From Rick Altman, "Television/Sound" in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski, Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1986. 43

The recognition of television and video as major agents of our understanding of contemporary time and space, indeed, along with the computer, of the transformation of these categories in everyday life, is essential, and potentially more useful than the analysis of single programs as if they were poems. But I'm not sure that this perception requires that we throw up our hands and say, "But it's all so ephemeral/such pastiche/without reference/ depthless/intertextual that there's nothing to analyze" (66).