Abstract
This ‘Provocation’ explores potential barriers to access in Television Studies in the UK. I consider the rising costs of studying television, and the ways in which this might impact upon different groups in higher education. I propose that unacknowledged pressure may be placed upon scholars and students already experiencing precarity and that, in turn, this has the potential to prevent or discourage engagement in Television Studies. Relatedly, I ask whether a complex financial burden of studying television has implications for the intellectual coherence of the discipline, leading to fragmentation.
Keywords
In what follows, I want to look at some potential barriers to access in Television Studies in the United Kingdom, and to encourage the academic community to speak about those barriers more openly and more frequently. These straightforward aims are motivated in at least two ways. First, my own sense of certain restrictions within academic study, which has only grown as those restrictions seem – from my perspective at least – to have become more acute over time. Second, the occasion of Critical Studies in Television (hereafter CST) reaching its twentieth anniversary, which provides an opportunity to concentrate upon a particular timeframe and to reflect upon some changes since the journal’s launch (and, indeed, some changes within the journal itself). I am focussing this discussion upon the rising costs of studying television, the ways in which this might impact upon different groups in higher education from undergraduates to professionals, and any repercussions for the health of Television Studies as a discipline. My suspicion is that, whilst costs are experienced by almost everyone engaged in the study of television at every level and to different degrees, they are rarely talked about and, consequently, may be endured silently. The risk, I would suggest, is that unacknowledged pressure may be placed upon scholars and students already experiencing precarity and that, in turn, this has the potential to prevent or discourage engagement in Television Studies. Relatedly, I ask whether a complex financial burden of studying television has implications for the intellectual coherence of the discipline (and, by extension, journals dedicated to the subject), leading to fragmentation.
My discussion is centred upon the United Kingdom context because that is where I live and work, but I suspect some of these questions have relevance beyond those territories. This national restriction extends to the use of quoted statistics within this article although, again, I am aware that certain pressures identified and described in the following paragraphs are experienced equivalently or even more acutely in other countries. As my writing and research was conducted between 2024 and 2025, it is inevitable that many figures will have since been revised and updated. Therefore, whilst I hope that the raising of certain issues remains relevant, more accurate indications of the conditions described will certainly become available.
It should be noted from the outset that studying television has never been straightforward, let alone easy. Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley’s, 1999 book The Nationwide Television Studies brings together two earlier works, Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’ (1978) and The Nationwide Audience (1980). In an introduction to the new publication, the authors reflect not only upon the historical contexts of the original works but also the conditions in which they captured and processed onscreen material from Nationwide (BBC, 1969–1983) for their 1978 book: The research for ETN [Everyday Television: Nationwide] was done before domestic video recorders were widely available. At CCCS [Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies], we had one reel-to-reel machine. The videocassette was as yet unknown. There was thus a significant problem of how to construct a corpus which included significant Nationwide programmes to enable us to make any general statements about the programme. Now, in 1997, our solution seems a story from pre-history, but it is worth recalling, precisely for that purpose…In 1975, we took it in turns to go round to each other’s houses every night to watch the programme together. While watching, we made a sound tape and took notes about visuals. While the 19/5/76 programme which features in ETN was analysed from videotape, all the rest of the programmes discussed were watched and recorded in this literal, if very sociable, way. (Brunsdon and Morley, 1999: 4)
If this account seemed like a ‘story from pre-history’ in 1997, any such perception has surely entrenched further since then, given the quickstep march of audiovisual technology (a concern this article will return to in due course). Elsewhere, Brunsdon and Morley justifiably describe their efforts as early contributions to what would become Television Studies but acknowledge that the discipline’s subsequent growth would be ‘unimaginable’ without the presence of the domestic video recorder (Brunsdon and Morley, 1999: 4). Conducting their research before the widespread adoption of that technology, the authors were clearly obliged to improvise more inventive and laborious methods, and we might be struck by their dedication to the accurate-as-can-be recording of screen detail pre-video cassette. Indeed, Everyday Television: Nationwide ‘spoke to a then-burgeoning debate about the significance of textual analysis’ circulating among many of the British Film Institute’s education and research initiatives in the UK at the time (Brunsdon and Morley, 1999: 2). The determination of Television Studies pioneers to make textual analysis an integral component shaped the discipline profoundly but, as the above account illustrates, realising this ambition required significant practical effort. It recalls the endeavours of groups like the Movie critics who, a decade previous, had scoured multiple cinema listings to search out repeat screenings of films they hoped to write about (Gibbs, 2019: 40). It seems reasonable to propose, therefore, that the Nationwide project was driven in part by a comparable if not equivalently motivated dedication to textual accuracy. Indeed, Brunsdon and Morley express frustration that subsequent research questions emerged that were not considered when the sound recording and note-taking sessions took place, such as whether outside broadcasts were always conducted by male reporters whilst their female colleague remained in the studio (Brunsdon and Morley, 1999: 4). The existence and, indeed, acknowledgement of such minor lacunas might emphasise the underlying diligence of the textual analysis conducted through methods that, in turn, had to be devised by the researchers. However improvisatory, this pioneering work helped to position the onscreen text as a central facet within the still-nascent field of Television Studies.
