Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Television as Digital Media , scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries, economies, aesthetics, and various production, user, and audience practices, the contributors develop a new critical paradigm for thinking about television, and the future of television studies, in the digital era. The collection brings together established and emerging scholars, producing an intergenerational dialogue that will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between television and digital media.

Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC's iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience "anytime, anywhere," we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media.

Contributors . James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. ix)
• Introduction: Television as Digital Media (p. 1)
• Part I Switchover: Historicizing the Digital Revolution
• Convergence and Divergence: The International Experience of Digital Television (p. 31)
• When Digital Was New: The Advanced Television Technologies of the 1970s and the Control of Content (p. 52)
• ôIs It TV Yet?ö The Dislocated Screens of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture (p. 76)
• Part 2 Production Strategies in the Digital Landscape
• Cult Television as Digital Television's Cutting Edge (p. 105)
• Multiplatforming Public Service: The BBC'S ôBundled Projectö (p. 132)
• Little Kids' TV: Downloading, Sampling, and Multiplatforming the Preschool TV Experiences of the Digital Era (p. 158)
• Part 3 The Aesthetics of Convergence
• The ôBasis for Mutual Contemptö: The Loss of the Contingent in Digital Television (p. 181)
• Television's Aesthetic of Efficiency: Convergence Television and the Digital Short (p. 204)
• Scripted Spaces: Television Interfaces and the Non-Places of Asynchronous Entertainment (p. 230)
• Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic? (p. 255)
• Part 4 User-Generated Content: Producing Digital Audiences
• Worker Blowback: User-Generated, Worker-Generated, and Producer-Generated Content within Collapsing Production Workflows (p. 283)
• User-Created Content and Everyday Cultural Practice: Lessons from YouTube (p. 311)
• Architectures of Participation: Fame, Television, and Web 2.0 (p. 332)
• Bibliography (p. 359)
• Contributors (p. 373)
• Index (p. 377)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Bennett (Univ. of London, UK) and Strange (Univ. of Sussex, UK) have collected 13 essays that merge television studies with new media studies. The contributors are an eclectic group of scholars from the US, UK, and Australia. Unlike those who prophesy a new world order as user-generated content supplants traditional, centrally controlled media monoliths, they see new media forms as contributing to a natural evolution. Nothing is to be served by trying to distinguish between YouTube and network television (as some of the latter can be found on the former). Major media corporations still dominate the landscape in spite of a plethora of choices. Instead, new media studies need to examine the purpose of television in order to define it. The book revisits some of the themes Sharon Marie Ross introduced in Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (CH, Jan'09, 46-2498), and it also offers some dramatically different predictions about the future of television. One thing is certain: shifting economic and international influences will result in a very different television landscape, whatever "television" may mean. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. D. Caristi Ball State University