Abstract
It is fair to say that Teletext has not attracted a great deal of academic attention over the 40 or so years of its existence. Teletext grew out of a project by the BBC in the early 1970s to provide services for the hearing impaired. One of the reasons why Teletext has garnered so little attention is that it was introduced by public service broadcasters who were essentially unchallenged at that time and that Teletext services themselves were not seen as controversial, for example, through stepping on the toes of the private sector. The exception here is the United Kingdom where Oracle, commercial broadcasting’s alternative to Ceefax, was intended to attract advertising revenue. Academics have, according to the editors, missed the significance of such services as they make up a pre-history of the Internet and offer insights into broader issues of technology, policy and society. This book attempts to make good that missed opportunity by surveying the form and content of Teletext services across a number of European countries. The editors offer in conclusion a number of comments. The first is that of the slowness of technological change. The significance of Teletext is only now diminishing despite the popularity of the Internet for over 20 years. Technologies tend to co-exist for extended periods of time. The second insight is the importance of path-dependency which helps to explain the peculiar national characteristics of each Teletext service. The third and final insight relates to how Teletext exemplifies relationships between state, public service broadcasters and commercial interest in each of the territories considered at the level of the microcosm. These insights are used to support the contention that one can learn much about the whole through concentrating on a small, and deeply unfashionable, part of the media landscape.