ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a short history of how television has been studied by academics and cultural commentators. There was a time, perhaps thirty years ago, when to suggest that television was an appropriate object of study for school and university students could only have been motivated by the need to protect them against it. The possibility that television might be worth studying in its own right would not seriously have been considered. The process of ‘reading’ outlined in Reading Television employed the methodology of semiotics. Semiotics offered two great advantages to television studies. A key factor in the development of television studies from the mid-1980s to the present has been the more positive assessment of the cultural role played by television as a medium, and of the ways in which it is consumed by its audiences. The growth of media and cultural studies in the Australian university system is the product of more than academic or theoretical developments.
