Citation

Lotz AD. Ann. Am. Acad. Polit. Soc. Sci. 2009; 625(1): 49-59.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0002716209338366

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article explores the institutional adjustments that have altered the operation of the U.S. television industry over the past twenty years. The author first chronicles those industrial norms that characterized television during its "network era" (1952 to mid-1980s) and upon which most ideas about the role of television in society are based. She then explores the ways in which adjustments in technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies, practices of looking, and textual formations have redefined the norms of television in the United States since the mid-1980s. Analysis of the shifts in the institutional and cultural functions of television reveals the articulations between the dominant industrial practices and the forms, texts, and cultural role of the medium. Such a conception of shifts of the medium allows us to understand recent changes as an evolution of this central cultural medium rather than its demise.