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The third Media in Transition conference centers on television's political and cultural role at the dawn of our new millennium. We aim to ask bold and clear questions, and to start to answer them in light of the medium's 75-year history as well as the emerging scholarship on this most powerful of communications systems.
What is the role of television in specific societies or regions today? How is this role changing? What part are digital technologies and new systems of communication playing in this transition? What are the likely outcomes of present trends? What are the darkest possibilities? What does the history of television in diverse countries and regions tell us about its possible futures?
These and similar broad topics will be the focus of three plenary "conversations" - lively but intellectually rigorous discussions between a panel of speakers and the audience, in the style of previous Media in Transition conferences. Panelists will be leaders of government, the corporate world, TV's creative industry, and media scholarship. Like those submitting proposals for papers to be delivered in the many individual panels that will constitute the spine of the conference, these plenary speakers will be expected to speak across and beyond their own field to a general audience of literate fellow citizens.
Political and ideological perspectives will be important, of course, but papers on historical, anthropological and cultural matters will be especially welcome. So will proposals on specific genres, programs, or performers if appropriately grounded in useful facts and also aware of some larger implications of the material.
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