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625 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2009)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0625 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION The End of Television? By ELIHU KATZ For the past few years, a group of experi- enced media researchers has come together to consider the proposition that the medium of television is approaching its demise and, there- fore, that the time has come for looking back to assess its impact and to pronounce its eulogies. This is a report on the progress we have made so far. It divides into two parts. Part One ques- tions the proposition itself. Part Two supplies some (questionable) answers. Part One: Querying the Proposition If you will forgive this fundamentalism, let me begin by deconstructing our proposition, which is an attempt to delineate what our group has had to cope with. Let's ask first what televi- sion is, or was. Second, let's make sure that it's really ending. Third, we should ask where to look for its impact, or, in other words, what hypotheses there are to guide us in our search for its major effects. And finally, how should we go about verifying those effects? What, then, is television? The abstract answer is that, like any other medium, it is (1) a techno- logical apparatus (2) embedded in a social insti- tution consisting of rules, roles, and organizations in an environment of other social institutions Elihu Katz is trustee professor of communication at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania and professor emeriu s of sociology and communication at the Hebrew Uniersity of Jerusalem. Recent books include The Export of Meaning; Cross Cultural Readings of Dallas (with Tamar Liebes, Oxford University Press 1990) and Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (with Daniel Dayan, Harvard University Press 1992). He studied with Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University and began his career at the University of Chicago. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Ghent, Montreal, Paris, Haifa, and Rome. NOTE: I wish to thank Anne-Katrin Arnold for edito- rial assistance. DOI: 10.1177/0002716209337796 ANNALS, AAPSS, 625, September 2009 6

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