Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty
Abstract
Television, the author argues, responds to two powerful desires of our age: it makes us witnesses of often traumatic events and it tries - and fails - to provide us with narratives that make sense of the world. The author makes sense of modern television, both by exploring its processes and in terms of its dynamic relationships with the cultures that provide it with raw material. Television, he proposes, offers us multiple ways of understanding the world, yet does not arbitrate between them. He explores this process as one of "working through", whereby television news takes in the chaos and conflict of the world and subsequent programmes of all kinds offer diverse ways of unravelling its confusions, from the psychobabble of talk shows to the open narratives of soaps, documentaries and dramas. By means of this working through, problems are exhausted rather than resolved. The author demonstrates how television's function in its new era is no longer that of building consensus; rather it uses all the means at its disposal, including sophisticated computer graphics, to mediate etween conflicting approaches to our age of uncertainty.
... Two approaches to the study of television in its online format inform this study: The first is represented by Paddy Scannell (1996) and John Ellis (1982Ellis ( , 1999Ellis ( , 2000 and centres on communicative strategies and the programme schedule as cornerstones of the television medium; the second draws on the scholarly work on online television and streaming services of Derek Kompare (2002), Daniel Chamberlain (2010), and Catherine Johnson (2019). Together, these two approaches form the basis for an understanding of how two BVoD services seek to translate some of the traditional characteristics of the television medium into a digital environment, as television transforms from a time-structured to (also) a space-structured medium. ...
... He described how systematic programme planning and serial production breed viewing habits and easily recognisable programme and channel identities. Ellis (1982Ellis ( , 1999Ellis ( , 2000 has outlined the same mechanisms that we find in Scannell's work, those of television providing a national calendar and time frame for daily activities. However, Ellis's (1999Ellis's ( , 2000 writing reflects the development of the British television landscape, from scarcity, to availability, to plentifulness. ...
... Ellis (1982Ellis ( , 1999Ellis ( , 2000 has outlined the same mechanisms that we find in Scannell's work, those of television providing a national calendar and time frame for daily activities. However, Ellis's (1999Ellis's ( , 2000 writing reflects the development of the British television landscape, from scarcity, to availability, to plentifulness. And whereas Scannell emphasised what was common for the population, Ellis covered the characteristics of television in a time when audience surveys formed the basis of scheduling and viewers identified with segments rather than a mass audience (Ellis, 2000: 65). ...
As on-demand media claim an increasing amount of the time we spend on digital media, traditional broadcasters have adopted video on-demand (VoD) services as a means of presenting their programmes. This article analyses two Danish VoD services offered by legacy broadcasters – that is, BVoD services. It argues that the traditional features of broadcast television, to communicate liveness and immediacy, are reappropriated in the publishing practices of the BVoD services. With an analytical focus on the use of temporal paratexts, the article finds that whereas both services emphasise liveness and immediacy in their publishing practices, they apply different means of expressing the temporal qualities. These differences can be attributed to organisational differences. Finally, the article concludes that competitiveness, distinctiveness, and the public service identity of the broadcasters are explanatory factors for the reappropriation of time-structured publishing in the two Danish BVoD services DRTV and TV 2 Play.
... Of course, it is imperative to recognise that media claiming to offer shared experiences and "natural" collectiveness while obfuscating their very role as mediators is not a recent or unprecedented strategy. As previously addressed by Feuer (1983), Bourdon (2000), Ellis (2000) and Scannell (2014), for decades television has been employing an analogous scheme (which, though, deploys different mechanisms). In fact, it is worth noting that social media platforms borrowed from television's broadcast the promise of connecting people to what matters at the same time as these events unfold, with the additional feature of providing potential multiple options and sources from which the audiences can choose. ...
... Through body-technology relations (Ihde 1990) such as those typical of media experiences, we are given the capacity to witness events remotely, and thereby have access to what is taking place from a distance. A witness, in general, is someone who 'has' (and therefore owns) the experience of 'being there' through direct, immediate presence (Ellis 2000;Peters 2001;Frosh 2019). Yet, in providing a second-hand sense of being there, media are said to make us "witnesses of the ways of the world", which "raises questions of truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying, and the trustworthiness of perception" (Peters 2001:707)questions that, I would say, are foundational to phenomenology more broadly, and to liveness in particular. ...
... Indeed, nowadays, it is likely that the most popular understanding of 'the live' is that related to real-time, instantaneous transmission, especially in the context of televisual broadcasta matter that has spurred a number of intellectual endeavours to this date (Caldwell 1995;Dayan and Katz 1992;Davis 2007;Ellis 2000;Kumar 2015;Levine 2003;Scannell 2006Scannell , 2014Marriott 2007;Meyrowitz 1985;White 2003). Generally, this perspective emphasises a given medium's technical potential for instant diffusionthat is, for connection without perceptible delays (Vianello 1985;Scannell 2014;van Es 2016). ...