The ‘sociable’ aspect of Brunsdon and Morley’s research methods would later be reflected in the mass compiling of an unofficial television history archive through domestic video recording in the following decades (Morley, 1986; Gray, 1992; Gauntlett and Hill, 1999: 141–72). Whilst the institutional development of Television Studies certainly relied on that technology, living room communities also captured and – crucially – retained material that might otherwise have been lost. The evidence of that archiving can be seen and accessed now through websites like YouTube, as users upload footage spanning generations of TV viewing. These recordings have the potential to disrupt the more official commemorations of television that can sometimes circulate within industry-generated narratives. Whilst researching awkward goal celebrations in televised football matches, for instance, an online search brought me to a domestic recording of the 1984 ITV broadcast of John Barnes’ famous strike against Brazil. In this original broadcast, however, the coverage of the match begins haphazardly at half-time, the goal has been missed without replay and, at one point, the stadium feed is overlaid accidentally in the vision mix with the live feed from the Brazilian broadcaster. Awkward minutes pass onscreen as the pundits attempt to reflect on a goal that nobody has even seen until, finally, it is cued up. The sequence, recorded in analogue and reproduced years later in digital, has the potential to reflect the more spontaneous and even chaotic qualities of live television and, furthermore, evoke the moment-by-moment experience of ordinary domestic viewing. Like much of videotaped television now reappearing online, its survival through the decades feels special when so much else has been lost; erased to make room or discarded when technology moves on.
This widespread but fragmented preservation of television on videotape emphasises the medium’s characteristic ephemerality.
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When CST launched, television had also become a commercial object, sold as VHS and then DVD boxsets. Writing in 2006, Derek Kompare notes that: ‘Media is increasingly experienced not as fleeting moments but as consumer commodities and physical objects in domestic spaces’ (Kompare, 2006: 353). His account makes plain the transactional nature inherent within this kind of access and alludes to the degree of selection at work over what kind of television would be chosen for mainstream purchase. At the same time, the UK was experiencing a dramatic expansion in terrestrial, satellite and cable channels as part of the ‘digital switchover’ from analogue (Iosifidis, 2005, 2006) whilst tapeless smart box recorders provided greater storage capacity and user convenience in comparison to home video technology. The first issue of CST makes direct reference to this extending landscape and, in an article focussed upon history and historiography, Stephen Lacey reflects upon the potential for research into television drama: The current interest in the history of drama comes at a time when programmes from television’s rich and cacophonous past are available as never before. It is now possible to buy some of the major drama series of the last thirty-years via the Internet and on any High Street in both video and DVD formats…Enthusiasts, however, do not have to dig into their pockets to purchase drama from the past, since on any given day there is a plethora of it on one of many channels, should they have access to Freeview, satellite or cable television. (Lacey, 2006: 7–8)
Not only does Lacey’s description accurately convey the range of access available at this mid-decade point, but he also implicitly references the relative lack of such options in the very recent past, perhaps looking back in the direction of the era described by Brunsdon and Morley with his phrase ‘as never before’. Importantly, Lacey also emphasises the degree to which the expansion in television formats was providing a form of response to those years of scarcity by making ‘some of the major drama series of the last 30-years’ available to revisit and own, whereas previously they may have been experienced only fleetingly, if at all.
