ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan characterized post-war media society as an 'electronic global village'. Changes in the structure of the television industry over the last 20 years or so, along with the arrival of other
information technologies, have confirmed the relevance of this ever-soslightly-glib label (village?). len Ang, in the introduction to her book, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (1996), remarks on these changes: 'Television itself has undergone massive postmodernization-manifested in a complex range of developments such as pluralization, diversification, commercialization, commodification, internationalization, decentralization - throwing established paradigms of how it operates in culture and society into disarray.' It may not be strictly necessary to describe these changes as 'postmodernization'; nevertheless, they are arguably homologous with changes in other spheres of the postmodern.
