Eric Michaels: An appreciation

… I got into media studies, as an anthropologist, because I believed the media were the belly of the beast, and because I thought television was central to the creation of the extraordinary contradictions that plagued the contemporary world. Michaels 1983]

It would seem that Malinowski's stricture that the function of the ethnographer was to see the native's culture from the native's own point of view could at last be achieved—literally, and not metaphorically.

What would such a world be like, and more importantly, what problems have we to set before our students now that will, at the least, not hinder them from coming to an understanding of an age in which man presents himself not in person but through the mediation of visual symbolic forms… It is now no longer possible for the student of culture to ignore the fact that people all over the world have learned, and will continue in great numbers to learn, how to use the visual symbolic mode. Anthropologists must begin to articulate the problems that will face us in trying to understand others when their point of view is known to us primarily through movies distributed by broadcast television and cable. Worth 1981: 94–95]