As Lacey reflects upon the growth of access to television content, other articles in the first issue of CST attend to the centrality of the text in scholarly debate. Jonathan Bignell points out that this can be the case even in work that ostensibly possesses a wider focus: ‘Books that have an overarching critical and historical thesis about television are in fact substantially based in arguments about programmes, and necessarily so inasmuch as they rely on robust evidence-based study’ (Bignell, 2006: 32). Elsewhere, Glen Creeber makes a related point as he observes a renewed attention to onscreen material within the discipline: My personal feeling is that textual analysis in television studies is currently undergoing a resurgence. Initially wounded by the criticisms against it, textual researchers now seem to have re-examined its methods and procedures, and are gradually helping it to regain some of its pride and integrity. By accepting its limitations and becoming less prescriptive, they have introduced a self-reflexivity and transparency that all healthy methodologies must have if they are to gain critical respect. (Creeber, 2006: 83)
It is worth noting that Creeber’s assessment follows his detailed discussion of previous tensions between semiotic and audience-centred research methods (with textual analysis essentially represented by the former in his account). Though any endorsement of textual analysis is qualified in his article – indeed, it must learn from its ‘past mistakes’ (Creeber, 2006: 85) – we can connect Creeber’s sense of a ‘resurgence’ with Bignell’s contention that attending to television texts essentially constitutes ‘robust, evidence-based study’. Going further still, we can place both perspectives within the context of Lacey’s description of television’s new availability and speculate that, when CST launched, any desire to engage meaningfully with television texts was supported by certain commercial and industrial contexts. This notion is endorsed by the fact that virtually all examples of television shows given in that first issue are from terrestrial broadcasts.
There are variations and flexibility within the charges. Where multiple price points are listed, these represent the different packaged tiers available from the respective provider. ITVX and Channel 4 are available within the UK license fee, but both offer subscription models providing increased content and no adverts. It should also be noted that many of the companies listed offer trial periods and temporarily lower priced subscription deals, whilst savings can be found within some subscription packages (Sky including Netflix access, for instance). Nonetheless, the cost of accessing television content has clearly risen in the 20 years since CST’s launch and, even though the figures listed may be crude, seeking out every show mentioned in the 2024 issue could cost a UK reader between £684.78 and £1344.68 per year. To put this into some context, the average monthly housing rent stood at £1339 in May 2025 (Office for National Statistics, 2025a).
The rising cost of accessing television content has coincided with a series of industrial and economic trends that have impacted adversely upon various groups within the scholarly community. Beginning with professional academic employment in 2025: 23 UK Higher Education Institutions have announced a total of 4571 anticipated redundancies (THES, 2025) 3 ; staff at 41 UK HEIs face job cuts and attacks on working conditions (UCU, 2025); 21% of full-time and 44% of part-time academic staff are employed on fixed-term contracts (HESA, 2025); and 38% of part-time academic staff are employed on hourly-paid contracts (HESA, 2025). 4 Statistics of this kind only emphasise the degree to which, by 2025, significant numbers of professional academics were experiencing both precarity and financial hardship in the workplace. They reflect that job insecurity has manifested in at least two ways: the dramatic loss of established job roles across the sector and the increasing widespread practice of employing qualified staff on short-term contracts.
Academic staff in UK HEIs can often include postgraduate researchers and, subsequently, this group is also vulnerable to the employment trends described above. However, it is also the case that the funding of postgraduate study in the UK has changed in the 20 years since CST’s launch and the result has been an overall reduction in financial support and a pronounced narrowing of available options for student researchers. For example, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (hereafter AHRC) has featured as a prominent source of potential funding for postgraduate research in Television Studies and its related fields. In 2005, the AHRC funded 632 UK-based doctoral students and 858 master’s students (AHRC, 2006). That rate of funding has not been sustained in the years since and, in 2013, the AHRC effectively stopped funding master’s study entirely (Docherty, 2013). Whilst doctoral funding has survived in different forms since 2005, it has been subject to reductions through restructuring and, in 2023, the AHRC announced that the number of available scholarships would be cut again from 425 to 300 (Grove, 2023). It is also worth noting that even recipients of research awards may face financial difficulty. Analysis conducted within a 2020 report from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) found that, in the 2019/20 academic year, PhD students receiving the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) minimum stipend would be paid below the National Minimum Wage by £1.55 (if aged 21–24) or £2.07 (if 25 and over) per hour (Cornell, 2020: 19–20). 5
A further shift has also occurred at undergraduate level in the UK, with students experiencing significant increases in the costs associated with a university degree. Whilst the introduction of and increase in tuition fees has added a substantial financial burden to studying, other cost of living rises also create acute pressures. For example, a 2023 study conducted by Unipol and HEPI found that, in 10 key university cities, average rents for student rooms increased by 14.6% between 2021/22 and 2023/24 (Unipol/HEPI, 2023: 9). The study places these findings within the context of the student maintenance loan, which is ‘designed to form the backbone of students’ living costs’: In 2023/24, on the basis of the Government forecast for England, the average maintenance loan expected to be taken up by full-time students is £7,590.
