Full Description
In Television as Digital Media, scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries, economies, aesthetics, and various production, user, and audience practices, the contributors develop a new critical paradigm for thinking about television, and the future of television studies, in the digital era. The collection brings together established and emerging scholars, producing an intergenerational dialogue that will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between television and digital media.Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC's iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience "anytime, anywhere," we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media.
Contributors. James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Television as Digital Media / James Bennett 1
Part 1
Switchover: Historicizing the Digital Revolution
Convergence and Divergence: The International Experience of Digital Television / Graeme Turner 31
When Digital Was New: The Advanced Television Technologies of the 1970s and the Control of Content / Julian Thomas 52
"Is It TV Yet?": The Dislocated Screens of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture / William Boddy 76
Part 2
Production Strategies in the Digital Landscape
Cult Television as Digital Television's Cutting Edge / Roberta Pearson 105
Multiplatforming Public Service: The BBC's "Bundled Project" / Niki Strange 132
Little Kids' TV: Downloading, Sampling, and Multiplatforming the Preschool TV Experiences of the Digital Era / Jeanette Steemers 158
Part 3
The Aesthetics of Convergence
The "Basis for Mutual Contempt": The Loss of the Contingent in Digital Television / Karen Lury 181
Television's Aesthetic of Efficiency: Convergence Television and the Digital Short / Max Dawson 204
Scripted Spaces: Television Interfaces and the Non-Places of Asynchronous Entertainment / Daniel Chamberlain 230
Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic? / Jason Jacobs 255
Part 4
User-Generated Content: Producing Digital Audiences
Worker Blowback: User-Generated, Worker-Generated, and Producer-Generated Content within Collapsing Production Workflows / John T. Caldwell 283
User-Created Content and Everyday Cultural Practice: Lessons from YouTube / Jean Burgess 311
Architectures of Participation: Fame, Television, and Web 2.0 / James Bennett 332
Bibliography 359
Contributors 373
Index 377
