In the current moment, probably no one would doubt that media shape human thinking. There are, however, many levels (and different approaches) to this connection between media and thought. The volume at hand, which exemplifies (rather than represents) the vast and versatile work of media philosopher Lorenz Engell, makes a number of specific interventions in this discussion: first, in alignment with current debates in New Materialisms, it shows how the material processes of media have to be considered as actual thinking instead of only as shaping ‘our’ thinking. Second, it argues that media also think themselves and thereby reflect on and actually contribute to their historical transformations. Third, in a remarkable divergence from most similar approaches, it focuses on the allegedly boring and outdated medium of television.

There are good reasons for this: whatever the future of television might be and whatever the term ‘television’ might come to stand for in the coming years, the multitude of forms and operational procedures that have been emerging with and around television can be described as ‘under-thought’. There is certainly no shortage of groundbreaking and thought-provoking work on television. Compared to other media, especially film and digital media, a more theoretical and philosophical approach is conspicuous in its absence. While most research inquires into how television changed the patterns of communication, the basic social fabric, and the spaces of everyday life (with concepts like mobile privatization, the family circle, and ambient television), the medium's contribution to a culture's modes of thinking and to the emergence and structuring of its basic categories (think of time, event, memory, choice, evidence, etc.) is seldom addressed. This is all the more regrettable since, even if television might have lost its character as the defining medium in most areas around the globe, the realities and manners of thinking it brought into being have had a lasting impact–which is often overlooked because of the lack of conceptual work. This is also why this volume seemed a more than appropriate contribution to a book series which, under the title Televisual Culture, seeks to foster discussion about the lasting, sometimes hidden, transforming and transformed, ‘legacies’ of television.