I’m not saying the internet is the eye of the world, but it definitely allows us a peek into what the world is truly like. After 911, we lost our shelter — I was there — I was a Nurse, in charge of an ICU in NY on that day, and we waited for casualties. None came. Everywhere — on every TV was the banal repetition of the Towers, blazing, smoking, falling. The propaganda of Network coverage — “Show it until they puke! Get e’m riled up. Let’s go to war!”

This is what it appears to be in the course of how it is shown — brainwashing us into oblivion. Get the nation revved — Let those who were not there “feel our pain.” I have no problem sharing my pain with a person, it’s when the broadcasters force that pain down our throats unrelentingly. “Just in case you missed it — here it is again!”

The still photo’s that surfaced shortly after — A Jet, just meters away from striking the building — you know the impact is inevitable. There’s no surprise in it, but strangely, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Knowing what had happened and the result that came of it — it became a moment frozen in time and will be the difference between life and death for those within Tower one — and two. A moment where if you could freeze your TV, you could get everyone out of those buildings and save thousands.

As a nurse, it’s my duty to care about others. Help those in need of care, and care about them from one human to another. I hate violence, but I have no control over the world (as no one else does). It’s something we all have to cope with. Shocking images are there for a reason — to show how non-violent you are! They are there to help recognize the fear of violence within ourselves and understand how the world outside is.

In the grand scheme of things, we have been a sheltered nation. One who’s been hiding under their mother’s skirt for years. I think it’s important to show what violence does — not being violent ourselves, but as a result. It most certainly isn’t pretty, but it does make it’s point.

Sterne’s column clearly fastens on changes in television itself, and the intellectual discourses on it. In this sense, his argument for a serious rethink of the vocabulary through which we approach television is compelling, and very necessary. More importantly, it contributes to a more substantive engagement with the crucial shifts that are taking place in television and our (that is, academics) discourse on it.

Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television rightly takes to task the spurious elevation of television by those who want to justify their passion for TV series in high cultural terms. Fair enough. But this criticism, which has been ongoing for sometime, including on this platform, does very little to further scholarship about the shifts in technology, the transformations in textual strategies, and consequently, newer perspectives on how to understand television today. In other words, by magnifying and (perhaps regrettably) over-publicizing the views of those who have never had any interest in television anyway (did we ever take the Mark Lawsons of this world as serious contributors to TV Studies?), the need for serious scholarship and sustained engagement with television’s dramatic contemporary changes risks being sidelined for a slanging match between parties ranged around two very suspect terms indeed: high and low culture. It also runs the risk of being cast as a defensive reaction by those wanting to maintain a disciplinary identity and its attendant privileges when the medium the discipline is founded on is refusing to be disciplined.

Sterne’s column neatly sidesteps this, maybe once necessary (defensive) gesture of bashing suspect over-valuations of television, and focuses instead on what challenges television poses for those of us interested in the theoretical, political, social and technological dimensions of this medium. The contemporary changes in television as technology, text, institution etc. are far too important to be framed in the tired discourse of either “quality” or a critique of it.

In “The Uses of Cultural Theory”, Raymond Williams eloquently and urgently argued that close attention to the formal characteristics of a text (and for us in TV Studies, to the concurrent shifts in technology and institutional structures) is crucial if we are not to dodge the way technology, aesthetics and a medium are intertwined. Developing a critical and contemporary vocabulary for understanding changes in TV today, and substantively engaging in analyses ranging from programming strategies of broadcasters to the minutiae of textual development in programs, are crucial to how TV scholars might contribute to the study of the medium. Let the guilt-ridden aesthetes who are busy justifying their love of television prattle on. Our job, it seems, lies elsewhere, and is far more important, politically, socially and institutionally.

The issue is thus one of emphasis rather than disagreement. Rather than focus on the spurious interests of those fairly uninterested in a scholarly analysis of television anyway, engaging productively precisely in the contemporary character of the transformations of the medium might be a far more enriching experience socially and intellectually.

In Supernanny, gestures made by Frost towards the need for fathers to do their share, do often come via her oft asked question “Where’s Dad in all of this???”, flagging up the extent to which fathers are shown to absent themselves from domestic mayhem. But it often seems to me that this is a negotiation, if not almost a tacit “oh well” to an all but normalised scenario. I am not sure that individual episodes profiling lone fathers trouble the show’s structuring discourse to a huge degree, although it is interesting that the episode referred to in one of the comments above apparently profiles a widowed single father, given the ubiquity of this figure in mediations of postfeminist masculinity elsewhere in popular culture, especially Hollywood cinema (We Bought a Zoo is the example currently showing in my local cinema).

At what seemed to be the height of this cycle of corrective parenting reality shows, around 2007, I remember a chick lit novel called ‘The Manny’ being published, and I wondered if it was going to spawn some sort of ‘Larry Poppins’ type reality TV series. Postfeminist masculinity has taken some seemingly unlikely turns in the media in recent years, but I don’t think it’s gone there yet… (?)

In our recent book, Legitimating Television, Elana Levine and I consider some of the same topics you raise here. We write about people who watch TV denying that they watch TV, aspects ratios, the proliferation of new ways of watching, and Gitelman’s definition of medium. But we apply different terms and draw different conclusions. I hope a comparison of our approaches might be productive.

What you explain as the dilution of the medium we discuss as convergence. And while you put aside the issue of taste in your introductory remarks, we see it as central to television’s shifting status.

To think of TV as a diluted medium suggests that a medium may be weak or intense, and that TV in the past was stronger or more pure than it is now (you say it has lost density and gravity). Perhaps it is true that TV’s identity was more stable in the past, though its history is one of constant technological renewal — through set technologies such as color and projection, remote control devices, videotape, cable, etc. We argue that in the past decade, television has been intensifying its convergence with other media, which is a different idea from dilution. Not just in terms of technology but also in terms of experience and cultural status, television has been converging with computers, the internet, cinema, video games, and other media. We quote a Netflix executive describing television becoming part of the movie-viewing experience. When both movies and television shows flow through the same browser window, the experiential aspects of each one become less distinct. But the medium of TV isn’t necessarily diluted by this process in the popular imagination. Even though some people might not consider watching TV via Netflix “watching television,” the identity of shows like Mad Men as television persists. In some ways, TV’s identity is intensified as television’s cultural status has been upgraded, in no small part as a product of this kind of convergence. We found many examples of critics arguing that TV is better than ever before and relating this to new technologies like DVDs and DVRs — in such discourse, TV has simply “gotten better” and thus more deserving of attention and praise. (We argue that this only works by the promotion of one kind of television at the expense of another — legitimated TV, with its adult, masculine, and upscale appeal, requires the negation of its Other: TV as feminized mass culture of the past.)

The distinction between medium and format might be productive for scholarship, but in our analysis of popular, trade, scholarly, and televisual discourses we didn’t observe that television’s status as a medium was weakening or becoming less distinct — becoming something more like a cluster of formats, as you use the term. It has been shifting in the direction of cultural legitimacy, and these very techologies that you relate to dilution we see as part of the discursive shift toward television’s higher status. These technologies are seen to be giving viewers highly valued agency, and to be making for a more artistic medium visually and in other ways. The issue of taste is central because it marks the transformation of TV into a more respectable medium like cinema (or literature).

Most of all, you seem especially interested in how scholars might define television. Our concern is more with how a wider culture understands TV and its significance in everyday life. I hope we’d agree that both of these are worthwhile pursuits, and that one will inform the other.

Anyhow, thanks for writing this!