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.The academic study of television needs to be understood in these terms also.Here the higher reaches of the education apparatus are concerned with a (in mostways more powerful) rival.This helps us to understand why the most negative andparanoid academic representations of television shows, such as that articulated byJoshua Meyrowitz (1985), regard it as overriding all boundaries, blurring distinctions121 MEDI A AND T HE PUBL I C S PHEREbetween the public and the private, between masculinity and femininity, childhoodand adulthood, politicians and their electors.ConclusionThe sense that television is creating a culture without shape or order is, in the end,untenable because it fails to appreciate the actual ways that TV is used and enjoyed.That kind of complaint is a version of the reactive cultural criticism on the rejectionof which Raymond Williams founded British cultural studies.Nonetheless it doespoint to something important: television, and the media generally, is not a site ofauthority, standards and hierarchy.Ultimately this is because it is so interfused witheveryday life itself.To take just one further example:TV produces reality as well asrepresenting it.One way it does so is by generating celebrities who are often nowfamous not for any accomplishment but just (as they say) for being famous (see Rojek2001).These celebrities exist in a weird cultural zone: they have real existences in aworld we share with them but they are also imaginary creatures imaged on thescreen, in print and on the Web in all kinds of complex collusions and synergies.It istheir ambiguous condition of being that makes them so fascinating.Finally, their livescan be understood as real-time, lived experiments on the power of the media to shapea life as spectacle: think most of all of Michael Jackson (although of course he didbring serious talent to his fame).Or think of the Olsen twins: media figures sincethey were nine months old (when they began appearing in the prime time sitcom FullHouse ); stars of computer games and animated TV series; media moguls (executiveproducers at the age of seven of a video series that has grossed over US$500 million);brand names for a tween orientated line of clothes, cosmetics, home furnishings,books and CDs; and web site and movie stars as well.The countdown to their eigh-teenth birthday was a minor-league major media event in the USA.In living in andthrough the media network (which remains centred around TV) celebrities of thiskind acquire a symbolic function: they become metaphors of the way in whichsections of the community also live in interaction with the TV/media imaginary, notas celebrities themselves but as consumers, obsessionals, dreamers, lovers, gossips,who are in the end the masters of the celebrities whom they anoint.The old understanding of the media that it represents or comments on the worldand that it exists on a different plane than life itself has been completely undone bythe broadcast media over the past century.And, as we shall see, it has been furtherundone by the Web.In that sense Hartley s mediasphere does not really exist.Ratherthe media folds into everyday life; it transverses it; it fuses into it and deterritorialises it; itforms blocks of emotion in the real world or grounds social activities there whichappear and disappear in their own opaque rhythms.The italicised words in thissentence are borrowed from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose theoretical122 T EL EVI SI ONconcepts work exceptionally well when deployed to describe relations betweencontemporary life and the media (see Rajchman 2000 for an excellent introduction toDeleuze).It says something about how complex and vital that relation is that it helps tohave a recondite philosophical vocabulary to describe it.Further readingAng 1991; Boddy 1990; Brunsdon 1997; Ellis 1992; Hartley 1996; Jenkins 1992; Lembo 2000;Press 1991; Spigel 1992.123 4.2Popular musicTelevision is a top-down institution in that TV broadcasts are comparatively expensiveand require considerable technical expertise and its channels of dissemination are rela-tively finite and highly regulated.Nor has the move from analogue to digitaltechnologies (as yet) empowered TV viewers or radically changed the industry s busi-ness model.All this is less true of popular music, which remains, at least to somedegree, a spontaneous product of individuals (both musicians and fans) who come to itoutside the highly capitalised recording industry itself, and have poached new tech-nologies to make and listen to topics on their own terms.Music isn t just records andmarketing.That s why, for instance, although it rarely makes much sense to ask of tele-vision or even specific television genres how authentic they are, that question remainspowerful when it comes to music.Likewise it rarely makes much sense to ask of TVshows how oppositional they are.But cultural studies has consistently posed that ques-tion of popular music, partly because rock n roll has connoted rebellion from its verybeginnings.In fact cultural studies claim to a politics of resistance has been deeplyinflected by rock s rebellion.Although popular music is genuinely popular, it is also divisive, segmentingcommunities by generation, class, race, ethnicity, tastes and, if less so, gender
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