Televisual Culture – serie

Television before TV rethinks the history of interwar television by exploring the medium’s numerous demonstrations organized at national fairs and international exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Building upon extensive archival research in Britain, Germany, and the United States, Anne-Katrin Weber analyses the sites where the new medium met its first audiences. She argues that public displays offered spaces where television's symbolic, cultural, political, and social definitions were negotiated and eventually stabilized; for the historian, the exhibitions therefore constitute crucial events to understand not only the medium's pre-war emergence, but also its subsequent domestication in the post-war years. Designed as a transnational study, her book highlights the multiple circulations of artefacts and ideas across borders of democratic and totalitarian regimes alike. Richly illustrated with 100 photographs, Television before TV finally emphasizes that even without regular programmes, interwar television was widely seen.

Media philosophy can only be found and revealed in media themselves. The essays collected in this volume thus approach television as a medium both of thought and of action in its own right. Through its specific forms and practices, television implements and reflects on aspects of time, such as synchronicity and succession, seriality and event, history and memory. Additionally, television stages new forms of thinking causality and agency, subject-object relations, tactility, choice, and other founding concepts of everyday experience as well as of outstanding philosophical relevance. In the course of media evolution, television organizes the transition from the analogue to the digital. Last not least, by conceiving of itself, television offers a source of finally thinking through television.

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.

Visions of Electric Media is an historical examination into the early history of television, as it was understood during the Victorian and Machine ages. How did the television that we use today develop into a functional technology? What did Victorians expect it to become? How did the 'vision' of television change once viewers could actually see pictures on a screen?, We will journey through the history of 'television´ from the first indications of live communications in technology and culture in the late nineteenth century, to the development of electronic televisual systems in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we will investigate the philosophy, folklore, engineering practices, and satires that went into making television a useful medium.

Cross-Cultural Television Audiences in the Age of Streaming explores how streaming platforms have transformed cross-cultural television audiences, reshaping the production, distribution, and interpretation of global TV dramas in a transcultural and transnational context.The book looks at production and distribution as well as the negotiation of meaning in a transcultural and transnational context. Revisiting and updating the influential research of Liebes and Katz, “The Export of Meaning”, on international and intercultural audience decoding of the American TV series Dallas, the book offers fresh insights into the global flows and contra-flows of TV dramas in the streaming era. By replicating, updating, and complementing one of the most influential research paradigms in audience studies, all authors in this book take the study of Liebes and Katz as a reference point and thus make it highly relevant for today’s television and streaming reality.Written in an engaging and accessible style, this timely cross-disciplinary book is an essential reading for students and scholars in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies and for anyone interested in contemporary television and streaming culture.

How do streaming platforms like Netflix change television, and what can the paratexts of television and streaming series tell us about the ongoing transformation of television as both a medium and a cultural practice? This book offers a key to a sophisticated analysis of television’s economic and institutional diversification in the contemporary platform ecology.Drawing attention to the commercial, dispositive and textual framing of audio-visual series in the age of pay-tv, DVD boxsets and video-on-demand, Jana Zündel contributes to a television theory that is conceived laterally and informed textually. The analysis combines an attention to surfaces with a keen understanding of its changing infrastructures. It reveals the connections between the textual organization of a series episode and the economic and wider disposition of the different kinds of television. The book argues that television is evolving into a hybrid medium and offers a new conceptual framework to account for this transformation.Tracking the differentiation and pluralisation of television as a medium and a reception practice by looking at TV and web series and how they are framed on platforms and through paratexts, this book allows for insights into an overarching transformation in media culture, which television has already helped to shape. It will be of interest to researchers in Media and Cultural Studies in general and television studies, studies in audiovisual series, digital media culture, interface studies and platform studies in particular.

Television as we knew it is irrevocably changing. Some are gleefully announcing the death of television, others have been less sanguine but insist that television is radically changing underneath our eyes. Several excellent publications have dealt with television’s uncertain condition, but few have taken the specific question of what television’s transformations mean for the discipline of Television Studies as a starting point. The essays collected in this volume aim to fill this void. Two fundamental questions string the various contributions together. First, is television really in crisis or is the present not so extraordinary when revisiting television’s development? Second, should we invent new theoretical concepts or are our old ones still perfectly relevant? To answer such questions the authors in this volume take up diverse case studies, ranging from the academic series Reading Contemporary Television to Flemish Fiction, from nostalgic programming on broadcast television to YouTube, from tell-sell television shows to public television art in the 1980s.

This collection explores television as both a medium of thought and action with its own philosophical dimensions.

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture.

Visions of Electric Media is an historical examination into the early history of television, as it was understood during the Victorian and Machine ages. How did the television that we use today develop into a functional technology? What did Victorians expect it to become? How did the 'vision' of television change once viewers could actually see pictures on a screen?, We will journey through the history of 'television´ from the first indications of live communications in technology and culture in the late nineteenth century, to the development of electronic televisual systems in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we will investigate the philosophy, folklore, engineering practices, and satires that went into making television a useful medium.