This project examines the new dimensions and attributes of the historical construct of liveness in the current social media environment. In this scope, liveness comprises both the orchestration of the experiential and the continuous pursuit of immediacy, presence, shared experience, and authenticity in contexts marked precisely by mediation. Liveness emerges as the productively contradictory experience of immediate connection through media. This thesis deploys liveness both as its central object of enquiry and as a conceptual device to examine mediation as an experiential process in and of itself. Through a diary-interviewing study conducted with London-based social media users, it explores how ordinary experiences of and with habitual social media challenge, reaffirm, or expand our available conceptions of liveness, and assesses the extent to which liveness can be useful to illuminate our understanding of lived experiences with and of social media more broadly. In so doing, the thesis advances a critical phenomenology of mediation, focusing on perceptual processes to examine and interrogate the structures of lived experience without disregarding the social, technical, economic, and political forces that underpin the social media manifold. In examining liveness through some of the organising principles of phenomenology – temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity, and embodiment – this thesis explores four existential quests as enacted through technical mediation. They are: the ‘real-time’ experience, the experience of ‘being there’, ‘getting involved in a shared experience’, and the ‘authentic’ experience. I conclude that the conceptual value of liveness and its relevance and endurance as a key topic of interest for media studies rest in its intrinsically contested, disputed nature of as-if-ness – of a mediation that claims also to be immediate – and in how those tensions are renewed, refashioned, and updated with the development and habituation of new technologies of communication.
... Flow ist zugleich Effekt der Fernsehtätigkeit und Programmstruktur auf Makro-, Meso-und Mikroebene (vgl. Williams 2003[1974; Ellis 2002Ellis [1992; Uricchio 2004). William Uricchio merkt an (2004, S. 167-175), dass sich die Auffassung von ‚Flow' als einer allgemeinen Programmstrategie, die auf eine bestimmte Rezeptionshaltung abzielt, hin zu individuellen Sichtungserfahrungen verschoben habe. ...
... Flow ist zugleich Effekt der Fernsehtätigkeit und Programmstruktur auf Makro-, Meso-und Mikroebene (vgl. Williams 2003[1974; Ellis 2002Ellis [1992; Uricchio 2004). William Uricchio merkt an (2004, S. 167-175), dass sich die Auffassung von ‚Flow' als einer allgemeinen Programmstrategie, die auf eine bestimmte Rezeptionshaltung abzielt, hin zu individuellen Sichtungserfahrungen verschoben habe. ...
Was ist anders an einem Fernsehen, das wir im Web abrufen und streamen, gegenüber einem Fernsehen, das ausgestrahlt wird und in das wir einschalten? Der Beitrag zeigt, inwiefern Video-on-Demand-Dienste die Serienrezeption und die verschiedenen Aktivitäten, die unter dem Begriff Fernsehen zusammengefasst werden, transformieren. Als zentrale konzeptuelle Bezugspunkte für die Rezeptionserfahrungen, die Nutzer:innen auf Streaming-Plattformen machen, dienen die Begriffe Flow und Stream(en). Gefragt wird nach den Brüchen und Kontinuitäten zwischen einer Serienrezeption im Programmfluss (Flow) und einer Serienrezeption per Datenstrom (Stream). Ziel ist ein Überblick über die Nutzungspraktiken des Streamens und deren Verwandtschaft zu herkömmlichen Fernsehrezeptionsweisen.
... However, the distinction between the two genres is based on the extent to which reality and imagination is reported (Table 4.1). For Ellis's (2000) documentaries, specifically those representing the environment, they are more real because they are less fictional. ...
Abstract
Environmental protection has become a central issue among scholars as they reflect on
the sustainability of human societies, species, cultures, and languages. To assure the
transfer, transmission, and interpretation of knowledge among cultures and
communities, the role of translation is vital and primordial to make sure that every sign
reveals its meaning when it is interpreted or further translated into another sign.
Ecotranslation is a new paradigm in translation studies that takes an ecological approach
to translation. Within this framework, the present chapter examines the ecodocumentary entitled “ :الزرق اء المرجة انينWhining of the Blue Lagoon” by Faouzi
(2012) from the interlingual and the intralingual levels. Alternatively, the voiceover
narrator interlingually translates scientists’ reports from French into standard Arabic,
and he intralingually transfers laymen’s narratives from Moroccan Arabic into standard
Arabic. The purpose is to study whether the double translation process has faithfully
accounted for the transposition of French and Moroccan Arabic texts into Standard
Arabic, the exclusive language of the documentary. For this aim, we examined the
faithful representation of linguistic structures using Stibbe's (2021) notion of “erasure,”
a process by which something important is completely excluded from a text, replaced by
a distorted version of itself, or partially erased but a trace of it is still present. The
results show that the translation process suffers from many pitfalls and inaccuracies. For
instance, many deficiencies were detected as a set of scientific terms were erased, either
... In fact, contemporary TV series are gradually moving away from the "pedagogical TV" concerns of the 1950s and into the 1970s, as well as from the 1980s and 1990s of "TV of the growth" aimed at winning audiences (Ellis 2000). The third phase of the "abundance of contents and channels" (ibid.) ...
This research examines the portrayal of (non)motherhood in television series from 2016 to 2022. The title, “(Un)being a Mother”, was deliberately chosen for its polysemic nature, facilitating an exploration of the complexities of motherhood, its absence, and the implications for womanhood. The study thematically analyzes 15 television series from Hispanic, Italian, and Anglo-American cultures to reveal the diverse perspectives on motherhood. Utilizing the frameworks of Intensive Mothering, Good Mothering, Good Enough Mothering, and Non-Mothering (including both childless and childfree women), the research aims to illuminate representations of motherhood, variations in mothering paradigms, and the influence of cultural and geographical contexts. This study introduces an innovative methodological approach by investigating recurring themes of (non)motherhood across different cultural productions, incorporating insights from media sociology, gender media studies, anthropology, and ethnographic media research for a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
... These texts are subsequently presented to audiences for (re)witnessing, cultivating moral awareness and a sense of responsibility. Throughout this process, the media functions as a witnessing institution, shaping audiences into (secondary) witnesses (Chouliaraki, 2006;Ellis, 2000). Journalistic witnessing has long been closely linked with advancements in witnessing technology. ...