This focus upon the rent-to-loan ratio in England provides a relevant contributary factor to a substantial growth in student debt that occurred during the first 20 years of CST’s publication. In the 2004/05 academic year, students in English HEIs graduated with an average student loan debt of £9350, whereas in the 2024/25 academic year, they graduated with an average of £53,010 (Statista, 2025).
Relaying these kinds of statistics can only give a sense of a more complex picture and necessarily falls short of accounting properly for important causations and correlations within the data. Equally, there are many additional factors that illustrate a worsening overall picture. Real terms pay, for instance, increased by only £38 between 2005 and 2025, having previously risen by £64 between 2000 and 2005 (Office for National Statistics, 2025b), whilst adjusted for inflation, goods and services costing £1 in 2005 would cost £1.78 in 2025 (Bank of England, 2025). Far more data would need to be added to gain a proper sense of long-term economic conditions and the scale of the UK’s cost of living crisis in 2025. Nevertheless, the figures I’ve mentioned go some way to outlining the levels of hardship experienced by three groups that might reasonably be viewed as CST’s main readership, to varying degrees: professional academics, postgraduate researchers and undergraduate students. Furthermore, they provide an indication of the extent to which financial precarity has increased for all these groups during the first 20 years of CST’s publication, whilst the cost of accessing television content has likewise increased in that same period. If engaging with the content covered by the journal now carries a possible cost of between £684.78 and £1344.68 in annual TV subscription charges, that financial outlay has the potential to become a relatively acute pressure for individuals affected by some of the statistical trends described. How can someone on a fixed-term lecturing contract accommodate that cost if they cannot predict whether they will even be employed in the future, let alone whether they can afford it on their hourly-paid contract? How can a full-time PhD researcher, even after securing an increasingly scarce postgraduate scholarship, cover that expense within an income that falls below the national minimum wage? And how can an undergraduate student, whose maintenance loan covers only their basic rent, keep up?
Inevitably, solutions and workarounds exist to emolliate these difficulties, and it would be naïve to assume that these did not include options that are both legal and illegal. (When I presented a version of this paper at the CST conference in 2025, some attendees kindly shared accounts of the institutional access to television content they had secured for their students, illustrating the role universities can play in providing legal access to copyright material. Meanwhile, other attendees spoke in more hushed tones of the ease with which their students could find apparently any form of content via illegal filesharing sites and – quieter still – some confessed to their own use of such methods.) However, the evolving circumstances might allow us to revisit and perhaps complicate some of those assertions made in the first issue of CST, when the landscape looked quite different. Lacey’s description of television being ‘available as never before’ carries with it qualifications that did not exist at the time: there certainly is availability in 2025 but it comes at a cost unexperienced 20 years ago. As a consequence, whilst availability may have continued to increase with more and more content providers entering the market, accessibility has not remained constant and, indeed, is now very likely to vary from reader to reader.
This issue of accessibility has relevance to Bignell’s characterisation, offered within the first issue of CST, of television research as ‘robust evidence-based study’ when it is focussed upon content. Whilst the polemic thrust of Bignell’s argument remains, we are entitled to consider how robust the evidence provided by accounts of television content is within CST (or any Television Studies journal) if limits are placed upon the ability of readers to check the accuracy, legitimacy and validity of critical claims about shows. If an article references many different examples from a variety of streaming platforms, is a reader able to take out several subscriptions in order to qualify the author’s arguments? The same, presumably, can be asked of peer reviewers or editorial board members. Perhaps such issues are a natural consequence for diverse arts and humanities research and should not trouble us too much. However, the rapid expansion in commercial television providers does make it distinct among other art forms, with major texts attracting scholarly interest whilst sitting behind commercial paywalls. (Whereas the schedules of ‘traditional’ UK broadcasters like the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5 have remained a comparatively viable access point for a relatively wide range of film content in the same period.)
