ABSTRACT
Closer to home, television, as the dominant medium of the period, has a unique relation to cultural studies which, it’s clear, has been formed around its encounter with TV. The discipline’s turn to populism and devaluation of high culture; its
emphasis on cultural reception as a life practice rather than on interpretation or production; its sense of cultural consumers as segmented, all owe much to its contiguity to television and to a TV-centred understanding of the ‘media’ (a word that, revealingly, only came into common usage at the end of the sixties). Of course, in being shaped by TV, cultural studies is by no means unique: it is just about impossible to imagine contemporary party politics, sport, music, film, and indeed consumer culture generally outside of their complex interactions with the box .