... Firstly, the increased likelihood of routine exposure to traumatic events, due to the changing conditions of the media profession, has increased the demands put on journalists, making them more likely to cover traumatic stories and more likely to cover these types of stories more frequently (McMahon & McLellan, 2008). As Ellis (2000) argues, this media witnessing is 'a new modality of perception', characterised by 'a sense of powerless knowledge and complicity with what we see' (p. 1). Second, journalists themselves are directly affected by the tragic effects of the economic crisis (Maniou, Photiou, Eteokleous, & Seitanidis, 2017), suffering a range of negative consequences, such as job losses and salary cuts. ...
... Chouliaraki here echoes the work ofEllis (2000) who focused on the moral demands made on spectators by television when presented with images of suffering without being offered the opportunity to do something about it, to act on it. ...
This chapter presents an examination of the portrayal of HIV/AIDS as social suffering in media representations. It elucidates how cultural representations, social experiences, and political processes shape public perceptions of HIV/AIDS, often perpetuating stigma and influencing policy. The chapter critiques the commodification of suffering in the media and the resultant distortion of social realities. By appropriating the narratives of those living with HIV/AIDS, media narratives often construct a spectacle that divorces audiences from the authentic experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. The chapter argues for a transformation in the representation of social suffering to counteract its trivialisation, advocating for more nuanced and empathetic portrayals that can inspire a collective responsibility and action towards addressing social suffering, particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS. It underscores the potential of media to redefine public engagement with social issues and to foster a global cosmopolitanism that recognises and responds to suffering beyond the spectacle.
... However, the distinction between the two genres is based on the extent to which reality and imagination is reported (Table 4.1). For Ellis's (2000) documentaries, specifically those representing the environment, they are more real because they are less fictional. ...
Chapter 4 by under title “Ecotranslation in Moroccan Ecodocumentary Interlingual and Intralingual Pitfalls” is written by Mohamed Mliless, Lamiae Azzouzi, Saif Aqachmar, and Driss Cherkaoui. According to the authors of this chapter, Environmental protection has become a central issue among scholars as they reflect on the sustainability of human societies, species, cultures, and languages. To assure the transfer, transmission, and interpretation of knowledge among cultures and communities, the role of translation is vital and primordial to make sure that every sign reveals its meaning when it is interpreted or further translated into another sign. Ecotranslation is a new paradigm in translation studies that takes an ecological approach to translation. Within this framework, the present chapter examines the eco-documentary entitled “الزرقاء المرجة انين : Whining of the Blue Lagoon” by Faouzi (2012) from the interlingual and the intralingual levels. Alternatively, the voiceover narrator interlingually translates scientists’ reports from French into standard Arabic, and he intralingually transfers laymen’s narratives from Moroccan Arabic into standard Arabic. The purpose is to study whether the double translation process has faithfully accounted for the transposition of French and Moroccan Arabic texts into Standard Arabic, the exclusive language of the documentary. For this aim, we examined the faithful representation of linguistic structures using Stibbe's (2021) notion of “erasure,” a process by which something important is completely excluded from a text, replaced by a distorted version of itself, or partially erased but a trace of it is still present. The results show that the translation process suffers from many pitfalls and inaccuracies. For instance, many deficiencies were detected as a set of scientific terms were erased, either totally or partially. Similarly, the findings revealed that the voiceover fails on many occasions to provide the linguistic counterparts of some of the items and structures that the laymen witnesses communicated in Moroccan Arabic. To cope with the translation pitfalls in both discourses, the study observed that the producer of the ecodocumentary, either intentionally or not, resorted to a technique we call “the articulation of narration and image on screen” to fill in the gap of translation. Finally, the study has many implications for ecodocumentary producers, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and future research to investigate other types of translation in eco-documentaries to demonstrate how man has harmed environmental resources.
... Such witnessing could even extend to certain types of fictions, such as movies based on true stories or as I will argue some video games. Medium should not be a defining characteristic of witnessing, as John Ellis (2000) suggests all acts of witness are mediated. He contends that audio-visual representations provide a new form of witness that gives us a different type of experience. ...
Ian Bogost’s 2011 book How to Do Things with Video Games seeks to “reveal a small portion of the many uses of video games and how together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant (p. 7). I aspire to join Bogost’s conversation by offering another use for video games— the video game as a site of immersive witnessing. To showcase how witnessing can be meaningfully utilized in video games, I present case studies of two vastly disparate games: commercial entertainment game Telltale’s The Walking Dead and not-for-profit game Half the Sky Movement: The Game. My method of analysis traces rhetorical and design forms (including narrative, duration, immersion, choice, and reflection) that contribute to my conception of an immersive witnessing experience. Achieved through games’ immersive and agentic properties, witnessing through games involves different emotional and thought processes than other media. This model not only potentially appeals to new audiences but also engages those audiences in a distinctly different way from media of the past.
