Interactive Integrated Media: In the "Agon" of Convergence
Lanfranco Aceti, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
The interplay between media cross-platforms is bound to create an experimental field for original visual formats and interactive applications. This contemporary technological visual field, with its pervasive and globalized network of digital media, is creating a single convergent framework. Will the new media structure standardize formats, social behaviours and visual aesthetic?

"Trust Me - I'm a Designer": the Irony of Recent Home Makeover Shows
Jiwon Ahn, University of Southern California
This paper considers the popular genre of home makeover shows with a focus on two "exchange-renovation" shows, Changing Rooms (BBC) and Trading Spaces (TLC). Although not new on television, the recent formats of home makeover programs provide interesting insights into the contemporary television culture, showing us how deeply television penetrates our domestic spaces and transforms our private lives. More importantly, the intriguing question of who decides the design of makeover leads us to the issues of cultural capital (hence the often-used line quoted in the title of this paper) and taste hierarchies constructed in the discursive space.

Television as a Global Theater: The Genre of Media Scandals in Semiotic and Anthropological Perspectives
Lily Alexander, University of Toronto
One of the most significant emerging macro-cultural TV genres is a "media scandal." The TV coverage of such events has a profound but controversial effect on culture and society. The paper will outline that through representing scandals, the media facilitates society's self-reflection upon its unresolved and hidden conflicts. The questions of closure, resolution, lesson or serious analysis of the social drama emerging trough the genre of media scandal will be examined.

Streaming Television: Participatory Democracy on the Rise? No, Not Yet
Aida Aidakyeva, Ohio University
Don Flournoy, Ohio University
A common assumption underlying the Internet is that it poses a direct threat to authoritarian regimes and contributes to the spread of participatory democracy all over the world. This will be even truer with online TV news. Research at Ohio University suggests that those assumptions are naïve. Not only is the broadband Internet not developing everywhere as hoped, but authoritarian regimes are using the Internet to further their own purposes. If states can control radio and TV stations, they can also control what is streamed over the Internet.

Television and Sexuality: The Democratization of Desire?
Jane Arthurs, University of the West of England
This paper offers a critical assessment of the main arguments about the political significance of the proliferation of sexual representations on television. The pessimistic fears of those who regard these changes as symptomatic of the decline of a democratic public sphere in the face of capitalist consumerism will be contrasted with those who argue its progressive effects. The paper will argue the strengths and limitations of the way that these issues have been conceptualized.

Public Service: Sold! The Commodification of Local Television News
Thom Baggerman, University of Pittsburgh
This paper traces the local television news broadcast's transition from public service to commodity, drawing heavily upon industry newsletters and trade magazines to document this change. Industry discourse reveals the centrality of promotional activity in molding broadcasters' shifting assumptions about the purpose and structuring practices of local television news production. The ongoing transition to digital delivery promises even greater impending complexities in the commodification of local television news.

The Discontents with Global Television News: Where Is the 'Other'?
Olga Guedes Bailey,Liverpool John Moores University
This paper will be looking at the issue of 'invisibility' of the 'Other' in relation to international television news. The central argument is that although there is an increased emphasis on a general awareness of other parts of the world in television journalism, of the world as a 'single place' as a basic feature of 'today's postmodern' society, there is still a large invisibility of the 'Other' in terms of the diversity of different 'others' cultures, people and realities. The aim is to develop a theoretical articulation of concepts such as cultural globalisation, representation in media texts and on the 'theory' of journalism, to initiate a debate towards a 'de-Westernization' of the binary opposition that demarcates 'us' versus 'them' in television international journalism.

Canada's Aboriginal Television Network
Doris Baltruschat, Simon Fraser University
Canada's Aboriginal Television Network (APTN) is a unique media organization, developed and administered by Canada's aboriginal peoples, the First Nations. Since 1999, APTN has been a prominent feature on television with programming as diverse as First Nations' cooking shows to newscasts in Inuktituk, the language of the Inuit. Throughout its short history, APTN has faced many challenges-similar to most television outlets-such as balancing the necessity for advertising on the one hand, and building a loyal viewer base on the other. This paper provides an analysis of the network's programming by identifying styles, genre and foci, which in many instances are similar to mainstream television in spite of efforts to offer a unique perspective on First Nations life in Canada and other parts of the world. Nonetheless, APTN has become an important public forum for First Nations communities throughout Canada and beyond.

Fin/Syn Begin Again?
Christine Becker,Notre Dame
The Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, also known as fin-syn, were officially eliminated by 1995, and many feel that this FCC decision directly resulted in the virtual disappearance of independent television production and a corresponding decline in programming innovation and diversity. Thus, in the spirit of the FCC’s current reevaluation of such issues as ownership caps, this paper analyzes in detail the impact of the elimination of fin-syn. Is it absolutely the case that program quality and network access have declined over the past decade because of the repeal of fin-syn? Which specific programs and producers might prove or disprove this theory? Should some portion of the fin-syn rules be reinstated?

Visions of Ethnic Diversity: The Next Steps of the TeleVisions Project
Mary C. Beltran, University of Texas
This concluding presentation of the TeleVisions Project panel outlines the recommendations and implications of this exploratory project. With an eye toward encouraging greater diversity in television industry employment and commercially viable programming that is also racially inclusive, imaginative, and appealing to audiences, such recommendations include forging initiatives between universities and the industry to improve employment pipelines, strengthening communication and exchange across sectors of the television community and between scholars and industry professionals through the establishment of an ongoing, collaborative forum, and practical research initiatives. Ample time will be left for discussion of the next steps of the TeleVisions Project. See Downing, Puente and Ross.

Television in El Salvador: Foreign Investment, Loss of Local Control?
Jose Luis Benitez, Ohio University
This paper provides a context for understanding television programming trends in Latin America over the last twenty years. It examines international programs and looks at the impact on Salvadoran television. The unique characteristics of commercial and state owned television stations in El Salvador are also considered.

Documentary Futures: New Documentary as Psychic Drama
Anita Biressi, University of Surrey
Heather Nunn, Middlesex University
This paper examines the move within recent documentary to examine interior states, memory and psychic trauma. It locates these within a broader move within television, loosely defined as a relatively open process of "working through," in which contemporary television provides "a forum of contending definitions with no final result" (Ellis, 2000:84). It will address three recent examples: Errol Morris's Stairway to Heaven (1998 Globe Dept Productions), True Stories: Men in the Woods (Channel 4 2001), and Our Father the Serial Killer (Court TV/Granada International 2002). This paper argues that together, these examples point towards the development of a distinctive hybrid form and towards new directions in factual television programming.

A Magic Window: The Emergent Aesthetics of High-Resolution, Large-Scale Video Display
Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser University
The widespread dissemination of large-scale, high-resolution display devices in our homes and offices will remediate the video experience. This technology will lead to new conditions of reception, which in turn will become the catalyst for new forms of video production. This presentation addresses the following research question: "If you are standing five feet away from a four-foot wide, high-definition video screen, is it Television or is it Imax? Or is it something else?" The paper is a speculation on the future of entertainment. A core component is the consideration of immersion as a variable parameter embedded within the dynamics of changing conditions of reception. Key issues to be examined are liminality of image and liminality of story. The presentation will include original video pieces that demonstrate some of the central aesthetic directions considered in the paper.

Television and Commercial Culture in Sweden during the 1950s
Mats Björkin, Göteborg University
When Swedish television officially opened in September 1956, commercial television was prohibited. The public service system that was created would remain without competition for more than 30 years. This paper discusses different media strategies that business and industry employed when commercial television was not available. I will use case studies and a discussion on Swedish television's relation to other commercial media and a broader discourse on commercial culture in a country where there was no commercial television.

