion of the active audience was then linked to the idea of ideological
resistance. However, the fact that audiences/consumers are always active does not
guarantee a challenge to the contemporary social order since activity is required to
take up world-views or ‘ideology’ as well as to resist it.
Today cultural studies has a concern with the globalization of television and its
role in the creation of a global electronic culture whereby cultural artefacts and
meanings from different historical periods and geographical places can mix together
and be juxtaposed to constitute a jumbled-up flow of images and ideas. Here
television contributes to the networks of meaning in which people are involved that

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