This brings us to Glenn Creeber’s assertion in the first issue of CST that textual analysis was at that time experiencing a resurgence as researchers re-examined methods and procedures, to the extent that it was regaining some of its ‘pride and integrity’. We might consider how the integrity of textual analysis – or text-based work in general – is affected when access to television is reduced or distributed unevenly across an academic community. Although the work itself may be conducted with precision and care, those qualities are vulnerable to compromise if the intended readers have no experience of the text discussed and, furthermore, do not necessarily possess the means to gain that experience. At that point, the intellectual coherence and rigour of the discipline may be undermined through the absence of a shared common focus. The involvement of readers and peer reviewers becomes important again here, as both groups are positioned to effectively check the validity of the textual work being undertaken. Ideally, this would constitute an inclusive community of engaged scholars, but if an ability to acquire knowledge is potentially dependent upon financial cost, the composition of that community can lack equality and is likely to become fragmented. Therefore, if the ‘resurgence’ in textual analysis of television has indeed endured in the 20 years since Creeber sensed it and, furthermore, is set to continue, its potential as a unifying scholarly practice – available to all on the same terms, should they choose it – may possess limitations.
If these are the issues, are there solutions to be found? It could be that Television Studies sheds its dedication to the television ‘text’ entirely, shifting scholarly attention solely towards the extra-textual. Certainly, debates beyond the text are integral to the discipline. Charlotte Brunsdon, with a characteristic ability to interpret trends even as they are taking place, 6 noted the change in focus between the 1984 and 1986 International Television Studies Conference – ‘from text to audience’ – as a swell of interest in the latter began to form ‘a whole new body of research into how people view television’ (Brunsdon, 1997: 117–119). It seems uncontroversial to suggest that seminal work on production and industry cultures have provided an equivalently rich seam for Television Studies. And yet, we might equally regard such interventions as a deepening enrichment of the discipline, rather than a process of any interest permanently displacing another. (And, indeed, Brunsdon’s point concerned the waning of ‘redemptive reading’ as a particular form of textual analysis that itself had a specific social, political and historical context, rather than textual analysis as a whole.) Certainly, attention to screen content has continued to be a core element of Television Studies within the mix of approaches. For instance, in a recent special issue of CST on the British show EastEnders (BBC, 1986), editor Rebecca Williams provides an apt subtitle for her introduction: ‘Production, text and audiences’ (Williams, 2025). Her choice of words offers not only a pragmatic capturing of the topics covered by her contributors for the particular issue but also a wider encapsulation of key interacting concerns within the discipline more broadly. I would add that discussing television content in detail can maintain a vital emphasis upon the element that motivates industry efforts and catalyses audience responses in the first place, thus drawing together professional and non-professional investments. Whilst many find it contentious to discuss television as ‘art’, a critical awareness of screen content does help to differentiate the work of Television Studies from reports about the manufacture of building supplies or consumer surveys of washing machine performance.
If a move away from the television text is deemed neither practical nor desirable, we might turn to the question of individual recognition and responsibility. If the cost of accessing content is creating barriers and inequalities within Television Studies, researchers are both potential victims of and contributors to that scenario. Self-examination might then provide a way forward, whereby we consider more carefully what kinds of texts we choose and how our intended readership might experience them. This sounds like a worthy ethical standpoint, and it is possible that television scholars are engaged in these kinds of choices to different degrees already. However, it is equally apparent that such intentions carry subsequent impacts upon academic freedom. If there is an ambition for Television Studies to strengthen and flourish into the future, that project is not advanced by curtailing the range of texts its community feels able to engage with. The boundaries for television research should be set according to intellectual imperatives rather than moral misgivings, and it would seem especially counterproductive to respond to issues of limited access by limiting the scope of academic enquiry commensurately.
This is not to say that individual researchers should not engage with the issues of access that I’ve described. Indeed, I hope that they do. However, it may be more productive and appropriate for these discussions to take place within the larger groups, organisations, institutions and societies that host, support and deploy academic work. This may represent a continuation of existing efforts. Some HEIs, for instance, have developed policies in response to the need for commercial material to be used for educational purposes, and these approaches often intersect with the work of bodies such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Learning on Screen around issues of fair use. It is not inconceivable that equivalent thought might be dedicated to the issue of television subscription costs and their impacts upon the wider academic community (spanning both professional academics and students). Action in these contexts offers not only more opportunity for co-ordinated responses to be formulated but also has the potential to engage organisations, and primarily HEIs, with questions of disciplinary value. Such questions may include what level of financial commitment is currently required from television researchers simply to engage with their subject, how that level corresponds with those set by other disciplines, and whether the study of television is resourced adequately as an intellectual pursuit. Any strategy for Television Studies must reflect the status of the medium in the twenty-first century and, consequently, there is merit in sharing these kinds of questions with organisations bearing responsibility for strategic planning. Any replies will at least tell us where we stand.
