SOURCE: Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Peering Back.” Journal of Communication 38, no. 4 (autumn 1988): 134-39.

In the following review, Meyrowitz discusses Watching Television, maintaining that Gitlin has made a convincing case for his argument that the medium deserves more careful scrutiny than it generally receives.

On reflection, the phrase “watching television” is as rich and complex as it first seems banal. It trips from our tongues and enters our ears dozens of times a week without much conscious thought, its meaning apparently too transparent to require elaboration or analysis. Yet hidden within it are multiple layers of potential significance.

These multiple meanings, reflected in the diversity of television research and in the variety of our daily experience, range from innocent to sinister. They include, but are not limited to: the active choice of what to watch; the unified mass of all the viewing options; individual variations in the processing of the same...