What Was Television?

For much of the history of global television, a combination of localizing and globalizing forces marked the medium’s geographic tendencies. Many of the worries about television’s impact around the world arose from these dual tendencies, including debates about cultural integrity, cultural imperialism, and hybridity. While television’s global-local tendencies remain important for understanding television today, the greatest legacy of television’s early years may lie in the fact that they continue to shape our thinking about the social issues surrounding television globalization today, even as television itself has found ways to move beyond the global-local dichotomy.