Screening Post-Civil Rights Blackness: Negotiating Race in Seventies U.S. Television
Aniko Bodroghkozy, University of Virginia
This paper examines the production and reception history of the controversial 1970s black family sit-com Good Times, the first series to feature a black family with the father present. It was also notable for its setting in the Chicago projects and its attention to issues of inner-city poverty and racial discrimination. I explore how critics and audiences used the show to negotiate and struggle over the meanings of "blackness," "authenticity," and "good role models" in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press Authors' Panel
Kristina Borjesson
Monika Jensen-Stevenson
Michael Levine
Maurice Murad
This panel of three reporters, all contributors to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, will discuss censorship in and of the American press.

Al-Jazeera: Sustaining a Free Press in the Middle East
Kahlil Byrd, Harvard University
Theresse Kawarabayashi, Harvard University
This paper explores the rise and business model of Al-Jazeera, a 24-hour news service that is now the outlet of choice for millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East. It examines why this internationally known brand, with its feverously loyal, growing audience, is having so much trouble emerging as an independent, profitable company. Compounding the problem is Al Jazeera's rocky relationship with government leaders in several regional countries. This tension is keeping major corporations from advertising on the network - squeezing out a primary revenue source. This brief analysis will answer the question: What will it take to make this growing 24-hour news channel on the peninsula self sustaining and profitable in the future?

Cultural Discourses and One Televised Text: 60 Minutes, Ten Years, Two Countries
Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts
How does the same televisual text play into two cultural systems of expression? More specifically, how does a text designed for one audience, about another, look and feel to both? This study explores one such text, an episode of the popular American newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, titled, Tango Finlandia. This episode has been broadcast repeatedly in the US (in English), and in Finland (in Finnish). This study reports the results of an in depth ethnographic study of this episode as part of American and Finnish cultural systems of expression.

Technology, Femininity and Fabulous Accessories: Alias and Cyborg Representation
Shira Chess, Emerson College
For over 25 years, images of the feminine cyborg--both threatening and desirable--have haunted popular culture. A new vision of the cyborg is seen on the popular television show Alias in its protagonist Sydney Bristow: a resilient but sensitive she-spy. Her cyborg-ness appears as an armor of clothing and accessories, allowing her to vacillate between older and newer representations of femininity. This removable armor allows Sydney to maintain a highly emotional, highly vulnerable inner-core, which sits in direct opposition to her technological shell. Thus, Sydney sits at a crossroads between traditional femininity and cyborg femininity. I will demonstrate how Sydney represents changing images of both women and technology. Ultimately, I show that while Sydney's depiction may have a cyborg feminist shell, it is ultimately cursed with a more traditionally sexist core.

New Media Technologies: New Ways of Viewing Television?
Bertha Chin, Goldsmiths College
In their 1995 book, Soap Fans, Harrington & Beilby proclaimed that electronic bulletin boards marked the "public emergence of fans as fans" (169). Naturally, debates surrounding the impact of new media technologies such as the World Wide Web on television have gotten considerably complex. Online fan communities are no longer merely convenient sites of research for fan scholars, but rather a site of immense complexity for fans - in relations to issues of community, fan social hierarchy as well as a space for the distribution and discussion of fan fiction writing. This paper will be an attempt to explore the changes within which new media technologies such as the Internet has brought to the practice of fandom.

Television and the Myth of the Mediated Center: Time for a Paradigm Shift in Television Studies?
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics
How has television studies dealt with the paradox that its main objects (television in particular, and the media in general) have built into their institutional discourses an essentializing and totalizing myth: The idea that "the media" (especially television) are our central access-point to society's central realities? This paper argues that this myth is pervasive, including within media studies itself, but that it is now under challenge by new social and technological conditions. What, then, are the consequences of developing a new, more decentralized paradigm of what media's place in society is, both for our research priorities and for media studies' political engagements?

A Personal History of Early Video Art
Russell Connor, artist
This presentation will offer some personal observations from a painter who played a small but significant role in the early development of video art, especially those works broadcast on public television in the 1970s, principally on WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York, clips of which will be presented. If never a practitioner of video art, I was more than a tourist along for the ride, collaborating at various times with Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman. It began in 1963, when I took a job at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as writer/host of a weekly series produced by the Museum with WGBH-TV. This led to two important encounters in the late 1960s, first with Nam June Paik at WGBH, then a pivotal exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York called TV as a Creative Medium. These inspired me to present, in 1970, as curator at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the world's first museum exhibition of video art, called Vision and Television. This in turn led to a position at the New York State Council on the Arts, in charge of dispensing grants to the mushrooming number of video artists, including Nam June and Bill Viola. I encouraged WNET to found what became the TV Lab, and then hosted a series presenting video art. I later did the same at WGBH, for a series called Artists' Showcase, featuring works from their Artists' Television Workshop. [Presented in conjunction with List Visual Arts Center and funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT]

Rape and Representation on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
Lisa M. Cuklanz, Boston College
This paper examines the relationship between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and previous televisual representations of rape, as well as within the larger context of mass mediated representation of sexual assault. It argues that the program makes important alterations in established rape scripts, particularly in its emphasis on the ubiquity of rape and sexual assault in contemporary society, while at the same time maintaining key elements of traditional representation such as an exaggeratedly evil characterization of the perpetrators of rape.

Repurposing News Content: Convergence Experiments that Worked!
Marie Curkan-Flanagan, University of South Florida
Academic and critical research probing the impact of convergence on news systems has focused on whether reporters, managers, web masters and corporate owners can generate profit as a group. Much of the available research concludes that the aims of convergence are to promote or market the news media rather than the news itself. Using an on-site experiment model at a top 100 network affiliate in the Northeast, this study examines the application of "repurposing content."

The "Me" Genre: Self-Reflexivity in Reality Television
Hugh Curnutt, University of Pittsburgh
Today reality programming is embodied in both the big four networks' flagship programming - Survivor (CBS), The Bachelor (ABC), Fear Factor (NBC) and Cops (FOX) - and almost all of cable's niche programming - Trading Spaces (TLC), The Anna Nicole Show (E!), et cetera. Authenticity is subsequently framed in degrees of 'me' moments produced through introspective articulation. If the primary characteristic of reality television, then, is a promotion of the self, vis-á-vis meta-dialogue, what characterizes today's most popular television programming is a celebration of the narcissistic personality.

Pop Culture or Political Riff: Presidential Narrative on Late-Night TV
Joe Cutbirth, Columbia University
Recent studies show three of ten Americans - and half those under the age of thirty - rely on late-night comedy and talk shows for news about public affairs. This paper examines the role non-news media sources play in shaping public opinion of the president and the institution of the American presidency. It examines seventeen presidential characters culled from 538 episodes of Saturday Night Live. As Americans move into the twenty-first century, they are adopting new media delivery systems, such as cable television and the Internet. I argue they also are adopting new genres for political communication within these systems.

"No Network!": Star Trek and the American Television Industry's Changing Modes of Organization
Máire Messenger Davies, Cardiff University
Roberta E. Pearson, Cardiff University
The paper addresses the conference theme of the broadcast era in the US by examining the production and distribution of the original Star Trek series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9), Voyager (VOY) and Enterprise (ENT). It draws particularly on the authors' personal interviews in Hollywood with 25 key personnel, including producers, writers, actors and executives, involved in both the original series and in later series. A comparison of TOS with its younger siblings in terms of narrative structure, editorial control and audiences/ratings illustrates many of the key differences between old-style network television and today's multi-channel environment.

