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Summary Television and digital convergence 2022
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Samenvatting Television and digital convergencehoofdstuk 1: television studies
1.1. What is television?
- box in the living room ? → TV IS ALL OF THESE THINGS
- programs ?
- channels broadcasting programs ? - TV has many aspects
- institutions behind these channels ? - Important not to reduce it to one aspect
- companies producing programs ? - These aspects are related to each-other
- people watching programs ? - TV is also related to social, cultural and
historical context
conclusion: TV is a complex phenomenon
We are part of the cord cutter generation: we stop taking subscriptions
→ first aim of this course: exploring the different aspects of television
TV changes
- TV has always evolved, from the very beginning
- in recent years: it became more radical change due to digitization and convergence
- the border between television and other media becomes less clear
- this has an impact on production, distribution, content and audiences
→ second aim: exploring the impact of digitization and convergence on TV
TV 1.0: broadcasting
- mass medium: one sender, many receivers → huge audiences, all watching the same stuff at
the same time
- programs watched at time they are transmitted
- watching at home
- watching on a television set
- TV signal travels through aerials, dishes or cables → these are different ways but they are very
much the same because at one point you get one signal
- all people watching certain channel see the same thing at the same time
- schedules → really important to put the right program at the right time
- Prime time: the time that people are home and are able to watch (the most important)
TV 2.0: digital TV
- many digital signals, decoded by TV of set-top box → the signal is now digital signal
- individualized viewing, ‘me TV’ → broadcasting (1.0) was collected in a family sphere, but
digital TV is more individualized (2.0)
- watching on other screens & devices like computers, mobile phones,...
- watching different content
- watching at different times → this is a huge difference, we used to sit down at a certain time
to watch a program, this is not how we watch TV anymore
1
, - watching in different places, outside the home
- no schedules
Is it still television?
- yes! TV is not dead → in a broad sense, TV is not dead
- traditional ways of watching continue, new ways are added
- still often mass audience
- TV adapts to new environment
- TV has always borrowed from other media and been hybrid
- explosion of content, e.g. Netflix, HBO, Amazon,... creating TV series
- more TV, even more ‘good’ TV?
But… TV is changing
in terms of technology, production, technology, content, viewing
connected to broader digital culture
1. production: different companies entering production → production used to be something
only big companies could do bcs it’s really technical but now you could do it with little
technology
2. distribution: on different platforms (Netflix, YouTube,...)
3. viewing
a. on different devices: PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone
b. outside of the domestic context: on the go, in public…
c. at own pace: entire season, binge-watching…
d. different selection process: choosing from catalogue
e. more than watching: more interactive, participatory, connected,...
1.2. Studying television
Television is not a neutral object → with gaming and social media there is always the ‘worry’ and we
also have these worries with TV (for example: TV makes you lazy). Because TV is more low culture,
sometimes trashy, it is really for the masses which has again these negative connotations.
- From the start: both hopes and concerns about the medium
TV is often seen as ‘bad object’, lot of anxiety
- Low culture, simple, trash, lowest common denominator, formulaic, just entertainment
- Vs. art, high culture, creativity, originality, elevating viewers
- Watching TV as passive, lazy, couch potato (= sitting there like a plant, being passive), waste
of time, addiction
- Particulary bad for children: sex and violence,...
But TV is also seen as a good object: source of information about the world, connecting people,...
What is television studies?
- Relatively recent discipline
- Hybrid: roots in film studies, sociology, communication studies, history, TV journalism,
literary criticism…
- Trying to explain the specificity of television, compared to radio, cinema, internet…
- Problem: multiplicity of TV, many programs and aspects, public and commercial
2
, - Not a unified discipline: different approaches, focus on different aspects of TV → TV is
different kinds of things
It assumes television is a key part of lived, everyday culture in contemporary society and one which
may allow us to understand large parts of that culture. It is also an industrial entity produced
under specific conditions that require analysis precisely because it is one of our society's primary
storytellers, a resource and tool for learning, deliberation, debated, and persuasion, and a site
where power and ideology operate. (Gray & Lotz 2019, p. 24)
Often combination of program, audience, industry and context analysis
You can break it down in three key fields:
1. TV ‘texts’: content, programs, genres, representations… → vb. The Wire was used in courses
about social issues so you can really analyze the different aspects
2. Production: technology, ownership, industry, market, practices…
3. Audiences: uses, interpretations, evaluations… → what do audiences do with TV?
Roots of television studies
- Based on different fields and traditions, not unified
- Seeing television as worthy of study
- In early research: worry about (new) medium, negative effects of TV (sex and violence and
how it would effect younger viewers)
- Seen as popular and influential, important in everyday lives of viewers
- Quite quickly: domestic medium, central position in the living room
- For this reason: lot of state control, regulations, restricting the market → there were a lot of
states who tried to regulate the TV, to control the information you get
- Often state monopolies: public service broadcasting
- Tradition of studying TV, but only legitimate subfield in 1990s
- Roots in US and UK, but growing global approach → where does this knowledge come from?
The US is very strong so TV studies is very much US and UK and the references would be
mostly from here
A - social science approach
- Empirical research in psychology, sociology and communications
- Focus on influences and effects
- First predominant research paradigm: powerful effect on users → worrying about people's
minds and the influence that violence is ok
- From the 1950’s more complex: selective exposure and perception
- 1960s, Cold War: belief in strong effects → something we still worry about: the fear of the
effect of propaganda
- US: George Gebner, ‘cultural indicators’, TV as cultural storyteller → the kind of things you see
a lot partly shake your idea of reality
- UK: Glasgow University Media Project, criticizing biased information → we may not always be
aware of the POV the media takes
- Social science approaches are mostly something television studies reacts against:
quantitative, positivist, experimental research assuming negative effects
B - humanities approaches
- Literary studies, film studies
- First looking down on medium, from 1960s and 70s: critical approaches beyond judging
beauty of cultural products
3
, - Focus on construction of ideology and common sense
- Influence of Marxism, critical race & gender studies, psychoanalysis, rhetoric & discourse
theories, poststructuralism and postmodernism
- Focus more on programs, less on audience and effects
- Humanistic tradition: attention to text, not audience and production
- Influence on TV studies: understanding how programs work, how they create meaning,
offering tools for analytics
C - cultural studies approaches
CCCS: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies → some people worked together in the 60’s and
they were interested in popular culture so not just the high quality TV show but also the soaps
- Founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart at university of birmingham
- Focus on popular culture
- Concern for effect of industrialization, media as apparatus of state control
- Exploring role of texts in society → not just tv show but what does the show means to the
society
- Influence of semiotics: language & images carry meanings that connote power relations
- Focus on textual analysis, but also audiences and social context → trying to understand the
meaning of tv for the audiences through qualitative research
- encoding/decoding: ethnographic qualitative audience research → we give it sense and the
decoding is really what they would focus on
- Feminist perspectives → a lot of tv was seen as not worthy for attention because they were
created for or watched by the housewives
Cultural studies work thus came to represent a way to talk about markers of identity,
power, and the media, but it also represented a move beyond the humanistic determinism
(→ where you would look at a text and you know what is means: it is the same for everyone)
that the text answered all relevant questions, the political economic determinism (→ the
idea that the industry organizes is how we watch tv) that the structure of the industry
answered all relevant questions, and the reduction of audience behavior to quantifiable
effects particularly evident in US social scientific approaches to television. (Gray & Lotz 2019,
p. 18)
1.3. Aspects of television
TV is diverse and changing, but certain key characteristics
A. Importance of programs
B. Importance of national TV cultures
C. Connection with society
D. Importance of audiences
A - programs
- Strong focus on individual programs in TV studies
- Origins in 1970s and 1980s, in different ways of writing about TV
- Reviewing of programs in newspapers & magazines
- Criticism of programs as works of art
- Programs is seen as text
- Closely studying structure, characters and themes
- Cf. literature & drama
- Analysis: discovering structure and how meaning is constructed through images and sounds
- Setting up categories & making distinctions: rules & conventions of TV
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