Audience Affect, Interactivity, and Genre in the Age of Streaming TV
. Volume 16, Issue 2 November 2019 Navigating the Nebula: Audience affect, interactivity, and genre in the age of streaming TV James M. Elrod, University of Michigan, USA Abstract: Streaming technologies continue to shift audience viewing practices. However, aside from addressing how these developments allow for more complex serialized streaming television, not much work has approached concerns of specific genres that fall under the field of digital streaming. How do emergent and encouraged modes of viewing across various SVOD platforms re-shape how audiences affectively experience and interact with genre and generic texts? What happens to collective audience discourses as the majority of viewers’ situated consumption of new serial content becomes increasingly accelerated, adaptable, and individualized? Given the range and diversity of genres and fandoms, which often intersect and overlap despite their current fragmentation across geographies, platforms, and lines of access, why might it be pertinent to reconfigure genre itself as a site or node of affective experience and interactive, collective production? Finally, as studies of streaming television advance within the industry and academia, how might we ponder on a genre-by- genre basis, fandoms’ potential need for time and space to collectively process and interact affectively with generic serial texts – in other words, to consider genres and generic texts themselves as key mediative sites between the contexts of production and those of fans’ interactivity and communal, affective pleasure? This article draws together threads of commentary from the industry, scholars, and culture writers about SVOD platforms, emergent viewing practices, speculative genres, and fandoms to argue for the centrality of genre in interventions into audience studies.
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