Future Possibilities: A Scenario Analysis Study of British Television
Christine Daymon, Bournemouth University
Robin Foster, Bournemouth Media School
The shape of the British electronic media industry and the role of television over the course of the next ten years are highly uncertain. In the television sector, the networks, production companies, and associated industry players, such as advertisers, marketers, and investors, have few stable guidelines on which to base their projections and strategies for the future. In order to help the sector prepare for and respond to the challenges of the future, Bournemouth Media School with support from the Independent Television Commission and the British Screen Advisory Council recently facilitated a scenario building exercise with senior executives and opinion leaders. The paper presents the four scenarios developed from the project together with potential implications for the role of television and the nature and structure of the television sector.

Reality TV as Advertainment
June Deery, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Reality TV is a prime example of hypercommercialism that illustrates, and intensifies, many forms of commodification seen in contemporary American society. This paper underscores how particular reality TV series are saturated with direct and indirect advertising and their more general spearheading of developments in advertainment. It considers reality TV series as international franchises that market people, experiences, "reality," and the medium of television itself, in addition to other goods. Topics include pornography, voyeurism, product placement, and celebrity.

The TeleVisions Project: Its Challenge and Goals
John Downing, University of Texas, Austin
To illuminate the dynamics that continue to contribute to 'racial' imbalance in U.S. entertainment television, researchers of the TeleVisions Project, funded by the Ford Foundation, interviewed industry and ethnic media advocacy representatives; compiled an extensive timeline of advocacy-industry interactions since 1992; and assembled other documentation regarding how "diversity" is currently pursued in the industry. The study's methodology was designed to explore nuances of television industry race relations. This introductory presentation by the project's Principal Investigator will provide an overview of the impetus for the project, previous research upon which the project was based, and its unique challenges and methodological approach. See Beltran, Puente and Ross.

Untapped Audiences: Zen TV and Redefining Youth Culture in The Arab World
Nabil Echchaibi, Indiana University
More and more satellite channels have been sprouting in the Arab world, and one of the more recent additions in the television scene is Zen TV, a youth channel owned by Lebanese Future Media, that targets an untapped audience segment. This paper is based on both a textual analysis of the most popular Zen programs and personal interviews with the producers and program hosts of Zen TV. How does Zen TV negotiate the conflictual relationship between respecting tradition and promoting modernism in its messages? How does the perceived identity of the young people behind the programming (most of them either lived in the US or have mixed parents of Arab and Western origin) affect the cultural output of Zen TV? How is the channel handling the pressure from both governments and religious groups in their treatment of taboo topics and issues?

The Brief Time of Audience-as-Witness to 9/11: Media and the Un-Representable
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Columbia University, New School University
This paper draws from theories of representation, witnessing, and performativity to explore the following ideas: For a brief time on the morning of September 11, 2001, television audiences nationwide witnessed 'the breakage of the world' (Felman) in and through the failures of television news to represent the morning's events. How might that collective experience of being addressed as witness to a traumatic historical event shape emerging social, cultural, political, and military responses to 9/11? How has television exploited the power of that collective experience?

CBS: The Eye on 9/11
Heather E. Fisher, University of Pittsburgh
On September 11, 2002, something astonishing happened on network television: broadcasters ran programming for a 24-hour period without airing any commercials. Or did they? The one-year anniversary of the WTC and Pentagon attacks is an occasion that illuminates the nexus of the complex relationship between television's four corners-the broadcasters, the advertisers, programming content, and public interest. This paper examines CBS's primetime television schedule, from CBS Evening News with Dan Rather through the Late Show with David Letterman, at which point, with the dawn of a new day and the "call to duty" duly met, CBS "eased" its viewers back into the regularly scheduled, commercially sponsored television format. This paper looks at the day's broadcast as a coherent narrative that contributed to the ongoing production of an internationally recognizable 9/11 "brand," currently being advertised worldwide.

Digital Television Standards: What a Mess!
Don Flournoy, Ohio University
High Definition TV was to be the answer to incompatible television standards around the world. Multiple scan lines would give way to a single universal standard of more than 1,000 lines. But now that HDTV is going digital, instead of one video standard, there are more than a dozen. This research lays out the problem and suggests solutions, most of which are technologically complex and expensive. Cleaning up the standards mess does not bode well for a quick transition to digital TV.

The History of Television in Japan
Lawrence Fouraker, St. John Fisher College
In 1953, when broadcasting began, the future of television in Japan was uncertain. Early sets cost more than a worker¹s annual salary, and foreign advisors recommended against promoting the industry. But seven years later nearly every other household owned a television, rising to 95% by 1965. In this paper I will argue that the rapid diffusion of television in Japan stems from some surprising factors, including a royal wedding, high school sports, and even a popular American comic strip. I will also examine the evolution of television technology in Japan, and how makers like Sony became synonymous with high-quality video products. Finally, I will consider recent trends, including the bureaucratic fiasco of endorsing the analog standard for High Definition television.

Home Video, Inc.: iMovie and the Industry of Memory
Eric Freedman, Florida Atlantic University
This paper examines Apple's marketing of iMovie, a consumer-grade desktop video editing software, and considers the ideological assumptions that are embedded in Apple's suggested deployment of its platform, the particular technical parameters of its software, and the subsequent exhibition of home video in its Internet-based iMovie gallery.This study is a theoretical treatment of the spatial realignment of experience and memory in the digital domain.

Developmental Public Broadcasting: Is There Still a Role for it?
Elfriede Fürsich, Boston College
Seema Shrikhande, Oglethorpe University
This study examines the fate of the developmental model of public broadcasting in the face of rapid global media commercialization. Specifically, we study how India's public broadcaster, Doordarshan, is responding to changes in the media environment in India. Doordarshan was established in the 70s with the intention of using television broadcasting to educate, inform and support the government's developmental objectives for rural and urban audiences. However, since the advent of satellite television in 1991, Doordarshan has struggled to position itself as a competitor to many new international and domestic commercial channels while seemingly suspending its developmental mandate. We explore whether Doordarshan's strategies jeopardize the survival of the developmental idea of broadcasting in a commercialized global television environment.

High Five: The Local, the Global, and American and Israeli Sports on Television
Yair Galily, Zinman College
The paper tries to shed some light on a process by which Israeli society transferred, almost overnight, from a single to a multi-channel media society. It is argued that the way in which communication systems developed in Israel, particularly television, helped in allowing the penetration of transnational media agencies (CNN, Sky), as well as of sports organizations such as the NBA and NFL.

Political Edutainment on American Television
Cristobal Garcia, MIT CMS
The historical relationship between television and the modern public sphere has been controversial and problematic. First, many commentators have blamed television -- especially its entertainment -- as one of the main causes of the trivialization of public affairs and the decrease of political involvement, especially among young generations. Second, recent data reveal the decline of traditional news media as a source of information for young people. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this paper analyzes the interaction between content and audience in a news satire talk show, namely The Daily Show, as an example of political edutainment on American television.

Melodrama, Trust and the Representation of Abuse
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow
Despite the changes in television including the possibilities of convergence and interaction, television drama still remains a popular staple for most viewers. This paper will concentrate on the British soap opera, EastEnders, but recognizes that stories of child abuse, rape and violence have become commonplace on television, cutting across traditional genres and formats such as soap opera, police series and news. It will suggest that, although melodrama is a term still used disparagingly in much criticism of popular drama, it may well do useful work in opening up such stories for analysis. Although the study of soap opera and telenovelas has challenged these hierarchies of taste, the discourses surrounding television reception still tend to underestimate the ability of melodramatic modes to express and shape contemporary issues. This paper will look at the way in which the traditional themes of melodrama - trust, power, innocence and evil - are reworked in stories that deal with abuse. It suggests that, while melodramatic imagery and characterization is particularly effective in handling such stories in journalism as well as drama, the change in EastEnders may mark a more significant shift for British television, opening up wider questions about trust, insecurity and a sense of what Zygmunt Bauman calls a "society under siege."

