ABSTRACT
This chapter asks what kind of an object of study is television, as it passes out of the broadcast (national) and into the post-broadcast (global) era. The argument is that despite TV’s technological, industrial, organisational and formal diversity and dynamics, it can be seen as an integrated system in terms of its cultural function, where it plays a leading role in the making and distribution of modern subjectivity. The implications of this argument for how we think about modernity, knowledge, cultural groups or “demes” (especially children), and television’s relation to philosophy, are set out. The chapter concludes with a comparison of two examples of TV speculative fiction, Westworld (USA) and Humans (UK), where these themes are extended to postmodern society and post-human subjectivity, via “synths” and “hosts,” the latest successors to modernity’s slaves and classes.
