James Bennett

Television as digital media

In Television as Digital Media , scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States combine television studies with new media studies to analyze digital TV as part of digital culture. Taking into account technologies, industries, economies, aesthetics, and various production, user, and audience practices, the contributors develop a new critical paradigm for thinking about television, and the future of television studies, in the digital era. The collection brings together established and emerging scholars, producing an intergenerational dialogue that will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between television and digital media. Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC’s iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience “anytime, anywhere,” we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media. Contributors . James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner

The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies

Despite its centrality in the production, circulation and consumption of contemporary celebrity culture, the detailed study of television fame has occupied a relatively marginal place in star/celebrity studies. Early work on television fame originated from film studies, or was generally defined ‘against’ the concept of film stardom. This meant that it was often characterised negatively: the apparent specificities or qualities of TV fame were defined in pejorative terms, and it was imagined in terms of what it was not (‘film’ stardom proper). The subsequent expansion of celebrity studies has arguably placed less emphasis on the specificity of media forms and boundaries – in part reflecting the fluid and pervasive circulation of contemporary media fame. We suggest here that this has created a conceptual context in which the real complexities of TV fame have fallen between the analytical cracks. This article thus seeks to explore the ways in which television fame has been positioned within star/celebrity studies, while also examining how a range of historical and contemporary studies can illuminate the possibilities and challenges for the future study of TV fame.

The BBC's Second-shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-platform Projects and Public Service 'Content' for a Digital Era

This article maps out some of the implications of interactivity and convergence for televisions textual and industrial forms in relation to the BBCs status as a public service broadcaster. Whilst the digitalisation of television may bring about new textual, industrial and audience configurations, the goals for broadcasters remain the same: to attract viewers in a marketplace where there is increasing competition for screen-based leisure time. John Caldwells work on ‘second-shift aesthetics’ demonstrates how TV-dot.com synergies must now attempt to ‘master textual dispersals and user navigations that can and will inevitably migrate across brand boundaries’ in order to keep audiences engaged with their proprietary content for as long as possible (Caldwell, 2003: 136). However, for public service broadcasters, mastering these user flows does not simply take the form of an economic transaction. Rather, these second-shift strategies must serve and fulfil public service (PS) obligations and engage viewers in new relationships. Based on a combination of textual analysis and critical industrial research, including interviews with key industry personnel, this article examines the BBCs early second-shift practices in relation to interactive television (iTV) and ‘multi-platform projects’, as the corporation moves from being a PS broadcaster to a PS content-provider.

Celebrity and politics

It has been more than 10 years since P. David Marshall identified the inextricable link between celebrity and politics around the ‘construction of public personalities’, demonstrating the ‘affective function’ politicians perform in organising interests and issues (1997, pp. 203–204). As Beer and Penfold-Mounce’s piece in last issue’s Celebrity Forum section noted, Marshall’s book is perhaps the most cited study of celebrity, with his work being particularly productive for studies of the relationship between celebrity and politics (2010, p. 362). In the intervening decade this link appears to have become ever-stronger, evidenced by not only the rising number of former celebrities breaking into politics – Arnold Schwarzenegger in the United States, Peter Garret in Australia, Imran Khan in Pakistan, etc. – but also politicians themselves promoting a celebrity persona and mobilising celebrity public relations (PR) tactics, from Tony Blair’s ‘rock star’ imagery through to Barack Obama’s use of Twitter. In the past 18 months of global politics, recent elections have put a new spin (if you will pardon the pun) on the relationship between politicians and celebrity. The essays in this edition of Celebrity Forum interrogate some prominent examples from elections in Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia. While all the pieces herein demonstrate the continuing inextricable link between celebrity and politics played in election outcomes, the results – in terms of winners and losers, the meaning of an individual politician’s celebrity and the extent to which celebrity tactics will be tolerated by both the media and the electorate – vary significantly according to a range of factors. Indeed, many of the essays indicate a turn away from, or even backlash against the politics of celebrity. Nevertheless, as Wheeler argues here, the sheer consistency and scale of impact that the celebritisation of politics has on elections should not merely be ‘dismissed as an erosion of politics, but must be viewed within the framework of a change in political aesthetics in which there will be positive and negative outcomes’ (Wheeler 2011). The issue starts and ends with studies of ‘failed’ or non-celebrity in recent elections within Europe and Australia. Lies Gieves’ entry charts the rise to relative fame of the European Union (EU) President Herman van Rompuy for, paradoxically, ‘not being famous’. The shock of appointing someone who was not a celebrity to the post – when for a long period it appeared that Tony Blair would run for the Presidency – was met by initial outrage by the British press, who perceived van Rompuy’s appointment as evidence of the bureaucratic and closed system of European politics because, they complained, nobody had ever heard of him. However, their ire dissipated quickly as it became apparent that to dismiss him as a non-entity would be to ignore the ‘real political threat’ van Rompuy

