Between Media and the Public: A Theory of Television Culture

Author: Chen Long
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Features: The emergence of cultural studies in the political field is closely related to the rise of the British New Left. In November 1956, Soviet tanks entered Hungary to suppress the Hungarian Revolution; soon after, Britain and France invaded the Suez Canal Zone. These two significant historical events clearly demonstrated that both capitalist imperialism and Stalinism were equally violent and aggressive in their existence. After the Hungarian Revolution, British Communist historians such as E.P. Thompson and John Saville began to doubt Stalinism, recognizing the dangers of blindly adhering to its doctrines. Another group of independent socialists outside the Communist Party line, represented by R. Samuel and S. Hall, mostly came from the Third World, so they maintained a clear critical stance toward colonialism and Stalinism. After the 1956 historical events, they expressed a desire to unite with left-wing scholars who had left the Communist Party. In 1961, the New Reasoner, co-founded by Thompson and others, merged with the Universities and Left Review, operated by Hall and others, to establish the New Left Review, which has been in circulation for over 40 years. The New Left was concerned with a wide range of issues, such as the important structural and historical problems gradually facing British society: the characteristics of late capitalism; economic and political colonialism: new forms of imperialism; the role of culture and ideology in various power relationships, and so on. The emergence of cultural studies was also a response to objective social conditions, representing a comprehensive reflection by intellectuals on post-World War II British society. Cultural studies were closely tied to the realities of British society from the outset, and it can be said that they represented intellectuals' engagement with the cultural and political aspects of society. Unlike previous cultural movements in history, the cultural studies movement of the 1950s did not emerge as an independent discipline but quickly became an academic trend and rapidly moved toward institutionalization. In 1964, the "Center for Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS)" was established at the University of Birmingham. Subsequently, the social cultural studies school also gained prominence. In its early stages, cultural studies emerged through debate. Scholars such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson, with their socialist humanism, directly challenged the economistic reductionism of Marxism, emphasizing the importance of creative agents and the decisive force of cultural production. Although cultural studies appeared in an academic form, it opposed the elitist and aristocratic attitudes of traditional academia in literary and historical studies, as well as the practice of looking down from above and excluding working-class culture. Early cultural studies focused on the concrete life experiences of ordinary people and cultural products as their main research areas. One important feature of mass media is its wide audience and broad distribution, and watching television has become part of people's daily lives.