Flow TV

From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on smartphones and beyond, TV has overflowed its boundaries. If Raymond Williams' concept of flow challenges the idea of a discrete television text, then convergence destabilizes the notion of television as a discrete object.
Flow TV examines television in an age of technological, economic, and cultural convergence. Seeking to frame a new set of concerns for television studies in the 21st century, this collection of all new essays establishes television's continued importance in a shifting media culture. Considering television and new media not as solely technical devices, but also as social technologies, the essays in this anthology insist that we turn our attention to the social, political, and cultural practices that surround and inform those devices' use. The contributors examine television through a range of critical approaches from formal and industrial analysis to critical technology studies, reception studies, political economy, and critiques of television's transnational flows. This volume grows out of the critical community formed around the popular online journal Flow: A Critical Form on Television and Media Culture (flowtv.org). It is ideal for courses in television studies or media convergence.

Michael Kackman is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture Marnie Binfield is a doctoral student in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Matthew Thomas Payne is a doctoral student in Radio-Televison-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is coeditor (with Nina B. Huntemann) of Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, also published by Routledge. Allison Perlman is Assistant Professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark. Bryan Sebok is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Lewis and Clark College.

Introduction Part I: The Convergent Experience: Viewing Practices Across Media Forms 1. Media Interfaces, Networked Media Spaces, and the Mass Customization of Everyday Space, Daniel Chamberlain 2. "It's Just Like a Mini-Mall": Textuality and Participatory Culture on YouTube, David Gurney 3. TiVoing Childhood: Time-Shifting a Generation's Concept of Television, Jason Mittell 4. Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence Culture, Jack Bratich 5. Industry Convergence Shows: Reality TV and the Leisure Franchise, Misha Kavka Part II: Creating Authors / Creating Audiences 6. More "Moments of Television": Online Cult Television Authorship, Derek Kompare 7. The Reviews Are In: TV Critics and the (Pre)Creation of Meaning, Jonathan Gray 8. "Word of Mouth on Steroids": Hailing the Millennial Media Fan, Louisa Ellen Stein 9. Masters of Horror: TV Auteurism and the Progressive Potential of a Disreputable Genre, Heather Hendershot 10. 49 Up: Television, "Life-Time," and the Mediated Self, John Corner Part III: Technologies of Citizenship: Politics, Nationality, and Contemporary Television 11. Television/televisión, Hector Amaya 12. The Limits of the Cellular Imaginary, Eric Freedman 13. Extreme Makeover: Iraq Edition -- "TV Freedom" and Other Experiments for "Advancing" Liberal Government in Iraq, James Hay 14. Representing the Presidency: Viral Videos, Intertextuality, and Political Participation, Chuck Tryon 15. NASCAR Nation and Television: Race-ing Whiteness, L.S. Kim