Television

Gothenburg.
The next session at AoIR 2010 starts with Rachel McLean, whose interest is how technology configures the home, especially in relationship to the placement of shared entertainment technology. How is the family living room set up, and who controls the technology there, for example? This was examined for families in the northwest of England.

Social practices around the television have changed over the decades. Once, families would gather around the television in the corner of the living room like they did around the hearth; with digital technology, this gradually fragmented, though something of a digital hearth perhaps still exists in some cases. The UK family room in the year 2010 now accesses a wide variety of channels – where children’s TV was once shut down at 7 p.m., for example, some children’s channel will now be available at any time, as is a large number of other channels, as well as video games and other entertainment on demand.

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Mervi Pantti, whose interest is in the role of amateur images in the Iran election crisis. This was a key moment for using citizen-created content in mainstream news coverage, and such images became a focal point for the public response to the election aftermath. Such images were also very difficult to verify, however, raising questions for the journalistic process. Mervi examined the coverage of these protests by CNN, BBC One, and the Finnish broadcaster YLE.

Citizen-provided images are used to support the journalistic mediator’s claims about the truth of the event; they are valued as evidence of the events, and provide immediacy and a heightened reality effect. At the same time, they also present a risk to the journalist’s trustworthiness, especially if there is confusion about the origin of these images. Additionally, there are questions of responsibility here – some of the images show scenes which journalists themselves would not have covered or shown, for ethical reasons; amateur footage of violence, for example, can be used as an excuse from standard journalistic ethics. Transparency is the new strategic ritual in journalistic justifications in this context; it serves as a means of letting the audience know where these images come from.

Bremen.
The final speaker for the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Miriam Stehling, whose focus is on doing a comparative study of globally traded television formats; she’ll use the Top Model format as a case study. The key challenge here is to understand transculturality: new forms of cultural phenomena that go beyond or across cultures. There no longer is necessarily a congruence between culture and territory, and binary approaches to researching international communication cannot work here; instead, there needs to be a focus on similarities and connections between cultures.

Transculturality, then, requires new methods for empirical research, differentiating between transculturality as a research perspective and transculturality as practices of discourse and social action. Miriam’s study of global TV formats provides a perspective on this: there is a strategic transculturality that is used to maximise global profits, but also a transculturality of text (a common subject matter that makes sense for diverse audiences), and a transculturality of reception – in the production of transcultural meanings and/or in transcultural modes of reception.

Bremen.
The next speakers in this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference session are Tobias Kohler and Jan Müller, whose interest is in the computer-based analysis of television footage from multiple countries. This is part of a larger study into automated TV content processing, covering German, US, Brazilian, and Chinese television content. The material examined here, in particular, are the annual year-end review broadcasts. There are substantial format differences here, of course (in length as well as original placement in the broadcast schedule – German clips are longer stand-alone review shows, while US content was broadcast during news bulletins).

This content was coded by a team of students, annotating videos according to a variety of criteria (presence of key actors, setting, topics, etc.). This was done segment by segment, since a universal coding sheet which was applicable across some very different segment types proved very difficult to develop. This allows for a precise analysis – for example, comparing the amount of broadcast time devoted to media actors from specific countries.

Canberra.
The final session at the ANZCA 2010 conference starts with Carolyn Michelle, whose interest is in the TVNZ programme Reservoir Hill, released weekly as an online interactive drama and advertised on TV and buses; the story was about a teenage girl moving to a new city who resembled another girl from that community who had gone missing. Each of the Webisodes lasted some 6-10 minutes.

Viewers were encouraged to text in with comments and advice to the main character, and extra bonus scenes were created from this; they were also incorporated in further episodes, and viewers' names were acknowledged. There was also a video blog by the character, as well as Facebook and Bebo pages. Initially, the show had an audience of some 20,000, but gradually this audience declined; it also won a Digital Emmy.

Canberra.
The next presenter an ANZCA 2010 is Jennifer Robinson, whose interest is in interfaces to journalistic content. An interesting case study for this is the cable finance news channel Bloomberg TV, which presents its viewers with multiple concurrent information streams - apparently contradicting the view that there are natural limits to how much information the human brain can process at any one time.

There are different forms of viewing television, for example: staring (over 15 seconds, and not taking in much information); engaged looks (5-15 seconds); orienting (1.5-5 seconds); and monitoring (less than 1.5 seconds). Features that impact on information processing on the screen are clutter (and perceived clutter), intrusiveness of content (e.g. pop-up ads), and the content itself (edits, cuts, sounds, etc.).

Singapore.
Finally in this ICA 2010 session we move to Yvette Wohn, talking about how people tweet about TV. When TV was first introduced, it was seen as a social medium, as families gathered around it to watch; later, it was seen as creating a social gap, as enabling people to disengage from reality, as increasing individualism, and (when multiple TVs in the same home became more commonplace) as fragmenting families.

Today, people watch more TV than ever - now also online, on mobiles, and on timeshift devices. At the same time, TV use may be becoming more social again - echoing some of the early commercial attempts to introduce greater immediate social dimensions for television by adding a (telephone, online, ...) social backchannel to the television set or media device: today, it is social media that are adding that backchannel.

Singapore.
The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Singapore.
The next speaker at this ICA 2010 pre-conference is Nele Simons, whose focus is on the reception side of the emerging 'TV 2.0'. The two constituent trends here are digitisation (detaching TV content from the TV screen) and convergence (leading to cross- and transmedia forms) - so what does it mean today to engage with a TV series; how may we study it?

We need to reconsider our methodological approaches - one approach, which Nele explored, is a semi-structured, online TV diary that helps researchers understand audience members' viewing practices, with online follow-up and in-depth interviews. The semi-structured diary included categories such as watching episodes of a series (in whatever format), consuming media-related extras), consuming other extras, producing related content, and communicating about the TV series.

Hong Kong.
The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Donna Chu, who highlights the different forms of content creation which are emerging in Web 2.0 environments as the nature of production and consumption is shifting. Does this mean that users are empowered or exploited in this environment? What forms of civic participation are possible here?

Some of these questions are not new, but continue similar discussions in the area of fandom - fans have been creating content for a very long time, and have now simply moved online to share that content. Fans mobilise in support for discontinued TV shows, create petitions to save characters which are to be dumped from TV shows, etc. TV fans who participate in this way, though, are also contributing free labour to these TV shows, and could be seen as being exploited.