Television studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era

Whilst the roots of media studies pre-date television, TV broadcasting has long provided a key disciplinary focus. Just as television came to dominate media usage in the late twentieth century, television studies became central to media studies. Recently, that centre has shifted. Increasingly, media studies academics have been distracted by the Internet. Not only did the Internet disrupt existing media industries, which first ignored, then struggled with the new technologies, but it also disrupted the academy. Incumbent academics, culturally habituated to viewing the world through television screens, suddenly found themselves threatened by a new generation whose vision was defined by an entirely different use of screens. The most obvious example of the shift was David Gauntlett’s provocative Media Studies 2.0 (2007) which overtly declared a new approach to understanding the media – de-privileging television and newspapers, and arguing for an Internet-centric mode of engagement. Also, Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (2006) proceeded to deprivilege traditional media industries, instead emphasizing the role of media users as complicit in new media production. In their wake, a new generation of media studies academics has emerged with little interest in the traditional areas of film, the press or television. Instead, they understand the future of media to be somehow associated with the Internet, and are keen to explore the possibilities and potentials of those technologies of production and distribution. In short, television studies specifically and media studies more generally found itself in a parallel situation to the industries that it covered – and, like those industries, is still in the process of understanding the scale and scope of the current changes. Initially, the discipline grappled with how best to engage. Media studies textbooks began to include chapters which (initially unconvincingly) addressed the new media forms in isolation. Whilst the discourse has progressed, many still consider the Internet as separate from television; as something that exists in a different realm, engaged with in a different room, and conceived of and produced in a separate production sphere. This approach tends to conflate the Internet with the amateur and ignores the technically convergent shift towards Internet distribution by large sections of the media industries (e.g. television via Hulu, iView, iPlayer, iTunes and YouTube). A broader analysis of those trends suggests that the Internet is becoming a key delivery mechanism for media content, and that television studies needs to examine what this means. Rather than insist that the Internet is separate from traditional television cultures, it