Pleasures of Transnational Cultural Modernity: Consumption of Television Reruns and Fan Practices (original) (raw)
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The Television Reader: Critical Perspectives in Canadian and US Television Studies, 2013
The first article in this section, by Eileen Meehan , updates critical political-economy research on the audience commodity. Television networks, advertisers, and ratings firms continue to trade commodity audiences. But Meehan argues that there are many varieties of viewer experience: "[W] e approach television as users, drop-in viewers, channel surfers, multiple screeners, casual viewers, focused viewers, engaged viewers, members of interpretive communities, fan consumers, and selfprogrammers"(165). Meehan's discussion of these novel TV viewer experiences contrasts with the old notion that TV viewers are "passive." Since the channels of mass TV broadcasting only allowed TV shows to flow in one direction, from a dominant sender (TV network) to a passive receiver (TV viewer), the audience was often institutionally constructed as mass of passive receivers of TV shows. Though one-way transmission is still a component of contemporary TV, many TV scholars are now less interested in making arguments about what TV networks are ostensibly doing to the audience (whether that be brainwashing them or engineering their pleasure) and more interested in exploring what people are actively doing, saying, and expressing in relation to their favourite TV shows. Using Web 2.0 technology and social networking platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), millions of TV lovers ritualistically and collaboratively talk about TV shows, create fan websites full of fan fiction, blog about characters, spoil revelations of reality TV shows, and vote for their favourite "idol." Television's mass audience of the network TV era is quickly morphing into groupings of very interactive TV show users.
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Television content has traditionally been associated with the cultural identity of a given territory, although in an increasingly global world, this relationship is under debate. From a comparative qualitative analysis of the Spanish scripted television format (STF) series Los Misterios de Laura and its adaptations for the United States and Italy, this research identifies differences between these versions in terms of narrative approach, television conventions, production context, and the use of the cultural imaginary. The findings imply the existence of aesthetic and narrative mechanisms associated with the production of cultural identity in STF fiction. They also reveal the existence of a belief within television culture that some audiences have tastes and expectations that depend on their cultural proximity to the content. This research highlights the relevance of the cultural and televisual productive contexts of each country to understand their adaptation processes.
Based on fifteen months of fieldwork with television and new media producers at the transnational "European" public television channel, ARTE, this article describes the ways in which staff are in the midst of reimagining the channel's "audience." On the one hand, staff continue to understand television audiences as primarily national, and only nationally coherent; on the other hand, ARTE's audiences are understood to be fast-dispersing as a result of new broadcast technologies and streaming web content. To reach dispersing audiences, and to better articulate its programming across borders, ARTE has partly shifted its efforts toward regathering its public through international events, festivals, and other off-screen engagements where its viewers become differently coherent and knowable. The article argues that such a strategy re-emplaces "fans and followers" of ARTE in ways that might foster collective identifications in ways that may be literally re-placing those engendered by traditional public broadcasting.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011
This special issue brings together a range of articles exploring the changing trends of television cultures in contemporary Asia over the past decade. With the process of deregulation and privatization of national broadcasting rights, coupled with the intensification of the rate of penetration of cable, satellite and digital communicative technologies; the experience of television viewing is becoming increasingly diffused and pluralized. The impact has been particularly accelerated in Asia, as evinced by the rapid liberalization of its media industries over the last two decades and the manner in which it has significantly freed up its airspace. Increasingly, private and even state broadcasters are compelled to fill the time slots with more programmes so as to generate revenues from advertisements. As broadcasting stations compete in importing external contents from popular American productions and other regional productions, locally made productions no longer define a country's televisionscape.
With the rise of television formats in global television, several studies have examined the economic, political, and cultural aspects of this media product's production and circulation. This study analyzes the complex path of a television drama series from a local critical and popular phenomenon to a global " quality " fiction format, focusing on the transnationalization process of the format of the Israeli program BeTipul from its arrival in the United States to its adaptation and reception in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. The study emphasizes the cross-cultural dialogic attributes of the quality fiction format, which support a strategy comprising both mutual benefits and competition, as opposed to the allegedly " odorless " or " neutral " features of reality and game-show formats.
Global Media and Communication, 2018
This article is concerned with the ways in which local/national drama becomes a global success, which strategies are developed to appeal to viewers within different cultural settings and how far this shift is important when re/thinking audience reception studies. The study answers this question by exploring the television (TV) drama series, The Magnificent Century (2011-2014) by conducting in-depth interviews in the Greek capital Athens and the Moroccan capital Rabat with viewers and the production and distribution team of the series. The findings show that potentials for pleasure in the consumption of drama are designed from the very beginning when thinking globally, to reduce cultural differences to a minimum, to finally fuse audiences' interpretative practices beyond cultural polarization to common understandings.
Global Television Formats. Understanding Television Across Borders
2013
Contemporary worldwide media environments experienced massive changes in recent years. The remarkable impact of social media and broader processes of digitalization and mobilization, which in turn preceded the rapid dynamics of media convergence, are the most common phenomena to name. Thus, it appears reasonable that the academic interest in particular developments and pheno¬mena of television, the classic fulcrum in global media studies, seemingly decreases. However, the collection edited by Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Georgia State University, proves television studies to be a still relevant, fruitful and highly contentious field of enquiry for understanding entangled media environments in the 21st century. Especially the accelerated circulation of television formats illustrates contemporary layers of global, transnational, national, and cultural connections. Oren herself concludes in the collection's final essay "the global TV format is now television in its purest form" (p.379), attributing the format's symptomatic status to its functionality and the "dynamic feedback loop it generates