When Broadcast and Internet Audiences Collide: Internet Users as TV Advocacy Groups
Joan Giglione, California State University, Fullerton
CBS's Big Brother, airing from July to September 2000, first delivered simultaneous content to TV and the Internet. This created a new viewer environment. Broadcasting and the Internet, used together, can change the broadcast channel from passive, to reactive and loyal, with many modes of immediate response. Though reality contestants are not typical celebrities, they can generate an audience response similar to an actor-quantity of airtime seems to affect status. Case studies show how viewers, contestants, and contestants' family members used the Internet to react and overreact to the program's events.

(De)Constructing Identities? Encounters with 'China' in Popular Japanese Television Dramas
Hilaria Goessmann, Trier University
Griseldis Kirsch, Trier University
Since the 1990s, Japanese television dramas have come to present an increasing number of characters from other Asian countries. This can be seen as a result of Japan's growing interest in its long disregarded neighboring Asian countries, which has resulted in a virtual "Asia boom". Focusing on two recent productions depicting Chinese characters, this paper seeks to illustrate how Japanese television dramas deal with the subject of Japan's encounters with "Asia." Questions relevant to the analysis thus include: How do the Japanese and Chinese characters interact? Are their different nationalities important to the plot? Do these dramas have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of China? And finally, is the question of a common Asian identity addressed? In answering these questions, this paper aims to show how cultural "identities" are constructed or even deconstructed within the popular genre of Japanese television drama.

The Fate of the Documentary
Richard Gonci, Neoscape Inc.
"…a report on historical events, or social conditions, that has not been fictionalized."
So says Webster in defining "documentary." I contend that there is a great deal of fictionalizing evident in many documentaries produced in recent years. In this case, fiction takes the form of conscious romanticizing and sentimentalizing of seminal events. This trend to morph legitimate journalism into treacly middle-mind infotainment isn't merely an aesthetic offense. It has had, and continues to have, consequences in the realm of policy planning, while dulling the critical judgment of the citizenry. I intend to cite examples and replay short video clips to demonstrate a correlative effect between such works and concurrent trends in public opinion and public policy.

The Preview and the Parody: The Yin and Yang of Contemporary Televisual Textuality
Jonathan Gray, Goldsmiths College
This paper posits that we should pay closer attention to two of the leaders of the opposing sides in a battle over meaning: the preview and the parody. Previews, spoilers, and introductory sequences work as supportive intertextuality, suggesting 'appropriate' or 'proper' frames, and both the generic and cultural codes with which to interpret the text. Meanwhile, however, television today is experiencing an unprecedented boom of parody, and these parodies lead the ranks of critical intertextuality, proposing other, more devious, or even more media literate frames through which we can interpret both upcoming and previously seen texts.

"Expect the Unexpected": Narrative Pleasure and Uncertainty Due to Chance in Survivor
Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona
This paper examines the role of "uncertainty due to chance" in the Survivor hybrid of game, adventure and drama. It explores how uncertainty is managed by the Survivor production team and exploited in the reception of Survivor. We find that the mathematical processes of prediction and the narrative processes of textual pleasure are complementary, and that uncertainty enhances the pleasure of the Survivor text.

Robot Cops and Human Machines: Taming Technology on American Television in the 1970s and 1980s
Mobina Hashmi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper examines the cycle of human-robot cop shows on U.S. network television in the 1970s and 1980s. There were at least ten shows (e.g. Knight Rider and Mann and Machine) on network television in the 1970s and 1980s that featured human-robot cop teams-a far greater number than in any other period. The 1970s & 1980s were a transitional period from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy, as well as from a still largely national culture and communication space to a global information space. I connect the emergence of this cycle of television programs with the "Japan Panic" phenomena and argue that the close articulation between national identity and economic strength provoked anxieties about the viability of U.S. technology and labor practices in the face of Japanese ascendancy.

Windows on the West: Hungarian Television Acquisitions and the Future of Western Dominance in Global Television
Timothy Havens, Iowa University
While few dispute the dominance of American and Western European programming on television screens around the world, much debate exists about the future of this phenomenon. In this presentation, I provide a case study of foreign and domestic television programming decisions in Hungary, based on six-months of interviews with more than thirty television professionals, which explores the reasons behind the preponderance of Western programming in that nation and evaluates the future balance of imported and domestic programming.

Humiliating Images/Humiliating Theory: On the Terrain of Reality TV
Alison Hearn, Northeastern University
In this paper I explore the dynamic of humiliation and alienation expressed in and enacted by the genre of reality TV. The paper also identifies traces of this dynamic in the plight of the critic who chooses to dignify such a cultural phenomenon with a response. I argue that the genre expresses a thematic of humiliation in at least three different ways. First, many of the shows themselves make the explicit humiliation of people a foundational premise. Second, the formal structure of the genre dramatizes, or stages, our contemporary anxiety and uncertainty about the fidelity of the image as witness or document of the real, thereby enforcing a kind of alienated viewing in which we watch ourselves watching, simultaneously believing and disbelieving the images before us. Reality TV both demands and makes a parody of our modernist investment in the image as witness and document. Finally, the genre of reality TV works on the industrial level, to extract and exploit new forms of labor.

Horror TV: Genre or Invisible Intertext?
Matt Hills, Cardiff University
Relations between horror and TV have been theorized, but in a limited sense. Firstly, TV's horrors have been thought of as "natural" horror (horrific, real events shown in news footage) rather than "art" horror (fictional horror). Secondly, when fictional horror on TV has been addressed, theorists have positioned this as classic or subtle horror, in apparent contrast to horror film, reducing the horror TV/film opposition to one of "suggestion versus splatter" (Waller 1987; Wheatley 2002). Thirdly, relationships between horror and TV have been theorized via genre representations of TV, it being figured as a disruptive, invasive force, drawing on folk theories of media effects. This paper will explore this neglected but significant area of tv drama's genericity and intertextuality.

European Television Financing for Fiction Film in Africa and Latin America
Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, University of Lausanne
Televisions have a central function in financing fiction filmmaking in Europe but they also play an important role supporting fiction filmmaking by directors from marginalized regions where making films often involves economic, political and cultural struggles more sinister than those encountered in much of North America, western Europe or parts of Asia. Specific examples are drawn primarily from African and Latin American fiction film productions. Media organization have specific policies for supporting foreign and marginalized film production, but beyond these aims, I argue that there is a cultural risk involved, to the extent that these relationships are circumscribed by the dominant, received knowledge circulating across and within the specific cultural groups that collaborate. As such, this paper addresses a discussion on the configuration of convergence through economic, political and aesthetic space.

On the Current Affairs Genre and the Challenge to Public Service Broadcasting in the UK
Patrica Holland, Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University
This paper will argue that the current affairs genre is central to a public-service commitment on UK television, and that, if it is to flourish, it should continue to be protected by positive regulation, both on commercial channels and on the licence-fee funded BBC. In order to maintain its authority and independence, current affairs must relate to its viewers as 'citizens' rather than 'consumers'. At the same time the danger of a nostalgic preservation of past forms must be avoided. The public service concept must face the challenge of new channels, formats and delivery systems.

Reality TV, Identity, and Post-Socialist Transition: A Case Study from Lithuania
Bjorn Ingvoldstad, Indiana University
The popularity of "reality television" has mushroomed in recent years, with relatively inexpensive production costs coupling with intense audience interest, yielding significant returns on investment for producers, and proliferation of programming for fans, with shows developed in one country rapidly replicated worldwide. In my presentation, I argue that the "reality" genre is particularly adept at articulating issues of national identity. I will discuss two particular TV programs broadcast in Lithuania from 2000-2002, highlighting their production and consumption, drawing on in-country fieldwork during this time.