... If some exclusive popular titles can generate sub scriptions, loyalty to the services can be mainly explained by the size of catalogs and the functionalities of devices (organization and presentation of the catalog, possibility of downloading, availability of subtitles, perceived qualities of recommendations, etc.). Ellis (2000) develops the concept of "choice fatigue" which tends to favorize the domination of the market by a small number of international platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ (Dessinges & Perticoz, 2019). "The old media persistence" manifests itself not only in the choices made by platform managers but also in cultural practices developed by users, for instance when they re-create at home traditional conditions of viewing television even with digital platforms (Combes & Glevarec, 2021). ...
Since the mid-1990s, film and television industries are more and more confronted with the appearance of new intermediation services which have created platforms. In a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), we try to analyze the place and role that these new services are taking in the audiovisual sector. Our corpus is composed of the platforms of four companies that have developed activities on a vast international scale, Netflix (with its service of the same name), Amazon (Prime Video service), Disney (Disney+) and Apple (Apple TV+). Based on our corpus, it seems to us that some changes have been the result of firms’ activities, but that it is not as linear as it may appear at first sight. Transformations are at work but there is also some “Old Media Persistence.” Thus, we find a certain “contamination” of old practices originating from the organization of industrial channels and forms in the mutations currently presented by these new intermediation services.
... Autoras como Lotz (2014) se han referido a un proceso de revolución televisiva, marcada por el desarrollo de las tecnologías digitales, por un mayor control de elección por parte del espectador y por la ruptura respecto al modelo de la televisión lineal. Otros, como Ellis (2002), han enmarcado la televisión del nuevo milenio en una era de incertidumbre y abundancia de operadores y contenidos. Por otra parte, autoras como Jenner (2018) han asociado a ciertas compañías como Netflix con la reinvención de la televisión. ...
Este artículo explora las principales estrategias de publicidad utilizadas por los operadores de servicios de vídeo bajo demanda por suscripción en el mercado audiovisual español. Metodológicamente, se ha realizado un seguimiento de los estrenos y las campañas publicitarias de cinco operadores (Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ y Apple TV+) con el objetivo de identificar las principales obras promocionadas en territorio español. El artículo indaga en la relación entre las series de televisión y la publicidad exterior a través de dos casos de estudio: Sky Rojo (Netflix) y Falcon y el soldado de invierno (Disney+). A través del mapeo y el análisis, se descubren distintas acciones de publicidad exterior en tanto ejemplos paradigmáticos de la presencia publicitaria de las plataformas audiovisuales en las ciudades contemporáneas. Los resultados ilustran dos dimensiones clave de la publicidad exterior de los servicios de SVOD: una material, asociada al soporte, tamaño, presencia y visibilidad del texto publicitario; y una simbólica, más asociada al texto publicitario. Asimismo, se advierten conexiones entre lo offline y online, que apuntan hacia la relación entre publicidad exterior, redes sociales y medios, así como a la mercantilización y reconstrucción cotidiana de la ciudad y el espacio público.
... Taking our point of departure on examples of mobile phone content from the war in Syria, we theorise citizen media testimonials as acts of media witnessing, which present conflict as a scene of suffering and rely on western 1 news platforms to amplify such suffering as both authentic and morally urgent storytelling to news publics of the global North (Frosh, Pinchevski 2008). While radio and television had already turned news journalism into spaces of testimony, in the past (Ellis 2000), mobile phones and digital media have nonetheless complicated the imperatives of media witnessing for authenticity and urgency, in two ways. Firstly, the imperative of truth is challenged as such media bypass the truthtelling authority of the professional and so pose the epistemological problem of who speaks; and secondly, the moral demand for urgency is intensified as citizen media often present war suffering in 1 Our use of the term 'western' here signals a conception of the global order, including the institutions of global journalism, as divided by historical relationships of neocolonial power between Europe and North America and the global South. ...
Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe.
... Teen-Dramen der 1990er-Jahre (z. B. Beverly Hills, 90210, FOX 1990-2000 adaptierten die stakkatoartige Montage und die flüchtigen Kamerabewegungen des Musikvideos (vgl. Mengel 1995, 24). ...
... One can thus conclude that soaps in general, and 7de Laan specifically, can be seen as a rich source of vicarious experiences. It provides a 'parallel world' (Gledhill, 1997: 371) to 'work through' (Ellis, 2000) aspects close to one's own world. ...
So often we seem to speak in abstracts about marketing. We may all nod our heads when itcomes to the importance of the basics of digging and delving into the marketplace and thoroughlyresearching the competition and looking at trend analyses. When we moreover talk about theimportance of positioning our brand and differentiating it by means of both an impactful name andpackaging that really do express the brand’s character, its DNA, we may all nod our heads again.
This chapter focusses on channel idents: the brief logos appearing between programmes. In the multichannel environment of the early 2000s, idents were elevated beyond simple navigational aids informing the viewer of upcoming programmes to become engaging pieces of entertainment in their own right. They were accorded larger budgets, often making use of live-action as well as motion graphics, and included bespoke music and sound. Combining audiovisual analysis of idents and interviews conducted with graphic designers and composers, this chapter examines idents for Channel 4 and Sky Atlantic from textual and production perspectives. In the early 2000s, both channels increasingly relied on licensing “quality” programmes from US premium channels such as HBO for the development of their brand identities. The channel idents therefore had an important role in recontextualizing US imports for UK viewers, whilst communicating the unique brand identity of each channel. This chapter begins by setting out the functions of idents before exploring the wider industry context. The remainder of the chapter consists of case study analyses, drawing links between the aesthetic character of idents and the industrial contexts of each channel—one being a commercial public service broadcaster, the other a premium subscription-based channel. Overall, it is argued that idents stretched the creative boundaries of televisual promotional texts during the build-up to the peak production era, preceding or even anticipating the nature of the programmes seen in the peak TV era that followed.
