ABSTRACT
Media research, for better and for worse, was founded to tell communicators whom they were talking to. In their pioneering study of the interaction of television and children, Wilbur Schramm and his associates divided television texts into two types, which they variously call cognitive and emotional, socializing and wish-fulfilling, reality and fantasy, or later, reality and entertainment. Robert Merton repeatedly reminds people that science abhors monuments and that the only true tribute is to stand on somebody's shoulders in order to get a better view. Television is capable of reaching everybody, everywhere, simultaneously and directly - total, immediate, unmediated - although it does so only very rarely. And soon, even a certain amount of interactivity will prove possible. Obtrusiveness remains a major problem, but so does representativeness. If some progress has been made in naturalness and unobtrusiveness, it is usually at the expense of representativeness.
