Seeing Things: Television in an Age of Uncertainty

John Ellis outlines here his ambitious project of redefining our view of television. Using the idea of "witness" to explore both television and its audiences, he focuses on the fudamental changes that this powerful medium has gone through in the last twenty years, demonstrating how it uses all the means at its disposal, from scheduling and talk shows to documentaries and computer graphics, to mediate between conflicting approaches to our modern age.