James Schamus's post was a thoughtful critique of the current state of
 discussion on Screen-L. I wanted to second his concerns as well as to offer a
 challenge. It seems clear to me that our ranks of "silent lurkers" include a
 large number of thoughtful young scholars whose work poses important questions.
 What we
need to do is find a way to use this forum to really explore the directions
being taken by film and television research, to continue the debates which
we enjoy in our private correspondence or at academic conventions. Is there
something about the net technology which encourages "flame wars," triviality,
and superficiality? I don't think so, because I know that the nets have been
used in many areas for intelligent discussion, both by fans and by academics.
How, then, do we get such a discussion going?
  I'll take a stab. Having recently returning from the Consoling Passions
conference at USC, which brought together feminist television scholars from
the United States and Europe, I have been reflecting about what I see as the
emerging generational politics of our discipline. I might identify three
distinct generations in the academization of media studies: a)the first
wave were brought to film studies through auteurism and the art cinema. They
had to build the case for film studies as a serious academic discipline and
they did so by seperating themselves from buffs and fans. This involved the
construction of the film author as the valued term, allowing them to discuss
film art alongside literature, theatre, music, and the other fine arts. b)The
second group broke with these aesthetically-inclined scholars to focus more
closely on the ideological dimensions of film and television. For them, being
academic meant being theoretical and they dismissed most of the first group
as being unsufficiently theoretical. They were drawn to publications like
SCREEN and CAMERA OBSCURA as central to theoretical debates about the media.
For this group, the avant-guard, documentary, third world film, etc. represented
 a way away from Hollywood commercialism. c)The third group consists of
younger scholars, most of whom are now graduate students or junior faculty.
We grew up as part of the late baby boom generation with television and popular
culture as our baby sitters. We do not feel a need to justify our consideration
of these materials through appeals to aesthetics, authors, or necessarily high
theory. We remain actively engaged with popular texts and wish to take them
on their own terms. We write with an eye towards the particularity of the works
under consideration, consuming rather than necessarily producing theory, writing
 in a more accessible style, drawn towards more empirical methodoligies, etc.
   What I find is that SCS remains very much under the wing of the second group
which seems to be drifting further and further apart, lacking a coherent
theoretical paradigm to hold it together as the old orthodoxies of the field
break apart. Consoling Passions, on the other hand, seems dominated by the
younger scholars, who are struggling to find ways to communicate with each
other across the theoretical and methodological divides that define SCS. I
was impressed by the number of collaborative projects and the willingness of
the younger scholars to complicate easy generalizations about the progressive
or reactionary quality of popular culture. From my point of view, these
scholars represent the future of our discipline.
   Are other people observing the same trends? What will the style of media
studies which emerges from this group look like? What happened to the coherence
of the second group? Do you respond to these pressures in your own work?
Perhaps if we begin to pose these types of questions in this forum, we can
get people to reflect more thoughtfully on their own work, on trends within
the discipline, and on the politics of the academy. Please do not use this
post as an excuse to flame me about political correctness or theory-bashing.
My bet is that this new perspective may have more space for conservative
positions within it and it will certainly not discard theory altogether, simply
transform how we talk about theory and the role of theory within our
 intellectual development.
 
--Henry Jenkin