Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition by Lynn Spigel


Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
Title : Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0822333937
ISBN-10 : 9780822333937
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 480
Publication : First published November 9, 2004

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.

Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition Reviews

  • Alanna Why

    Grad school summer reading. Very funny book to read 20 years after its publication because it sits at such a weird moment in TV history, where the convergence of TV and the Internet had started but hadn't yet been fully codified into digital streaming services as we know them now. So there's a lot of people arguing things that seem really outdated/funny now (and making up portmanteaus like "Netizens"). But, you also have some incredibly prescient gems like William Uricchio literally predicting the Netflix algorithm and interface a decade in advance. That article, along with Anna McCarthy's and John Caldwell's, were the most interesting and useful to me.

  • Rebecca

    I read this book for work, looking for some specific information which I did not find, which may color my opinion somewhat.

    I expected this to be a bunch of essays on the change in TV in the age of the internet, possibly with some historical background essays. That was the title, after all. Some of the essays are in fact about this, and several of them are fairly interesting.

    Unfortunately, at least half of them are the kind of overly theoretical rambling that causes people to make fun of the ivory tower. Worse, at least half of them appear to have been written for some other purpose and then sort of shoehorned into this collection after they failed to be published in their journal of choice. Essays on the role of the internet in the Million Woman March or the placement of TVs in windows or a fairly obnoxious explanation of why using the author's diagram for the TV dialectic instead of other people's diagrams for the TV dialectic would totally save the world or something all have a tangential relationship with the topic at best. Disappointing.

  • Amy

    This book has proved useful to me on a couple of occasions. I especially loves Jeffrey Sconce's article.