Media and Communication Open Access Journal | ISSN: 2183-2439
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Media and Communication Open Access Journal | ISSN: 2183-2439 Volume 4, Issue 3 (2016) (Not Yet) The End of Television Editor Milly Buonanno Media and Communication, 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3 Issue: (Not Yet) The End of Television Published by Cogitatio Press Rua Fialho de Almeida 14, 2º Esq., 1070-129 Lisbon Portugal Academic Editor Milly Buonanno, University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy Managing Editor António Vieira, Cogitatio Press, Portugal Available online at: www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication This issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). Articles may be reproduced provided that credit is given to the original and Media and Communication is acknowledged as the original venue of publication. Table of Contents Thematic Issue on The End of Television (Not Yet): Editor’s Introduction Milly Buonanno 95-98 Television in Latin America Is “Everywhere”: Not Dead, Not Dying, but Converging and Thriving Guillermo Orozco and Toby Miller 99-108 “There Will Still Be Television but I Don’t Know What It Will Be Called!”: Narrating the End of Television in Australia and New Zealand Jock Given 109-122 Re-Locating the Spaces of Television Studies Anna Cristina Pertierra 123-130 Not Yet the Post-TV Era: Network and MVPD Adaptation to Emergent Distribution Technologies Mike Van Esler 131-141 The End of Television—Again! How TV Is Still Influenced by Cultural Factors in the Age of Digital Intermediaries Gunn Enli and Trine Syvertsen 142-153 Digital Media Platforms and the Use of TV Content: Binge Watching and Video-on-Demand in Germany Lothar Mikos 154-161 The End of the Television Archive as We Know It? The National Archive as an Agent of Historical Knowledge in the Convergence Era Berber Hagedoorn and Bas Agterberg 162-175 Still ‘Watching’ TV? The Consumption of TV Fiction by Engaged Audiences Alexander Dhoest and Nele Simons 176-184 Taming Distraction: The Second Screen Assemblage, Television and the Classroom Markus Stauff 185-198 Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183-2439) 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 95-98 Doi: 10.17645/mac.v4i3.661 Editorial Thematic Issue on The End of Television (Not Yet): Editor’s Introduction Milly Buonanno Department of Communication and Social Research, La Sapienza University of Roma, 00198 Roma, Italy; E-Mail: [email protected] Submitted: 1 May 2016 | Published: 14 July 2016 Abstract This editorial provides background considerations for challenging the long taken-for-granted narrative of the passing of television in the digital era, thus inviting scholars to re-interrogate the place of the medium in the new technology- saturated environment from perspectives that are not informed by the unquestioned assumption that the age of televi- sion is over. Keywords broadcasting; change; continuity; digital; microcasting; obsolescence Issue This editorial is part of the issue “(Not Yet) the End of Television”, edited by Milly Buonanno (University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy). © 2016 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). In November 2014 Netflix CEO pronounced that televi- television of sharedness, of family togetherness— sion will be dead by 2030. Hardly a new prediction, in under the disrupting, disuniting impact of media digiti- actual fact, as statements of the soon-to-come collapse zation. The digital optimists, on the contrary, welcome of broadcast TV have resounded in media pundits dec- the rise of the post-broadcast era which—by disclosing larations since mid–Eighties. In turn the academy— an unprecedented range of contents, and allowing un- which “every decade or so…is gripped by a fascination” restrained time, space and modes of access to an array (Livingstone, 2008, p. vii) with some new develop- of platforms, screens, outputs—is deemed to demo- ments—has not remained immune to this same ten- cratically satisfy individual needs and demands of free dency. Media and cultural studies’ fascination with choice and control over television experience. Yet the technological transformations in the digital age, and two antithetical perspectives converge to provide the the ensuing establishment of the (hierarchized) distinc- same diagnosis that television is over. tion between new media and old media, has in fact Is television really dying? In a sense, we could say turned the obsolescence of television as we knew it in- that television has never been so healthy and trium- to a key issue in early 2000s years, thus making ‘the phant as nowadays: it has entered an age of ‘plenty’ end of TV” a familiar trope in scholarly discourses (Katz (Ellis, 2000), characterized by unceasing proliferation of & Scannel, 2009). channels, uncontainable spread of output across me- The passing of the broadcast era is being ap- dia, screens, platforms, and national and transnational proached from two different perspectives, arousing phenomena of fully-immersive, addictive fandom that opposing feelings of anxiety or satisfaction. The leading was unthinkable in the old days when audiences were cultural studies scholar Graeme Turner has coined the known as passive ‘couch potatoes’. But on the other definitions of ‘broadcast pessimism’ and ‘digital opti- hand it might appear that owing precisely to the trans- mism’ (Turner & Tay, 2010, p. 32), to encapsulate the formation undergone by the medium in the digital age, two diverging standpoints. The proponents of broad- television as we know it is definitely coming to an end. cast pessimism complain that we are witnessing the in- Worries about the disappearance of television, exorable obsolescence of traditional television—the manifested by the broadcast pessimists, are hardly an Media and Communication, 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 95-98 95 unprecedented cultural phenomenon. As the wonder- novelty’ (Mulgan, 1990, p. 18), which fuels the highest ful book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2006) compellingly expectations towards the new digital environment with demonstrates, “the anxiety of obsolescence” has been its cornucopia of technologies of agency and liberation; a regular feature of the history of almost all the tech- and the “rejection and denigration” (Newman & Lev- nologies and cultural forms of modernity, and has con- ine, 2012, p. 2) that cultural élites have long expressed cerned from time to time novel, movie, radio, press, towards broadcast Tv, as a low-quality medium suited painting, photography etc. (all of which are still with us, to passive mass-audiences. albeit reshaped). In reality, the anxiety of obsolescence In keeping with the hunger for television obsoles- (or the opposite, the hunger: a point I will return to cence, the enduring ‘substitution approach’ so often later) is perhaps less interesting for its alleged capacity prevailing in discussions about the media and their to identify endangered technologies and cultural forms evolutionary steps has expressed itself all too easily in than for what it discloses about the way we conceive of declarations, predictions and expectations concerning those forms and envisage their possible evolution. It the imminent demise of broadcasting. By substitution may be the case, for instance, that worries about the approach I refer to the intellectual penchant—to be death of television help to unveil underlying essential- found well beyond media studies—of conceiving pro- ist conceptions of the medium, tending to solidify its cesses of change and development in terms of dis- nature into a set of given and unchanging characteris- placement of the ‘old’ by the ‘new’. U. Beck has de- tics: essentialist visions that resist coming to terms fined this ‘either-or’ stance as “the mode of exclusive with processes of becoming. Further interesting and distinction”, as opposed to “the mode of inclusive dis- consequential aspect: as suggested by the Thomas tinction” that accommodates co-existence and over- theorem (Thomas & Thomas, 1928), discourses on the lapping of differents phases, forms and directions of demise of TV end up by conferring on their subject a becoming (Beck, 2003), rather than postulating an in- status of reality. In fact, whether this ‘definition of the evitable sequence of obsolescence and replacement. situation’ emanates from broadcast pessimism or digi- The inescapability of such sequence is never so taken tal optimism, it achieves to bring into existence the for granted as when the drivers of the change are be- ‘epochal phenomenon’ of the end of television, and to lieved to be the new technologies, whether this sug- validate the largely taken-for-granted assumption that gests pessimistic or optimistic predictions. Then, the broadcast era has definitely given way, for better whereas broadcast pessimists mourn the loss of the (the optimists) or for worse (the pessimists), to the television’s ability to address the national community, present post-broadcast, post-network era. putting the blame on the fragmentation brought about Writing about literary fiction Frank Kermode af- by media digitization, the optimists—who have on their firmed that as readers “we hunger for ends and for cri- side the digital orthodoxy enthusiastically embraced by ses” (Kermode, 1996, p. 5). In the context of Kermode’s conventional wisdom—celebrate the much awaited discourse hunger for ends refers to a sense-making decline of a top-down centralized medium, superseded process; but the expression can be appropriated in its by a more progressive delivery system attuned to plain meaning