ABSTRACT
The publication of a large-format undergraduate textbook is a sure sign that a discipline or field of study has developed, if not an orthodoxy, then at least a body of facts and relatively uncontroversial research approaches. These can be listed as a potential table of contents which publishers translate into a formula of student readers multiplied by the number of relevant university courses, to produce a (new) market. The resulting textbook (maligned and relied upon in equal measure) is worrying, if only because textbooks, in effect, predetermine the structure of the courses for which they are intended. Yet they can be a very useful resource. And undergraduates like useful resources! Teachers were once students, and were probably themselves subjected to many similarly heavy textbooks in which contestable concepts were hidden behind factual generalizations, lists and diagrams. So it was with trepidation that I approached The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. I feared empiricist orthodoxy; I envisaged objective tests based on such an imposingly comprehensive resource. Here was the field mapped out: the industry(ies), the texts, the audiences, each with its own unanswerable closure, each implicitly bounded by a little box, with the ambiguous arrow of causality or interaction linking it to the other boxed-in members of the trinity. Although these fears proved not to be entirely justified, the phenomenon of the ‘textbook’ remained problematic after I’d digested its 414 pages. In particular, the implicit (and occasionally explicit) nationalistic and functionalist assumptions which underpin some, at least, of the authors’ ‘norms’, seem quite problematic. I’ll return to these concerns later in this review, because they seem to underlie much of the book’s ostensibly descriptive overviews of the field.