Television as an Element in the Democratization of a Society in Transition - Uzbekistan: Experience, Problems and Perspectives
Sanginjon Jabborov, National University of Uzbekistan
This paper examines the role of television in Uzbekistan, a country in a transitional period. Being a propaganda tool during Soviet times, TV has remained a powerful institution influencing many aspects of economic, political and social life after the country became independence in 1991. Television has not lost its propagandist function, but propaganda is no longer TV's pivotal concern and activity. This paper explores how television has played a crucial role in reanimation of the folk culture such as national holidays, customs, games, handicrafts, and so on; coverage of minorities on television and the medium's role during interethnic clashes; and the effect of globalization processes on Uzbekistan through television and on television itself.

Imagined and Performed Locality: The Televisual Field in a North Indian Industrial Town
Kajri Jain, Deakin University
A busy industrial centre in a prosperous agricultural state, for the better part of the twentieth century the town of Ludhiana in Punjab, India has been a site for both transnational out-migration and intra-national in-migration. Over the past few years, however, the city has been the site of a new self-awareness with regard to issues not just of regional (Punjabi) but also, unexpectedly, of local urban cultural identity. How might these recent manifestations of a self-reflexive public culture link up with the simultaneous consolidation of cable TV networks in the city? This paper examines the kinds of ‘imagined’ communities and self-images that foster and are fostered by this form of globalised media capitalism, through the commodification of cultural identity. However it also describes the largely unacknowledged performed communities that are equally closely connected with the establishment of a televisual regime. These interactions unfold in a different regis! ter, thriving on the relatively informal arrangements that corporate television networks and advertisers must rely on to operate at the local level.

Development of The Institute Television Series: A New Genre of Global Television
Keith Johnson, MIT
With the exception of science and technology biography and docudrama, drama and realistic sci.-tech. scenarios are seldom combined in television outside the traditional science-fiction genre. I present the concept and development of The Institute, a weekly, one-hour television fiction series designed to both entertain and educate the viewing audience about the real-life drama of contemporary science and technology. Set against the backdrop of a fictional institute of technology, The Institute is a dramatic series about the adventures of a young female astronomy professor as she confronts the challenges of an academic career. The series hosts a leading single female character to rival Ally McBeal. and is designed to be a hit series with the American college age group, as well as with smart, hip global television viewers of all ages. The series will be co-produced in Hollywood with Michel Shane and Tony Romano, executive producers of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can.

Afghan Camera: Shifting Stories of Global Television
Liza Johnson, Williams College
This paper is a gender-based analysis that compares the discursive production of information about Afghanistan from the Reagan and Bush eras to contemporary discourses. I particularly consider work produced by Afghan cameramen through the USIA-sponsored Afghan Media Resource Center during the late 1980s and early 1990s, through which members of Islamic resistance parties collaborated with U.S. instructors to provide "coverage" of Soviet failures in Afghanistan. I argue that Afghan women have been marginalized by U.S. discourses that rely on the idea of rescuing Afghan women from Afghan men, as well as by more concrete intercultural failures to address women's resistance groups in representational and propagandistic projects. In addition to archival video materials from the Afghan Media Resource Center, I also look at elements of the 1987 film Rambo 3, and materials from CNN after 9-11.

TV, New Media and Feminism's Third Wave
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, University of Oregon
In this paper, I will argue that feminism's future as a viable mode of cultural analysis as well a movement for social change hinges in part on its relation to popular culture and new forms of media that increasingly shape the lives and politics of youth cultures. Drawing examples from such TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Daria and The Osbournes, I will map out some of the connections between Third Wave feminism and popular culture.

Rage Against the Receiver: How Ulster Loyalists Lost the TV War in Northern Ireland
Michael Keating, MIT CMS
Northern Ireland is host to the longest running low-intensity civil conflict on the planet. This paper will look particularly at the Loyalist side of the conflict and ask why Loyalism has failed to generate a positive media image for itself, even among viewers in Great Britain, while Republicans have been much more successful in getting their message across. The paper will also examine how frustrated Loyalists are now using TV-Internet hybrid broadcasts to reach out to supporters in Great Britain, the U.S. and Continental Europe in an attempt to project an unmediated self-image, a model which is being followed in conflict zones elsewhere.

Digital Convergence: Dead, Dying or Delayed?
Kieran Kelly, University of the West of England
Digital Convergence has been the Holy Grail of media corporations and considered inevitable by commentators for some time. The integration of interactive services with broadcast technologies, particularly television, is seen as the route by which new methods of media exploitation are most likely to emerge. In practice integration has been partial, slow and the results disappointing. This paper will explore the phenomenon of digital convergence in light of the study of Cultural Industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2002). This approach gives primacy to social, regulatory, and economic factors over the purely technical aspects of communication and media systems. The paper considers the AOL/Time Warner merger in the light of this thesis.

Show and Tell: The Ignominious Bodies of Reality Television
Derek Kompare, Texas Christian University
Over the past several years, reality has become the fastest-growing genre on television throughout the world. This paper argues that the success of reality television challenges long-held assumptions about the boundaries of genre and representation. While reality series cover a wide array of subgenres, the primary site of the genre is the (real) human body. Bodies are displayed for cameras and microphones, functioning as the ultimate signifiers of "reality" as they register the effects of particular actions. In doing so, bodies become ignominious, i.e., marked by the shame of public exposure or humiliation. This paper analyzes examples of ignominious bodies from several reality programs, traces their development from other genres and cultural forms, and speculates on the future of television genres and representational parameters.

Lebanese Television as a Cultural and Political Forum
Marwan M. Kraidy, American University
This paper is a historical analysis of Lebanese television as a cultural and political forum, mirroring and mediating the cultural and socio-political situation of the country in different historical periods. Between 1974 and 1994, Lebanese television, like Lebanon itself, exploded into anarchy: By the early 1990s, more than 50 pirate television stations were vying for the Lebanese audience, providing the cultural critic with a fascinating hodgepodge of cultural, ideological and aesthetic sensibilities. After the passing of the Audio-Visual Media Law in 1994, the television landscape was narrowed down to a half dozen stations, who joined the pan-Arab satellite race as they consolidated their national audience. The conclusion will address the role that television has played in reflecting and shaping Lebanon's hybrid identity over the past half century, and how this role is changing in the context of a regional satellite television industry itself embedded in the globalization of media industries.

De-Constructing Television and Global Media Stereotypes
Susan B. Kretchmer, Johns Hopkins University
Rod Carveth, Rochester Institute of Technology
Every country has stereotypes about other nationalities and races, including its own ethnic minorities. Many have criticized Hollywood and the television industry for filling viewers' minds with prefabricated images and themes, a reality invented by media. To date, research examining the role of television in constructing the stereotypes of one nation's people about another's has either examined U.S. stereotypes of citizens of other countries, or other countries' stereotypes of U.S. citizens. No work has brought these strands of research together, or integrated research about the role of television in constructing stereotypes among other countries. The focus of our argument in this paper is that while television has had a significant impact on creating global stereotypes, new media, such as the Internet, have the potential to provide information to de-construct these stereotypes.

Television and Taste Hierarchy: Social Status and the Appreciation, Dislike, and Knowledge of Television Comedy in the Netherlands
Giselinde Kuipers, University of Amsterdam
How are hierarchical relationships between taste cultures possible in a fragmented, popular, and accessible medium like television? This article explores this by looking at the relationship between taste cultures in Dutch television comedy. Survey data showed four taste cultures: clusters liked by old and disliked by younger people and vice versa; a lowbrow style disliked by higher educated informants, and a highbrow style unknown to lower educated informants. Interview materials are used to understand the mechanisms behind this asymmetric pattern of knowledge and dislike, and to answer the more general question how television can sustain a taste hierarchy like this, with one taste culture exclusive to high status viewers. Taste, it will be argued, has to be understood not only as a pattern of preferences and aversion, but as a form of cultural knowledge. This cultural knowledge varies between groups, in nature and amount, and is crucial in the perpetuation of taste hierarchies.

