Thoughts On Television Of Birmingham School

Birmingham school put television research into a historical, social, cultural context to study, absorbed widely from range of semiotics, ideological hegemony theory to ethnographic and other theories and research methods, formed from the television symbol to the television text, from the television technology to television form, from television producers to the television audience in all aspects of a complex system of television studies. Its television concept gradually formed after the scholars of CCCS accumulated their research achievements for decades, and these research were independent of each other, with focused differently, but also they were inheritance and correlation. Therefore, according to the members of Birmingham school in the theory of television research contribution degree and effect degree, the paper put the time when they entered the CCCS as the diachronic axis, and chose Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, David Morley, John Fiske, the four scholars as case studies. Meanwhile, this paper is also concern about the theory of contact between them, and tries to find out their common. From two angles of individuality and generality, the paper tries to achieve the theoretical innovation.Raymond Williams introduced the historical and society viewpoint into television research, curbed the spreading of technological determinism. This paper cards Williams’s television view from the television history view, the effect of television, television form view, points out Williams put political analysis as the foundation, construct and develop a complete and critical consciousness of television research framework. Hall’s’"encoding/decoding" model surpassed positivism research for the television communication "sender--information-recipient" linear propagation models, at the same time, it subverted the Frankfurt school’s negative audience theory, introduced discourse, symbol, power, social relations into television research. Molly introduced the methods of ethnographic research, combined the message to the audience a semiotic analysis and sociological analysis, turned the traditional "text analysis" to "accept" the audience, reexplained the decoding process information, and reconstructed the concept of the audience, which is considered to be a new audience research starting point. Not the conclusion, but the change of methodology and research object, focus and scope, the television theory of John Fiske was placed in the macroeconomic and social background by himself, with full role as the object of study. He was known as the "master of Birmingham school television theory"As a loose academic factions, the members of Birmingham school emphasized the theory of different figures and criticized the existence of "alienation", but the realistic consciousness and critical spirit were their common from first to last through.This paper believes that text, discourse and power, ideology, the audience is the main feature of television view of Birmingham school, they inherited the Frankfurt school’s critical spirit, challenged television study of American positivism, and provided a new way of thinking for television studies on traditional and influenced it greatly. Of course, the Birmingham school academic path development limited in late-stage, which inevitably effected their television studies. Birmingham school also has certain limitation in the television text analysis, research of television audience, ethnographic research methods.