FILM 46.07 Television and New Media
This course examines the transformation of television in both its commercial and public-service forms by the rise of the internet as a mass medium, YouTube and participatory culture, and most recently, social networks and mobile communication. On the one hand, it will show, digital technologies and computer networks have disrupted the historical power relations between television networks and their audiences, enabling viewers to watch programming whenever and wherever they like, to avoid commercials, and to become producers themselves; yet at the same time, networks and advertisers are quickly finding new ways to adapt older business models and forms of storytelling to today's multi-platform media environment. Attention is paid to questions of agency in the control of programming flows and consumption; the shift from ratings to analytics, the emergence of transmedia storytelling as a production model; new forms of digital aesthetics (e.g., “slow TV”); and celebrity, branding, and neoliberal citizenship.
Instructor
M. Roberts