ABSTRACT
Since television became a popular social form there has been widespread discussion of its effects. The most significant feature of this discussion has been the isolation of the medium. Especially in advanced industrial societies the near-universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause- and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. What is significant is not the reliability of any of these particular identifications; as will be seen, there are very few such effects which come near to satisfying the criteria of scientific proof or even of general probability. What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialised to an 122isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause.