In suggesting that certain financial burdens may be restricting access to content for members of the Television Studies community, that this represents a change since CST first launched, and that it has repercussions for the discipline, I appreciate that I am highlighting one small area within a wider network of potential inequalities. Other costs such as book purchases and journal subscriptions can impact most heavily upon those with the least institutional support, for instance, when the publishing model relies upon universities paying to provide access for their staff. Although many university libraries are committed to sharing resources with their local communities, and schemes exist that offer use of facilities to members of public, the system can certainly be weighed against those outside of academic employment or study. Given the levels of precarity and hardship that current statistics point to, this seems bound to include a growing number of skilled researchers.
Equally, television subscription costs may contribute to a wider burden described already by scholars within the discipline. In 2015, at the mid-point of CST’s first 20 years, a series of blogs were published on its companion website, CST Online. These blogs detailed the ways in which an academic career in Television Studies – and academia more broadly – can have significant ill-effects on health and wellbeing. In January of that year, Catherine Johnson identified how arts and humanities professionals are often jostled towards a poor work-life balance as they labour under the narrative that they ‘love’ their subject to the extent that leisure and work effectively become interchangeable and devoid of important boundaries. Furthermore, as she points out, ‘The rhetoric of “if you love what you do then you never do a day’s work” becomes a justification for self-exploitation and if you find yourself stressed, unhappy and overworked, then perhaps you just don’t love the job enough’ (Johnson, 2015). Johnson advocates for a more open discussion about labour that ‘might be the start of a collective language and action that can be powerful and empowering’ as well for as a change in rhetoric from ‘love’ of a subject to ‘intellectual curiosity’ for it (Johnson, 2015). Later that year, taking up that call for ‘collective language and action’, Kim Akass contributed a blog written literally from her sickbed as she recuperated from an acute, stress-induced, asthma attack. Whilst acknowledging that such a disclosure is unconventional within academia, Akass uses this context to explore a series of pressures impacting upon the working lives of university teachers and researchers, dovetailing broader evaluations with her own professional experience. In her penultimate paragraph, she explains the circumstances that have led to her recent hospitalisation and a subsequent realisation: In the end, I no longer have a choice but to take care of myself. In the past few years I have overworked to the point of collapse, using annual leave to research and write (instead of taking holidays), drafting unsuccessful funding bids, fulfilling the requisite REF submission, supervising an inordinately large amount of dissertations, trying to provide pastoral care for an ever-growing student body as well as continuing to run this website, attend conferences, review and edit articles and work on the editorial board of Critical Studies in Television. I am not alone in working this hard and I can’t quite see how I can fulfil my contracted duties without putting in extra hours – often having to work evenings and weekends. Even though I am used to hard work, I am increasingly finding it difficult to sustain this level of commitment, I no longer have as much energy as my younger colleagues and, in my struggle to keep up with the workload, I suffered that acute asthma attack and ended up in hospital, quite literally nearly working myself to death. (Akass, 2015)
Ten years later, it is worth considering whether these sound like experiences of the past, or whether they might easily be heard in universities throughout the UK today. Furthermore, given the statistics regarding working conditions, job security and even funding opportunities in 2025, might the situation have actually got worse over time? My rather prosaic focus on one financial pressure within Television Studies may not constitute the most immediate issue facing its community of scholars. But it is nonetheless significant, and my concern is that it may represent one more unspoken burden for individuals already facing several competing difficulties. The cost of access to television content alludes to the kind of blurring between work and life, intellectual curiosity and love, that Johnson and Akass describe: if you’re studying the thing you love, shouldn’t you pay for your enjoyment? Unsurprisingly, I would contend that this mispresents the situation, and I would borrow Johnson’s phrasing to suggest that intellectual curiosity is carrying the price tag, rather than ‘love’. Perhaps that is bearable or even reasonable. If not (and to end with a hint of provocation), we cannot stay silent.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Correction (March 2026):
Article updated online to correct the book name in the sentence, “Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley’s 1999 book… and The Nationwide Audience (1980)”.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
