ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly maps out the topics of study and introduces some of the critical approaches that are central to academic Television Studies today, with emphasis on the approaches used in Britain and the United States. By doing this the chapter aims to provide an overview of the kinds of questions which students of television should carry with them as they use this book. Each of the chapters in the remainder of this book focuses on a particular aspect of the study of television, picking up the concerns and ways of thinking about television that are introduced here. The discipline of Television Studies is a relatively new academic subject, and in its short history the questions that have been asked about television, and the answers which researchers have discovered, have changed in interesting ways. Television Studies, like all academic subjects, is in a continual process of development. This is partly because researchers discover new information and respond to changes in what is happening in television in the present. Television Studies also changes because, as ways of thinking about television are discussed and their strengths and weaknesses discovered, new questions and problems in understanding television are found. One of the aims of this book is to involve readers in the debates and disagreements about television that animate Television Studies.
