Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition

by Michael Curtin

Book Overview

In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822333937
• ISBN13: 9780822333937
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

High-level scholarship

"Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition" by Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Editors) is a scholarly collection of essays about TV culture, technology, industry, and culture. Professionals who have studied these issues in depth offer insightful analysis and criticism, and offer a range of opinions on what the future may hold. Through its consistently high-level scholarship, the book also offers the next generation of media abalysts many outstanding examples to emulate as well as suggestions on how the field of study might remain relevant. The book is divided into four sections. Part One is "Industry, Programs and Production Contexts". John Caldwell discusses the post-Fordist media industry's shift to producing branded content and TV's increasingly strategic relationship with the Web. Charlotte Brunsdon surveys Britain's lifestyle programs to find the social good of inclusiveness partly offset by more aggressive displays of consumerism and spectacle. Jeffrey Sconce convincingly argues that TV narratives have grown more sophisticated over time as conjecture, mythology and self-relexivity have conspired to enrich texts that in turn cultivate ever more demanding audiences. William Boddy recounts the history of interactive technologies and suggests that if the past is a guide, new technologies will merely serve to enhance the TV experience but will not revolutionize it. Lisa Parks deflates microcasting as embodied by the Oxygen network as representing a corporate scheme to more efficently market to profitable niche audiences and encourages social progressives to fight for greater TV self-expression. Part Two is "Technology, Society and Cultural Form". William Uricchio explores how changing technologies have threatened broadcaster's control of programming flow and predicts a general shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Anna McCarthy's fascinating field study about TV in public spaces ultimately discovers that viewing practices are defined by capitalism's exploitation of waiting time created by differentials in power relations. Jostein Gripsrud contends that broadcasting will persist because it continues to serve elite interests in distributing cultural values and anticipates that interactive technologies will only marginally effect viewer behaviors. Anna Everett's case study of the Million Woman March touches on issues of technological self-empowerment and the mainstream media's increased reticence to cover significant social issues and events in depth. Part Three is "Electronic Nations, Then and Now". Michael Curtin discusses the history of media production to show how national broadcasting was crucial to U.S. capitalist development in the post-World War II era but has more recently entered into an era of uneasy international competition and cooperation between East (Hong Kong) and West (Hollywood). David Morley contemplates TV's role in reinforcing the nation state and the manner in which audiences experience dis-placement thro