Fantômes dans la rue (2000) de J.M.G. Le Clézio réinterprète le mythe du fantôme dans la machine. L’analyse intermédiale de la nouvelle littéraire est l’occasion d’un questionnement critique sur la vidéosurveillance en milieu urbain et sur la circulation des images produites par les caméras installées dans nos villes. Ces images sont ici considérées comme des biens symboliques d’un genre particulier, qui participent de la formation d’un regard instrumenté et qui contribuent à un imaginaire de la surveillance. Les caractéristiques éditoriales et énonciatives de l’oeuvre leclézienne sont interrogées au prisme d’une éthique du témoignage. Une telle éthique, en effet, donne son sens au texte et à l’intervention de l’écrivain, qui cherche à travers ceux-ci à conscientiser les nantis sur la réalité des subalternes.
In the context of global turbulence, the importance of journalists understanding their mission and motivation to implement the functions of the media as a social institution is growing. In this paper, attention is focused on the study of ideas about the functions of future television workers studying at the specialized department of the Faculty of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The survey showed that students are primarily focused on the implementation of the traditional triad of functions: informational, entertainment and educational. The majority of respondents saw their major task as informing the audience, which they understood as the main and most important task of the media. The second most popular was the entertainment function, the importance of which the students have proved to be a feature of the modern media space, where news can be learned from digital media, while television is used for recreation and entertainment. As a priority, students also often referred to the cultural and educational function, which contributes to the development of both the individual and society. The study also demonstrated the growing attention of students to the function of public opinion management. The social value of investigative journalism and the importance of implementing the control function of the media were noted in several responses, but were not in demand. The respondents justified not only the importance of a managerial function, but also an entertainment, cultural and educational one, believing that journalists should help viewers distract from the agenda.
This article explores the fabrication of liveness, understood as a category of affective urgency and narrative motivation, in two reality series derived from a sex tape scandal: Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians. The reality programs narratively incorporate Kim’s live TV appearances to compensate for the sex tape intertext’s incomplete liveness. Consequently, the Kardashian series suggest that live TV might imbue other media genres, like reality TV and sex tapes, with the liveness those genres only partially replicate. At the same time, the Kardashian series indicate a deficiency in live TV’s intertextual influence. The two series necessitate artificial liveness, produced through esthetic techniques, and simulated liveness, manufactured from imitations of live TV, to bolster the liveness of Kim’s live TV appearances. The Kardashians’s intertext, Saturday Night Live, clarifies this complication in live TV’s intertextual impact by parodying live TV’s decline as the dominant medium for liveness.
This chapter offers a detailed examination of the Welsh media production company Teliesyn (Cardiff, 1982–2002) based on paper records, oral testimonies from former employees, and the theories of Simon Cottle (media and communication), Pierre Bourdieu (sociology) and Eric Berne (transactional analysis). It focuses on the lived experience of the employees, so as to shed light on what was, on the one hand, a successful mix of collectivist and corporatist approaches to media production and organisation, but on the other, a failure in a period of turbulent change within the broadcasting environment. This chapter is also a reflection on historiography with specific attention being paid to the dialectical interaction between singular events (individual occurrences) and systemic narratives (general context). To this end, it draws inspiration from Cottle’s “macro-meso-micro” analytical frame, from Bourdieu’s concept of “autonomy” and from Berne’s “model of organisational dynamics”.
Bir kitle iletişim aracı olarak güncelliğini koruyan televizyon, afet dönemlerinde geniş kitlelere kesintisiz ulaşabilen bir enformasyon kaynağı olarak öne çıkmaktadır. Afet dönemlerinde gerçekleştirilen gerek canlı yayınlar gerekse kriz anlarına yönelik programlar, bu dönemde doğru bilgi almak isteyen kamu tarafından takip edilmektedir. Dijital iletişim teknolojileriyle ortaya çıkan alternatif haber kaynaklarının söz konusu olduğu günümüzde televizyon; editoryal süreçlerden geçmesi, yetkililer ve izleyiciler tarafından muhatap alınması, tecrübeye sahip ve kurumsallaşmış bir niteliğe sahip olması sebebiyle olağanüstü durumlarda daha “geçerli” bir enformasyon kaynağı olarak dikkate alınmaktadır. “Afet dönemlerinde bir kitle iletişim aracı olarak televizyonun rolü nedir ve nasıl olmalıdır?” sorusundan yola çıkan çalışmada sektörel ve akademik tecrübeye sahip uzmanlarla derinlemesine görüşmeler gerçekleştirilecek, internet yayıncılığı ve televizyon karşılaştırması etik, canlı yayın, eşik bekçiliği ve iletişim eğitimi odağında tartışmaya açılacaktır. Çalışmanın sonuçlarının değişen dünyada televizyon yayıncılığının sürdürülebilirliği, televizyonculuk ve internet yayıncılığının entegrasyonu ve afet dönemlerinde televizyonun güvenilir bir bilgi kaynağı olarak dikkate alınması konusunda önemli ipuçları barındırması beklenmektedir.
