Table of 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

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The future of television in the digital era

About the Author

James Bennett is head of area for Media, Information, and Communications at London Metropolitan University. Beginning in April 2011, he will be Senior Lecturer in Television Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen and a co-editor of Film and Television After DVD.

Niki Strange is the founder of Strange Digital, a company providing research and strategy consulting for digital businesses and the culture, education, and public sectors. She is also a research fellow at the University of Sussex.

Reviews

"Television as Digital Media is an important and timely collection. Offering strategies for mapping a fast-changing digital terrain, it is poised to stimulate an important conversation between television studies and the television industry." William Uricchio, Director of Comparative Media Studies, MIT "This original collection reframes contemporary debates about new digital media technologies, media convergence, and modes of cultural regulation, production, and consumption." David Morley, author of Media, Modernity, and Technology "This is a terrific collection that opens up exciting ways to think about relations between old TV and new digital culture without reifying either of those terms."--Lynn Spigel, co-editor of Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition