Television Truths

• Explores the pervasive, persuasive, and powerful nature of television: among the most criticized phenomena of modern life, but still the most popular pastime ever
  
• Written by John Hartley, one of television’s best known scholars
  
• Considers how television reflects and shapes contemporary life across the economic, political, social and cultural spectrum, examining its influence from historical, political and aesthetic perspectives
  
• Probes the nature of, and future for, television at a time of unprecedented change in technologies and business plans
  
• Provides an up-to-date analysis of content and cultural uses, from the television live event, to its global political influence, through to the concept of the “TV citizen”
  
• Maps out a new paradigm for understanding television, for its research and scholarship, and for the very future of the medium itself

List of Tables.

Acknowledgments.

1. Television Truths (Argumentation of TV).

Part I: Is TV True? (Epistemology of TV):.

2. The Value Chain of Meaning.

3. Public Address Systems: Time, Space, and Frequency.

4. Television and Globalization.

Part II: Is TV a Polity? (Ethics/Politics of TV):.

5. Television, Nation, and Indigenous Media.

6. A Television Republic?.

7. Reality and the Plebiscite.

Part III: Is TV Beautiful? (Aesthetics of TV):.

8. From a “Wandering Booby” to a Field of Cows: The Television Live Event.

9. Shakespeare, Big Brother, and the Taming of the Self.

10. Sync or Swim? Plebiscitary Sport and Synchronized Voting.

Part IV: What Can TV Be? (Metaphysics of TV):.

11. “Laughs and Legends” or the Furniture that Glows? Television as History.

12. Television in Knowledge Paradigms.

References.

Index