Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Console-ing Passions) by Lynn Spigel

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, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it.With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future.

Contents:
Convergence television: aggregating the form and repurposing content in the culture of conglomeration / John Caldwell --
Lifestyling Britain: the 8-9 slot on British television / Charlotte Brunsdon --
What if?: charting television's new textual boundaries / Jeffrey Sconce --
Interactive television and advertising form in contemporary U.S. television / William Boddy --
Flexible microcasting: gender, generation, and television-internet convergence / Lisa Parks --
Television's next generation: technology-interface culture-flow / William Uricchio --
The rhythms of the reception area: crisis, capitalism, and the waiting room / Anna McCarthy --
Broadcast television: the chances of its survival in a digital age / Jostein Gripsrud --
Double click: the Million Woman March on television and the internet / Anna Everett --
One commercial week: television in Sweden prior to public service / Jan Olsson --
Media capitals: cultural geographies of global TV / Michael Curtin --
At home with television / David Morley --
Pocho.com: reimaging television on the internet / Priscilla Peña Ovalle --
Television, the housewife, and the museum of modern art / Lynn Spigel --
From republic of letters to television republic? citizen readers in the era of broadcast television / John Hartley --
Cultural studies, television studies, and the crisis in the humanities / Julie D'Acci.