This chapter examines key elements of the institutional, economic, and industrial contexts that are fuelling the cultural diversification of ‘high-end’ TV drama devised for international distribution. It foregrounds four areas of focus. First are the characteristics and distinctions of television’s multiplatform era, as one profoundly shaped by internet distribution, the expansionist objectives of multinational subscription video-on-demand providers (SVoDs), and a continuing shift towards the online consumption of TV programming. Second are broadly applicable changes to the cost and prevailing forms of ‘high-end’ drama, which can be linked to its strategic function for both SVoDs and broadcasters and to this drama’s irreversible internationalisation. Third, the impacts on this drama’s financing and commissioning at a national level are explored through a case study of the UK, as a significant producer of widely distributed ‘high-end’ drama. Fourth, this chapter explains the strategies for drama coproduction that distinguish the older practices of ‘international coproduction’ from the newer strategies now shaping cross-national collaboration in TV drama, a paradigm that Michele Hilmes (Media Industries, 1(2): 10–15, 2014) calls ‘transnational coproduction’.
This research critiques Western approaches to social media by using an Indigenous theoretical tool/concept, the Moanan (Pacific Islander) conception of tā and vā, to center Indigenous knowledge through an analysis of the Kū Kiaʻi Kahuku community movement (an Indigenous and ecological stand for environmental justice to protect native species and push back against colonial development in the form of giant wind turbines (568 feet high) placed over schools and the homes of community members and Kanaka Maoli in Kahuku, Hawaiʻi). We argue that Kū Kiaʻi Kahuku’s livestreaming inspired movement within the space of digital connectivity, a civic rhythm, forging symmetry and reciprocity within sociospatial ties. Moanan peoples inscribed within social media a distinct Moanan rhythm. In this case, the vibrations of the protecting, an affectively charged tā, engaged the community and diaspora in a moment of rupture—opening up a space for symmetry within the dissymmetry of colonial capitalism.
An important interpretative theme of this collection is the question of whose viewpoints these comedies represent. Charlie Chaplin supposedly said that life is a tragedy seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot, a saying which nicely encapsulates the distinct view which comedy has of any history, situation or community, a view through an alternative lens. This is argued by Bakhtin (1981, 1984) to be the inverted viewpoint produced by satire, one which happily represents the aspects of the world which a more proper, serious and official version suppresses or ignores. Bakhtin reminds us that jokers can ‘create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope’ (1981: 159) becoming keepers of the gateway to this alternative viewpoint, from which something which is officially ‘taken seriously’ can be laughed at and a symbolic boundary transgressed. As well as social, these symbolic boundaries are cultural (Douglas [1975] 1999) and psychological (Freud [1905] 1976), our surprised laughter or smile of recognition provoked by the realisation of the transgression. Stallybrass and White (1986) argue that the transgression of joking is a ‘symbolic struggle’ where there is some kind of contested boundary, and they describe Bakhtin’s notion of boundary-transgressing satire as ‘Janus-faced’ (1986: 13), neither inherently radical nor conservative, neither a preservation nor an upending of the social order (ibid.: 14). If we see the joking structure underlying comedy as ‘Janus-faced’, we can see the direction of the joke is not fixed: anyone can become the joker if an audience will laugh, laughter can be cruel or kind, exclusive or inclusive, told from the inside or the outside—in each instance, we can ask who or what is being laughed at and who we are laughing with. ‘UK and Irish Television Comedy: Representations of Region, Nation, and Identity’ explores television comedy drawn from across the UK and Ireland ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. This introduction frames the collected chapters within theories of comedy and discusses their context within existing scholarship on UK and Irish comic representations of region and identity, particularly on television. Key ideas addressed here include analysis of the viewpoints of these regional comedies and the targets at which their jokes are aimed. This chapter presents an overview of the collection’s engagement with the particularity of the lived experience of time and place embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives experience and sensibilities which the collected individual chapters offer. It also highlights the wealth of reflection and range of perspectives the collection offers on funny and engaging representations of the diverse fragmented complexity of UK and Irish identity explored thorough the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.
This chapter focusses more specifically on Netflix’ texts to discuss how it is positioned within national media systems as cultural artefacts. First, it looks at how the binge model draws on social media and the instant communication possible through the internet to explain how Netflix positions itself transnationally. The chapter then moves on to discuss a ‘grammar of transnationalism’ visible in Netflix’ in-house productions to make integration into different national media systems possible. This chapter then analyses how Netflix makes the domestication of texts possible through its extension of translation options, increasingly available from the outset. These aspects position Netflix as transnational broadcaster that manages to cater to ideological constructs of ‘the nation’, but simultaneously also evades these concepts by highlighting aspects that serve an idea of transnationalism.
This chapter deals with the way Netflix employs binge-watching as a structuring force in its organisation and publication of content. In this discussion, this chapter puts Netflix’ organisational structure in relation to the linear television schedule, discussing similarities and differences. Central to this are Lisa Perks’ (Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2015) concepts of insulated flow and entrance flow. Insulated flow describes the way Netflix forwards binge-watching as a mode of viewing through features like the post play or skip intro function while entrance flow describes the way viewers find new texts to binge-watch. In the case of Netflix, entrance flow is guided by algorithms that nudge viewers towards different texts, sometimes following the logics of the linear television schedule, such as through the central role of genre. Thus, this chapter offers an analysis of binge-watching as a central concept to guide the structuring of Netflix.
