We all know about literacy and its recent upper-crust cousin cultural literacy. The time has come for TELELITERACY--a concept that defines, explores, and embraces what we know about, and have learned from, the mass medium of television.

This clear-eyed and lively book shows that television, contrary to the opinion of many, is a medium that is opening the American mind. The knee-jerk reaction television often elicits from critics, literati, even well-intentioned parents and educators actually follows a pattern that has come down to us through history.

In The Republic, for example, Plato attacked poetry and drama on the grounds that they were mere "imitations." His early denunciation of what we would today call the docudrama also implied a disdain for the popularity of all public performances. Closer to our own time, little respect was initially accorded radio and film, though both (significantly the latter) are now accepted as subjects for serious study.

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Grounding his argument in such historical fact, television critic David Bianculli goes on to present in Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously a spirited argument for television. "It's time to realize TV must be doing something right," Bianculli observes, "to reach and affect so many people." If one hasn't watched television in the recent past, one has missed I, Claudius; Holocaust; Shogun; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Brideshead Revisited; The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; Anne of Green Gables; The Singing Detective; the Gulf War; The Civil War; the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; the collapse of the Soviet Union; Bill Moyers talking with Joseph Campbell; and much more.