Television after TV: essays on a medium in transition

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- I. INDUSTRY, PROGRAMS, AND PRODUCTION CONTEXTS -- Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration -- Lifestyling Britain: The 8–9 Slot on British Television -- What If ?: Charting Television's New Textual Boundaries -- Interactive Television and Advertising Form in Contemporary U.S. Television -- Flexible Microcastting: Gender, Generation, and Television-Internet Convergence -- II. TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURAL FORM -- Television's Next Generation: Technology/ Interface Culture/Flow -- The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and the Waiting Room tv -- Broadcast Television: The Chances of Its Survival in a Digital Age -- Double Click: The Million Woman March on Television and the Internet -- III. ELECTRONIC NATIONS, THEN AND NOW -- One Commercial Week: Television in Sweden Prior to Public Service -- Media Capitals: Cultural Geographies of Global tv -- At Home with Television -- Pocho.com: Reimaging Television on the Internet -- IV. TELEVISION TEACHERS -- Television, the Housewife, and the Museum of Modern Art -- From Republic of Letters to Television Republic? Citizen Readers in the Era of Broadcast Television -- Cultural Studies, Television Studies, and the Crisis in the Humanities -- Contributors -- Index

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.