From: Television After TV, Spigel, L. & Jan Olsson, Eds. (Duke UP, 2004)
JOHN CALDWELL CONVERGENCE TELEVISION: AGGREGATING FORM AND REPURPOSING CONTENT IN THE CULTURE OF CONGLOMERATION I was on a panel called "Profiting from Content," which was pretty funny considering no one thinks we can.-Larry Kramer, CEo, cBs Marketwatch.com, quoted in Ameri can Way, December 15, 2000 "The New Killer App [television]" -title of article from Inside, December 12, 2000 With the meteoric rise and fall of the dot-corns between 1995 and zooo, high-tech media companies witnessed a marked shift in the kind of explanatory discourses that seemed to propel the media toward an all-knowing and omnipresent future-state known as "convergence." Early adopters of digital technology postured and distin guished their start-ups in overdetermined attempts to promote a series of stark binaries: old media versus new media, passive versus interactive, push versus pull. These forms of promotional "theorization" served well the proprietary need for the dot-corns to individuate and to sell their "vaporware" (a process by which products are prematurely hyped as mere concepts or prototypes before actual products are available, all in an effort to preemptively stall the sales and market share of existing products by competitors). Both practices-theorizing radical discontinuity with previous media and hyping vaporware-proved to be effective in amass ing inordinate amounts of capital and in sending to the sidelines older From: Television After TV, Spigel, L. & Jan Olsson, Eds. (Duke UP, 2004). competitors that actually had a product to sell. The tenor of this techno rhetorical war changed, however, after the high-tech crash. Many ob servers now recognized that a phalanx of old-media players had, in fact, steadily weathered the volatile shifts during this period, and they did so with greater market share and authority than ever before.
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