The Introduction of this book sets out the parameters of the debates of this study. It sets out the broader themes of this book and positions Netflix within the context of reconceptions of television (Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, Routledge, New York, N.Y, 2005) and the processes of TV IV. It introduces the broader themes and structure of this book: a focus on television’s ancillary technologies in the TV II and TV III era to place Netflix within a broader television history, the centrality of binge-watching to the structure, marketing and branding of Netflix and its broader role as transnational television within a dialectic relationship between the national and the transnational. These three parts are drawn together by an overall theme of the concept of control in relation to television and the way this positions Netflix within the processes of TV IV.
Peace is usually studied by looking at nation-states. Recently, peace scholars have become interested in peace found in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I argue that media scholars can contribute to this effort because they are well-equipped to capture fleeting manifestations of everyday peace. However, the problematic legacy of peace in Israel/Palestine necessitates a different conceptual framework. I highlight encounters in and through media between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and contend that they present opportunities for constructive dialogue. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the Israeli television show Arab Labor, focusing on its production process, and the plight of Jewish and Palestinian characters on the show. By fusing text and context, I suggest that media do not persuade people to believe in peace; instead, media encounters, both on and off the screen, function as cultural forums for discussing complex issues undergirding violent conflicts.
This paper aims to create a shorthand for video game history-from video games' infancy to the current subscription model that is dominating gaming. In this essay, I will apply the practices of historical media scholarship that have helped parse out television history (e.g., TV I, TV II, TV III, and TV IV) and film history (e.g., Cinema 1, 2, and 3.0) to define the various shifts in video game history. Gaming I represents the arcade and home system boom up until the 1983 video game Crash, Gaming II describes the post-Crash console period, and finally, Gaming III materializes due to the arrival of modern video game subscriptions. Rather than constructing an exhaustive account of video game history, this essay means to generate more studies on what video game history can mean in the context of the established academic studies on visual media.
This chapter introduces Bull’s study of televisual discourses on DNA in the early twenty-first century. Situating the book in relation to existing work on the gene in cinema, literature and other media, Bull engages with debates about medium specificity to explain why television is a key site for the genetic imaginary. She re-examines theoretical concepts by Horace M. Newcomb, Paul M. Hirsch and Raymond Williams, arguing that television functions as a cultural forum on genetics that stages multifaceted negotiations between long-standing essentialist ideas and new genetics. TV, she proposes, is articulating an emergent post-genomic structure of feeling. The chapter also presents Bull’s methodological approach of analysing a wide range of US and UK programmes across an extended transnational viewing strip.
The claim of truth telling is a feature that connects very different forms of testimony. The essay distinguishes two forms of testimonial truth: discursive truth is a claim of validity while making assertions to others. Existential truth is a claim that a person does not discursively raise, but embodies. Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction between knowing the truth and being the truth, but also Michel Foucault’s reflections on the ancient concept of Parrhesia can be read and interpreted as contributions to existential truth. Every single form of testimony is a different mix of both dimensions of truth telling. Furthermore, three aspects characterise the performativity of witnessing: making an assertion (third-person perspective), providing assurance (second-person perspective), and expressing oneself as a human being (first-person perspective).
Following the marked increase in the use of digital technologies during the recent pandemic, the article reconsiders the concept of social telepresence, in the sense of interpersonal connection at a distance, locating it in the longue durée and within media studies. It reminds the reader that, for centuries, when people were separated from one another by the force of various circumstances, including pandemics, they resorted to technologies at their disposal to experience telepresence, long before the term itself was coined by scholars. Foremost among these has been the epistolary, a vitally important interpersonal media largely overlooked by media and telepresence researchers. Rather than competitively evaluating the performance of various technologies, the article proposes a framework to compare them, along with the practices of social telepresence, in the course of history. This comparative program employs the following criteria: embodiment, synchronicity, the space of the encounter, the ontology of entities other than humans actuated by telepresence and the social preferences for different forms of telepresence.
Civilian victims of aerial warfare too often go uncounted and unrecognised by the belligerents. Myriad images and video of attacks against Syrian civilians did little to end their suffering, for example. The UK-based not-for-profit Airwars has had tangible impact on civilian harm disclosures and reparations because they have been able to shape such representations in a form that will be recognised by those with the power to enact change. Building on established theories of media witnessing and their extension to what Gray calls ‘data witnessing’, we argue that Airwars reveals the operative role of framing in open-source investigation and the forms of it witnessing it produces. Through interviews with key team members and detailed analysis of Airwars published methodology and other materials, this article shows how open-source investigations broadens the frame for witnessing civilian harm and in doing so generates relational, multi-scalar accounts of state violence that remain open to contestation and confirmation. In doing so, Airwars claims an epistemic authority via its distinctive framing of emergent practices of witnessing that depend upon the assembling of roles, standards, spatialities and techniques.
Netflix’s status as a personalised service has been central to its business proposition and brand. However, recent changes to include community-based metrics within the user interface – such as the 2020 addition of a national top 10 feature – denote a shift in corporate strategy from personalisation to communal discovery. This article uses a critical communications and media industry studies approach to consider both the data being produced by the top 10 ranking and the broader industrial function of the list, especially within a longer history of audience measurement.
This article explores methods and approaches by which scholars can examine the representation of intelligence agencies in television drama, arguing that television can be productively separated from literature and film by virtue of its mass audience, its institutional character, and the form of the episodic series, which typically causes its narratives to hew towards the conservative and affirmative. This will be explored through and complicated by a case study of the career of television writer George Markstein and three series which he played a key role in creating and overseeing: The Prisoner, Special Branch and Mr Palfrey of Westminster.