Cultural Studies and Identity: the Social Construction of Canadian Television
Yves Laberge, Lavall University
Canadian television began in 1952, many years after the U.S., England, France and even Brazil. We will look at the models that inspired Canadian TV, and explore such questions as how is Canadian television today? How did Canadian programs create a genuine Canadian identity? Are programs in Canada different from US shows? What is the specific Canadian contribution to the television aesthetic? To answer these questions, we will use a content analysis from different programs produced in Canada through five decades.

Babylon 5: Book of Quotations -- How a View of the Universe Shapes our World View
Kurt Lancaster, Fort Lewis College
Babylon 5 is a philosophical science fiction series that is known for its intellectual as well as dramatical capabilities. This talk will be an examination of the creator's interacation with fans and how fans have used quotations from the show in order to inspire their own lives.

Reality and the Founding Discourses of Television or, Why We Love Lucy
Lori Landay, Berklee College of Music
Much ado is being made about "reality" television, but the fascination with the supposedly "real" yet obviously highly mediated form of entertainment has been at the core of television since its inception. In the 1950s, television culture was founded on a shifting balance of reality, immediacy, and artificiality that characterized early television in general and I Love Lucy in particular. The conflation of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Jr. with the characters they portrayed was intensified by the virtually simultaneous births of Ball and Arnaz's and Ricky and Lucy's sons in January 1953. In blurring the line between reality and artifice with the synchronic "real-life" and "fictional" births, I Love Lucy was a metaphor for what television as an institution and apparatus was doing anyway: making more permeable the traditional boundaries between public and private, truth and artifice, and representation and social experience.

Does National Programming Promote National Identity? A Case Study in Rural Brazil
Antonio C. La Pastina, Texas A&M University
Over the last 50 years, television in Brazil has created a television infrastructure that reaches close to 99 percent of the households. The majority of programming, including news and telenovelas (highly popular, prime-time serials), is produced in the large urban metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, both located in the south of Brazil. This paper uses an in-depth, year-long audience ethnography in a small rural community in the Northeast of Brazil to examine issues of national and local identity. How does television programming that represents Brazil as mostly urban, white and middle-class position poor, mestizo, rural viewers who also happen to be from a region that has traditionally been represented on the news as backwards, machista and steeped in religious fanaticism?

"It's Only a Game Show"...?: The Generic Development of Big Brother
Christine Leishman, University of Strathclyde
Defining what constitutes a genre is difficult when the concept is constantly in a process of flux, but it is precisely this generic change that keeps the audience interested and paves the way for new types of TV show that can ignite debate amongst academics, the press and the general public alike. In July 2000, a new generic variation was aired on British television to a media frenzy -- the first series of the reality game-show Big Brother. Hybridization of generic features was strongly evident in the show but this wasn't unexpected as it was derived from the genre of reality TV' -- a form of programming that developed from the documentary style of feature -- in which the incorporation of elements from other program genres was the norm.

Survivor as Metonomy of Global Capital
Julia Lesage, University of Oregon
Contemporary adventure shows on television that take place in exotic places regularly enact Mary Louise Pratt's thesis about emptying the landscape of culture, as she describe it in terms of the colonial incursion into Latin America. In addition to demonstrating how this narrative process works in television entertainment, I also want to point out the way the common sense attitude in the U.S. toward exotic spaces, especially desert and mountain spaces, as empty and toward nations as existing in a coordinate system of discrete and mutually exclusive locations keeps people from unpacking spaces in terms of those spaces' constituent pluralities and interdependencies. Such an imaginary about the spaces and places in the world, as propagated by numerous discourses, has significant political consequences.

International Televangelism/American Ideology: The Case of the 700 Club
Michael Leslie, University of Florida
The international religious broadcaster that has received the most attention from scholars is the Christian Broadcasting Network and its flagship program, the 700 Club. The ideological content of the 700 Club is an important arena for research, given the tremendous growth of international religious broadcasting, the entry of religious broadcasters into the contest for ownership and control of digital technologies, and the frequent congruence between the ideological perspectives of religious broadcasters and the international policy objectives of the U.S. government. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: What ideologies (political, economic, cultural, religious and social) are emphasized in the 700 Club? What are some of the political and ideological roles the 700 Club program plays in the context of less industrialized nations? What congruencies are there between U.S. government policy, market-oriented economic policy and 700 Club content?

Live!: Defining Television Quality at the Turn of the 21st Century
Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
This paper investigates some of the major efforts by U.S. television producers to create live drama since the 1990s. It examines the ways in which this programming and the discourse surrounding it articulated liveness to various definitions of television quality and sought thereby to highlight the uniqueness of broadcast network television in an age of media conglomeration and convergence. In particular, I focus on the live 1997 episode of NBC's ER, the live feature-length teleplay, Fail Safe (CBS, 2000), and the week of live broadcasts of ABC's daytime drama One Life to Live in 2002. I argue that these attempts at television liveness negotiated distinctions of quality between the visual styles of live video and film, between a nostalgic vision of television's "Golden Age" and its present, less exalted condition, and between the real world (i.e., the potential mistakes of the performers and crew) and the fictional narrative.

"Network" Theory in the Post-Network Era: Using the Cultural Forum Model to Analyze Fictional 9/11 Discourses
Amanda D. Lotz, Denison University
Many foundational models for the study of television were developed at a specific moment in history during which a particular set of institutional operations governed norms of industrial operation. My paper focuses on one such model, Newcomb and Hirsch's (1983) cultural forum model, and considers its viability in an industrial and cultural environment in which "television" is very different from the network era of the model's creation. A central assumption of the model is that television texts are widely shared, but the audience fragmentation and narrowcasting that defines the U.S. post-network era have eroded the tendency for television texts to be shared among broad audiences. As an application, my paper explores the value of the model in assessing the ideological contribution of post 9/11 related discourses appearing in isolated episodes of some twelve narrative fictional series in the 2001-2002 television season.

The Unknown Soldier vs. Darth Vader: Conditions for Ethnically Relevant TV
Lars Lundsten, Arcada, Finland
In present-day film and television, American iconography and American schemes of intelligibility are predominant. This presentation makes a couple of comments on the very possibility of mastering the cultural conventions of American television in order to create products of national or even ethnical relevance. In Europe, there are numerous small and ethnically diversified audiences that are continuously exposed to products created by American television companies. On what premises are the Europeans able to produce material that matters only to a small audience but still manages to outsmart their American competitors?

The Potential and Pitfall of Interactive TV Technology: An Empirical Study
Soha Maad, Institute For Media Communication (Germany)
Providing interactive television programs that capture the attention and edutain (educate and entertain) the viewer while attending his/her preferences, needs, requirements, and limitations (e.g. physical handicap) is still far from our reach. This is due to several factors including the limitation of the prevalent paradigms of interaction with digital TV, the limitation of interactive-television technologies, and the lack of the development of truly interactive and universally accessible multi-modal content. In this presentation, the potential and pitfall of interactive TV are examined by reviewing state-of-the-art research in the development of paradigms of interaction with digital TV and by discussing the results of an empirical study on the use of various paradigms of interaction with digital TV.

Genre Television and the Imaginary Entertainment Environments
Daniel Mackay, University of Oregon
The future of genre fiction in television is intertwined with the medium's interconnectedness with other media forms: film, the Internet, video games, and print culture. This presentation will be a theorization of this interconnectedness, centered on the idea of the "imaginary entertainment environment": a conceptual construct developed during the mid-nineties as a means of analyzing the performative elements that cut across discreet media forms. The model of the "imaginary entertainment environment" will be explained and the implications of this model for the future of genre fiction in television will be discussed.

Behind Bars: Guilt, Redemption and Oz Fans
Michele Malach, Fort Lewis College
Tom Fontana's HBO series Oz was known for its exploration of moral boundaries and the evil that men do. And violence and nudity. Oz fans watched not only for the soap opera qualities of the show but also for the ways in which the prison microcosm mirrors the ethical dilemmas of our own lives. This presentation will consider the ways in which Oz fans pondered those boundaries and incorporated the mythology of the show into their own lives.

Television for Ritual: The Modern Majlis
Atteqa Malik, freelance artist
Muslims around the world have recently been reassessing their religious practices; rituals that were previously followed blindly are now being questioned and understood for their spiritual significance and purpose. Modern technology has played a significant role by providing the necessary tools to facilitate research and information access. Choices are available to worshippers today that did not exist ten years ago. This paper focuses on a small community of Shi'ite Muslims in Pakistan and their modern means of observing a mourning ritual during the Islamic month of Moharram. The group has replaced their traditional gathering where a live 'maulvi' gives a sermon by recreating one where they view a prerecorded 'majlis' on television.


Chasing the Inspirational in Arab Television and Film
Ramez Maluf, Lebanese American University
Inspirational storytelling has been popular in American film and television since the 1960s, and has become even more popular of late. A successful inspirational production offers a reluctant hero with whom the audience can identify. Although very popular around the globe, this type of Hollywood production is rarely imitated abroad. In the Arab world it is virtually non-existent. The paper explores the reasons for the absence of inspirational storytelling in film and television in the Arab world in the context of identity theory. After examining the literature on inspirational films, the paper reviews the causes for their success worldwide and their absence in Arab productions.

The Production of a "Beloved Community": Sesame Street's Effort to Educate Disadvantaged Children
Jennifer Mandel, University of New Hampshire
This paper explores the creation and development of Sesame Street and its representations of race, class, gender, and children in American culture. The creators carefully selected the cast of African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian characters, along with an array of yellow, purple, and green puppets (called the "Muppets"). They constructed the set to resemble an urban neighborhood (with brownstone apartments and streetlamps). The show set out to provide an equal start to the urban poor, but ended up appealing to a much broader audience nationwide and gradually worldwide that has lasted through the 21st Century.

Celebrity-Real: The Vestigial Cultural Power of Contemporary Television
P. David Marshall, Northeastern University
The American television industry appears to be bifurcating. On one level, reality television has asserted itself as the dominant genre of entertainment television. On another level, subscription television in the form of Home Box Office is experiencing unprecedented success, both critically and financially. Behind both of these transformations are two key factors: the decline in the centrality of television for information and entertainment and the foreboding threat of a transformation of the economy of television. This paper looks at this televisual moment as identifying the swansong of commercial television. How this is manifested is through a celebration of its cultural power in the twentieth century. Commercial television is increasingly self-reflexive in its structure and one of its key patterns of self-reflexiveness is to celebrate its vestigial capacity to make things significant. From this perspective reality television can be analyzed as production of the television celebrity - a celebration of the power of television to make significance at the exact moment of the decline in television's cultural power.

Preserving Democracy through the 30-Second Negative Political Ad
Michael L. Maynard, Temple University
This paper asserts that negative political advertising is a legitimate rhetorical strategy for advocating one's candidacy for office. Despite outcries of foul play, and notwithstanding the predictable drumbeat for legislation which would outlaw the 30-second negative television ad, this paper argues that by expressing political animosities, negative advertising is actually beneficial in preserving our democratic form of government. The paper discusses the rationale for running negative political television spots, the various attempts to regulate the content of the political ad, and arguments in favor of no regulation. Moreover, the paper contends that the 30-second negative political ad contributes to a robust and often frank discussion of the polarizing issues of the day.

"Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt and Me": Cold War Social Science and the Roots of Reality TV
Anna McCarthy, New York University
This paper situates first wave of reality television in a broader context of popular and intellectual culture. It examines the intersections between the realist capacity of the hidden camera as a tool for the production of social knowledge and the methods and techniques of social science. It details how the kinds of social dramas that liberal media producers like Allen Funt played for laughs throughout the 1950s and 1960s were simultaneously raising deep moral questions for experimental social scientists like Yale's Stanley Milgram, the instigator of the ethically compromised obedience experiments. Milgram was one of several social psychologists who turned to the work of Allen Funt as a template for their experimental situations and as a teaching tool in the classroom. Indeed, up to and including the broadcast of PBS's An American Family, a series Margaret Mead hailed as a social scientific breakthrough, reality television served as a place where popular culture and social science overlapped, via a realist ideal in which social norms, mechanisms of conformity, ritualized scripts and modes of interaction were put on display.

Whose Screen Is it, Anyway?: Games, Agency and Television
Christian McCrea, University of Melbourne
What is it about computer and video games that has been slowing transforming television viewers into game players? Games invariably rely on the idea of success and failure, and continually ask of us success against the odds, be that through perseverance, bravery, or lateral thinking; in a word, forms of heroism. If we can term this process as heroic, what does that mean for a generation of media-aware children versed in the systematic vanquishing of terrible odds and endless evil via quick thinking and rapid hand-eye co-ordination? This paper attempts to approach these concepts from the direction of the stories and logics themselves. I will ask what extent are Japanese and American/Western games and their stories affecting the cultural landscape of these countries? More specifically, how has this impacted on the role of television in the home?

Who Owns Cable TV?: Locating the Public Interest in a Post-Scarcity Era
John McMurria, New York University
Public-interest television policy has been anchored in the scarcity doctrine, a Progressive-era statutory framework that deemed the airwaves a scarce, public resource to be managed by commercial broadcasters. At this moment when the scarcity doctrine stands on tenuous legal and economic grounds, this paper surveys avenues for public interest policy based on these new television transmission technologies of cable and satellite.

Interfacing Television: TiVo, Technology Convergence, and Everyday Life
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
This presentation examines one of the key developments of convergent media technology, the digital video recorder (DVR), and considers how it functions to transform traditional conceptions of television as a communication medium. I argue that DVRs, specifically represented by the TiVo technology, work to radically alter our temporal and experiential relationship to television by foregrounding an interface to the traditional live medium of television. Rather than addressing media convergence at the level of hypothetical abstraction or utopian speculation, this analysis of TiVo s medium interface explores how convergent technologies get adopted and integrated into the everyday life of media consumers, arguing that the changes fostered by these technological developments will be experienced on this micro-level.

(Re) Visiting The Osbournes: The Emergence of the Reality Sitcom Genre
Joanne Morreale, Northeastern University
This essay uses The Osbournes as a case study to document the emergence of a generic hybrid: the reality-sitcom. It illustrates the increasingly prevalent hybridization of genres that characterizes the contemporary television landscape, and articulates the role of genre in cultural meaning making practices.

Mycasts: New Genre of Global Television
Bill Mosher, Visionaries.org
Tom Vreeland, OpenVES
Broadband Internet access, webcasting, streaming media standards and specifications, and Internet 2 technology, now make revolutionary new genres of participatory digital interactive television on the Web possible. It is now easier, in the digital domain to program interactive personalized "Mycasts", than it has been in the past to program conventional one-size-fits-all television broadcasts. We will show some examples of what these new open channels will look like at Web scale as they begin to incorporate the following technologies: SMIL, MPEG-4 and 7, synthetic characters, virtual sets, automated semantic playlists, weblogs, webcams, webcast streams, video-on-demand, no advertising, no commercialization, etc.

