Television Truths.

• Author: Powers, Shawn
• Position: Book review

Television Truths. By John Hartley. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008; pp. 290. US $34.95 paper.

Split into four parts, Hartley's Television Truths analyzes television-broadly conceived-in terms of epistemology, ethics/politics, aesthetics and metaphysics. Naturally, such an ambitious endeavor is to be well received, as Hartley works not only to dispel the myth that television is somehow unworthy of our scholarly attention, but also to challenge readers and academics to consider how integral television has become to political and social stability and progress. Published on the cusp of the transition from the age of broadcasting to the age of interactivity, Television Truths provides a helpful compendium outlining how television, as a medium, has shaped culture and politics, and in so doing, provides a helpful resource as we progress into a future with more integrative, innovative and interactive media technologies. Importantly, Hartley's detailed analysis of how different media shape messages adds an additional variable shaping the meaning of messages, a factor that is critical for argument scholars to address.

The strength of Hartley's latest book is in part one where he outlines a history and trajectory of the epistemology of mediated meaning. Here, rather than focus on a single medium, Hartley outlines how knowledge has been constructed over the course of history, arguing that with technological development comes new forms of knowledge validation. For example, whereas in medieval times the primary source of knowledge, and thus power, was divine wisdom, as society modernized and developed, knowledge was constructed via experts, administrators, publishers and journalists. Today, knowledge is increasingly constituted through self-navigation and aggregation, a development that has been driven by the rise of new and increasingly mobile communication technologies. Importantly, the diffusion of responsibility for the constitution of knowledge has important consequences for the university, a topic Hartley revisits in part four, "What Can TV Be?"

Also in part one, Hartley's discussion regarding the reconceptualization of citizenship is spot on. Whereas previously citizenship was defined primarily spatially (i.e., where someone lived), new media technologies have fostered a move towards temporal citizenship, where communities are formed not based on the city they are located in but rather on mutual interests, identities and discourses, typically...