Qu’est-ce que c’est la television? Perhaps it is telling that André Bazin's volumes on the ontology of cinema have become classics of film studies, while in television studies there is no equivalent search for the specificity of the televisual at the origin of the discipline. One could mention Raymond Wiliams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) as a landmark study in which the influential concepts of flow and mobile privatization were coined, but this would ignore that the book's leading contribution is of a socio-political, rather than ontological nature: theorizing the role television played (or could play) by grounding the technology and cultural form in the society that had produced it – a position that must be understood in opposition to Marshall McLuhan's technological determinism. By emphasizing the agency of viewers, Williams paved the way for British cultural studies, which remained one of the two most popular academic traditions in the study of television until the 1990s. The other major tradition, political economy, did not concern itself much with the being of television either, but arose out of a left-wing anxiety for concentration of power in the hands of the few, contributing to our understanding of the ways in which broadcasters, media institutions and companies serve their own (class) interests with the production of mass media. Looking back, it seems as if academic attention for television has been displaced from the beginning, never focusing on the question of what the object of scrutiny defined, but always being lured away to study what appeared to be more urgent topics: the effects of mass media on society, the exploitation underlying media industries and their role in the creation of hegemonic projects; or, alternatively, the ways in which audiences appropriated TV and television shows to actively construct (social) identities.

This edited volume opens a new academic series on television. The timing of the series might raise eyebrows. It is an understatement to say that the media sector is undergoing profound technological and economic changes. Although the postwar period saw its fair share of technological change, the settlement between film, television, radio and music industries was relatively stable, or at least seems so in hindsight, as Markus Stauff and Judith Keilbach argue in this book.