The Business of Multi-Platform Public Service: Online and at a Profit

In this article, we explore the notion of hybrid public service media (PSM) in relation to two interconnected issues: economic and platform hybridity. We examine the creation of PSM content by privately owned, commercially driven independent production companies in the United Kingdom as a hybrid economic arrangement. In so doing, we ask not only whether public service can act as a motivation beyond profit for production cultures and business models, but also whether PSM can be created at a profit without compromising the fulfilment of public service values. In relation to platform hybridity, we study examples of interlinking public service content created, delivered and distributed across multiple platforms (as opposed to merely video-on-demand services). In particular, we are interested in how such multi-platform texts might fulfil public service, but also the way in which multi-platform content creation brings together digital and television production cultures to produce hybrid PSM business models and cultures.

Head On: multicultural representations of Australian identity in 1990s national cinema

Abstract Suffused with a sense that earlier filmic imaginings of Australian identity were ‘beginning to look threadbare’ (Turner 1994a: 68), 1990s Australian cinema provides a key site for the examination of Australian identity in multicultural terms. Drawing on the work of Ghassan Hage (1998, 2003), Stuart Hall (1990, 1993) and Daniel Nourry (2005), this article investigates how notions of Australian identity in a multicultural society are played out (and with) by Australian cinema of the 1990s. Particular attention is paid to Head On (Kokkinos, 1998) and Strictly Ballroom (Lurhmann, 1992), as examples of different approaches to this issue. Enlisting a Bakhtinian approach, whereby identity is conceived in terms of ‘thinking from the margins’, I argue that whilst films such as Strictly Ballroom enlist a ‘good multiculturalism’ to extend, through tolerance, the boundaries of Australian identity to the Other, Head On provides a way of thinking about Australian-ness that refuses to simply assimilate or incorporate its Greek-Australian protagonist. By co-opting the audience to a position on the margins of society, Head On opens up a notion of Australian identity that is not only or simply hybrid, but also never finally fixed (Hall 1990).

THE PUBLIC SERVICE VALUE OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION

‘Red button’ interactivity has become an important feature of the UKs digital television landscape, with the BBC launching over 150 such applications in 2004 alone. Simultaneously, interactive television has become an important site of fulfilling public service remits and providing public value by the BBC. This paper examines the place and purpose of the BBCs interactive television services in the newly developing public service landscape. The paper focuses on the dialectic between the rhetoric of choice that has accompanied digitalisation and the public service remits of universalism, civic value and education to interrogate two prominent cases of the BBCs use of interactive television: news programming and the coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympics. In so doing, I propose that such interactive applications promote choice as a public service value that is both problematic for how public service obligations are fulfilled and how television studies conceives and understands the television text. As a result I suggest that by paying attention to the specificities of televisions form, we can usefully draw on new media scholarship to understand the interactive, non‐linear television text as ‘fragmented’. In turn, analysing these interactive applications as a form of textuality we can usefully term ‘fragment’, I argue that whilst choice is not an inherently problematic public service value, its privileging in news programming undermines existing notions of the genres public service fulfilment.