INTRODUCTION

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to my co-editor Dr Mark Hampton of Lingnan University, Hong Kong, for his suggestions and corrections to this Introduction, the contents of which I take responsibility for. Mark has been the driving force behind this themed issue, which emerged from our conversations over many years. I would also like to thank Dr Simon Potter for providing me with some additional materials to aid my thinking and Dr Rohan McWilliam for his careful reading of this Introduction. Notes 1. See Media History's special issue on Transnational Histories in 2010, from which we drew particular inspiration from Michele Hilmes’ article on the three-way relationship between the USA, the UK and Canada. See also Corner for a discussion of the development and future research agendas of the field. 2. Some of the critical points were debated by Peter Mandler, Carla Hesse, Colin Jones and Carol Watts in the first volume of Cultural and Social History. For a slightly different take on the subject, see Richard Johnson. 3. See, for example, the discussion on Scandinavian television in Nordicom Review 23 (2002), which was a Special Issue featuring papers from the Fifteenth Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research, particularly Bondebjerg. See also Bignell and Fickers. 4. See also Simon Potter Elitism, the ABC and the BBC, c.1922–1970. 5. Kato suggests this was also true for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, even though television had been available for over a decade by this time. 6. This was not limited to Anglophone nations. For a discussion of how this debate developed in Japan, see Chun.