What defines the memorial museum in the digital age? This chapter introduces the volume 'The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age' thinking through the extent to which the digital marks a radical shift in memorial museum practice. The chapter explores three core themes which emerge throughout this volume: the tension between the national and transnational in memorial museums; the relationship between the memorial museum and "the multitude" (Hoskins 2018); and the extent to which digital technologies affect the authenticity claims so important to the presentation of material evidence in memorial museums.
In the following interview, Chao Tayiana Maina, founder of African Digital
Heritage, explains the work she and colleagues are doing to use digital
technology in order to memorialise concentration camps created by the British
in Kenya during the ‘Mau Mau Emergency’, at a time when the history and
memories attached to the physical sites are at risk of being forgotten. What
follows is the result of email exchanges between Tayiana and this volume’s
editor Victoria Grace Walden, in 2020. Tayiana founded African Digital
Heritage in 2018. The project explores how colloquial, public history work
can counter the forgetting imposed by colonialism and provide new ways of conceptualising the idea of the ‘memorial museum’ beyond top-down,
institutionalised (and often state-sponsored) collective memory. African Digital
Heritage reimagines ‘collective memory’ through public dialogue against
the inaccessible colonial archives that have constructed a history of Kenya,
which does not present the histories of the people of Kenya. In the spirit of
the orality central to the African Digital Heritage, this chapter is presented as a conversation (albeit a written one).
The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age is the first comprehensive review of thinking and practice related to the effects and affects of the digital for memorial museums. These commemorative and educational spaces have traditionally contained object-heavy displays to stand-in for people, cultures and things that have been destroyed. What then happens when collected material evidence is presented to visitors/ users in digitalised forms – distanced from the material proximity offered at so-called ‘authentic sites’? Whilst memorial museums have often been celebrated for their commemorative and educative agendas, they are also political and tend to reiterate museological logics deeply embedded in problematic histories of arranging cultural objects and identities. Can digital technologies offer the potential to rearrange or resituate the memorial museum into activist spaces? Can going online disrupt the national memory politics that commonly characterise memorial museums, or does it enable more of the same? These are some of the questions that interest the contributors of this collection.
Whilst there is a growing number of publications interested in museums and the digital, the specificity of the memorial museum is understudied. Yet, it raises particular concerns relating to preservation, materiality, ethics, and absence that require careful consideration in relation to the digital. After a theoretical consideration of what the memorial museum is and could be in this ‘digital age’, this book offers a series of case studies written by curators, artists, and academics covering memorial museum examples in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Within this chapter I evaluate the still unfolding evolution of digital
resources in the case of museum and archive practice related to Nagasaki
and their suitability in assisting in the task of teaching the difficult history
of the atomic bombing. Memorial museums do exist to convince, and to assist the public in recalling public and collective trauma. Such museums were established in Nagasaki (and Hiroshima) specifically to convince the public of the necessity to avoid any repetition of such an event in the future. I raise here the possibility that digital
techniques offer apposite methods that potentially reflect the fractured and
incomplete nature of memory that supports the work of historiography
(Williams 2012). In displaying a traumatic subject whether through physical
objects, or the digital, an ongoing contest between the narrative and the fragmentary is apparent – and the ultimately un-knowable story is told by fragments displayed or represented. The basis of the discussion in this chapter is my own extensive fieldwork involving multiple visits to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum between 2008 and 2019, supported by references within the literature, and my communication including emails to local public historians. Additionally, the work depends upon my analysis
of emerging digital representations of the narrative of the bombing of Nagasaki. My wider work as historian in Nagasaki has involved extensive oral history interviews over many years with multiple sufferers of the bombing including the Catholic community, resulting in my book length monograph about their experiences, Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives (McClelland, 2019a).
The link between crime and the media is a longstanding one. Indeed, crime is one of the mainstays of traditional and contemporary media, alongside politics and sports. This volume of the Advances in Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Penology series includes a series of contributions that examine a number of crimes, which include cases that are both notorious and interesting. The volume has contributions from a number of eminent criminologists, who have a combined expertise in the field which lends itself to a collection of both depth and variety of discussion and analysis. As criminology has become more popular, it is now a topic that engenders a great deal of media coverage, with films, documentaries, podcasts, and even whole channels dedicated to famous and infamous cases. While this increase in popularity is welcome, it also necessitates a greater level of expertise and analysis.
Digital technologies, which have changed the media environment, have witnessed a significant change with the emergence of OTT platforms in television broadcasting. With the opening of national OTT platforms in Turkey, a change has begun in terms of television production practices and audience preferences/experiences. From this point of view, this study aims to examine the opinions and attitudes of young audiences in Turkey towards watching dizi (Turkish TV drama) on OTT platforms and the consistency of their experiences and practices reflected in their watching behaviours. In this context, two-stage research consisting of survey and focus group interviews was designed. The first stage -an internet survey- determines the differences and similarities of audience experience on the traditional television dizi versus on OTT platform dizi. In the second stage of the study, the research questions were deepened on a limited sample based on the data that half of the dizi audience were between the ages of 18-34, in line with the survey findings. In this context, focus group discussions were held with eighteen participants in three sessions. In the sessions, questions categorized in three themes according to the survey results were asked. The data obtained from both studies were evaluated together; collected under three thematic titles, visualized through tables, and analyzed and interpreted in the context of critical theories prominent in recent audience studies.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.