EDITORIAL Hullo Television Studies, Bye-Bye Television?

I take the field of television studies to encompass production and audi-ence ethnography, policy advocacy, political economy, cultural history, and textual analysis. Television studies borrows from and contributes to media studies, mass communication, critical race theory, communication studies, media sociology, critical legal studies, queer theory, science and technology studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and Marxism. These intersections with other areas are not always easily negotiated. Within television studies itself, there are clear differences of method. But television studies ’ abiding preoccupation is to question power and subjec-tivity in terms of access to the means of communication and representation. This questioning recurs across sites, albeit with due regard to the specificity of different media and their social uptake—the occasionality of culture. Those emergent forms we currently call “new media ” evidence many of the same discourses: concerns with soap-opera audiences, or broadcast owner-ship and control, have been transferred to e-mail discussions and domain names. The intellectual genealogy of television studies is formidable. Consider the emergence of encoding/decoding from Umberto Eco’s 1965 consul-tancy for RAI (Eco 1972) and Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 critique of the “cul-tural dope ” paradigm (Garfinkel 1992). A brief glance back at the founda-tional work of television studies, and books by Raymond Williams (1962