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