Towards an Aesthetics of Entertainment: Soccer on TV
Eggo Müller, University of Utrecht
Entertainment not only plays a major role in processes of transition within the media sector, but - as Michel Wolf has claimed in his book The Entertainment Economy (1999) - within the transition of economy and society as a whole. This paper aims to outline basic concepts in order to develop a theory of entertainment, defining "entertainment" neither as the inferior version of high art, nor as a social agency of pure ideological transmission, nor as a phenomenon of popular culture which can be sufficiently described in terms of identity politics. It takes for granted institutional and discursive processes, i.e. the entertainment industry as an institution providing society with entertainment programming and popular discourses on entertainment phenomena. The paper will go beyond this accepted fact to argue that the very act of perceiving entertaining media products has to be outlined in aesthetic terms. In order to be entertaining a media product has to have the capacity to involve its recipient in an aesthetic experience. It takes live broadcasting of international soccer games as a paradigmatic example, for instance in Europe the top ten programs of a TV season are consistently nothing but live soccer.

"I Think We Need a New Name for It": The Meeting of Documentary and Reality Television
Susan Murray, New York University
I want to explore how a network¹s brand image and marketing and positioning of particular programs work in conjunction with our critical judgments, expectations, and knowledge of previous documentary and reality forms, to help us as, viewers and/or critics, decide what is "reality TV" and what is a "proper" documentary. In this way, I'm engaging in the type of analysis that Jason Mittell calls for, which at its base, conceives of television genres as discursive practices. Traditional analyses of the documentary form have focused on the textual elements that distinguish it from other forms of non-fiction film and video. This type of discursive generic analysis helps us understand what reality television is, since it reveals many of the assumptions of that surround the generic category as well as the cultural role assigned to it, particularly in relation to that of documentary.

Utopian Promise Fulfilled? Cable Television in Korea
Siho Nam, The Pennsylvania State University
Originally developed as a means of retransmitting and boosting broadcast signals, cable television nowadays has grown as a main element of visual culture in many, if not most, countries. In view of that, this paper seeks to explore the roles played by Korean cable TV in regards to both political and cultural democracy. In so doing, it first presents a brief yet interpretive history of Korean cable TV in its battle against the established broadcast corporations, and then assesses the impact of that ongoing battle on Korean civil society at large.

This Cop's for you: Genre and Discourse in the Post-Network Era
Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, DePauw University
In an era of commercial television marked by industry expansion, fragmentation and segmentation, we need models for analysis that can account for a wide range of texts aimed at increasingly differentiated audiences with varied interests, tastes, and beliefs. Using the cycle of police dramas that has emerged since 1981 as a case study, this paper returns to Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch's model of television as a "cultural forum" as a way toward understanding the cultural work of television genres in the "neo-network" era. As opposed to ritualistic or rigidly ideological approaches to genre analysis, what makes the idea of the "cultural forum" useful is its refusal to short-circuit that analysis by presuming an underlying unity of generic discourse enforced by the institution of commercial television.

Political, Cultural and Educational Dimensions ofTelevision in Post-Colonial African States
Tokunbo Ojo, freelance journalist
The establishment of a Moroccan television station in 1954 marked the beginning of the television age in Africa. The inception of television service was seen as part of a social, political and economical national development plan in the postcolonial African states. It is within the framework of national development that this paper explores the political, cultural and educational purposes of television in the post-colonial African states.

Reality Television and Cultural Citizenship
Laurie Ouellette, Queens College, City University of New York
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has been faulted for granting media corporations license for expansion and synergy, and for entrusting the market with any remaining "public interest" goals in broadcasting. Critics have also likened the legislation to the neo-liberal forces that propelled the Welfare Reform Act and fuel the privatization of public institutions, from the postal system to the penal system. What have not been addressed are the cultural implications of these reforms, and their relationship to television's role in the production of cultural citizenship. This paper analyzes reality programming as one site where neo-liberal approaches to democracy have materialized on television.

Conceptions of Marriage and Family in Turkish Television: Settlement or Reorientation?
Esra Özcan, Bahçesehir University, Istanbul
The realm of family and marriage constituted an important battleground in which Turkish modernization defined and represented itself in relation to various cultural experiences, milieus, and dichotomies which include modernity and tradition; extended and nuclear family; monogamy and polygamy. This paper deals with the forms of marriage and family as represented in contemporary family dramas in Turkish televisions.

The 1990s - A Decade of TV Diversity Advancements and Stumbling Blocks
Henry Puente, University of Texas, Austin
This presentation will review the historical research of the TeleVisions Project. As a part of the project, researchers surveyed entertainment trade magazines and the Los Angeles Times regarding media advocacy groups' attempts to improve diversity in television portrayals and employment and the networks' response to these efforts since 1992. The past decade has been a turbulent time, which has seen both unprecedented progress and setbacks for advocacy groups. Simultaneously, the television industry and professional guilds have struggled with diversity issues and with appeasing the various media advocacy groups and the government. The historical timeline of events compiled by researchers will be highlighted in greater detail in this presentation. See Beltran, Downing and Ross.

Decoding D-Dag: Multi-Channel Television at the Millennium
Martin Roberts, The New School
This paper focuses on an unusual recent example of multi-channel television: the so-called D-Dag (D-Day) project produced by the four Dogma '95 filmmakers for Danish television to commemorate the new millennium. Although little known outside Denmark, the project is of particular interest for a number of reasons. Focusing on the nature of D-Dag as a national media event, the paper will argue that it problematizes common assumptions about television, notably about the fragmentation of national audiences in an age of transnational, multi-channel television. Shot in real time on mini-DV, D-Dag also exemplifies the blurring of boundaries in contemporary media between documentary and dramatic fiction, as well as offering a glimpse of possible future directions for interactive television. Excerpts from the D-Dag project itself will be presented.

"The Amazing Thing Is That it Happened at all": WNYC-TV and the Impossibility of Municipal Broadcasting in the United States
M.J. Robinson, New York University
While many metropolitan areas of the United States have educational and public television outlets operating under noncommercial licenses from the FCC, New York is unique in that in 1952 the City of New York was granted a commercial license to operate WNYC-TV over UHF Channel 31. This television station never operated commercially, but from 1961 until 1996, it operated as a part of NYC's existing Municipal Broadcasting System, bringing news and information programs to the citizens, and providing an outlet for programming created by the many diverse communities of New York City. This paper presents a history of WNYC-TV from its genesis as WUHF through its demise when Rudolph Giuliani sold it in part because "municipalities have no reason to be in the broadcasting business." It examines the relationship between government and government-created and sponsored broadcasting as well as the regulations that affected this unusual broadcast outlet.

Inside Information: Industry Professionals and Activists Speak About the State of Race and Ethnicity on Television
Sharon M. Ross, University of Texas, Austin
In this presentation, Sharon M. Ross examines some of the main themes and findings of qualitative interviews conducted by the TeleVisions Project researchers. The research group focused on four sectors of the television community: network executives, creative professionals, professional guilds, and advocacy groups. Across all four sectors, individuals we spoke with expressed a commitment to improving ethnic and racial minority representations on television, emphasizing the importance of creating greater avenues for access to behind-the-scenes power in particular. However, it also became clear that these different sectors often had competing priorities in regards to this common goal, as well as varying assessments concerning the success of past initiatives and the future of others. See Beltran, Downing and Puente.

Television, Cultural Change and Media Dynamics in Germany
Gebhard Rusch, Siegen University
Against Riepl´s law television right from its advent in the early fifties not only displaced other media, but also lead the public to some radical changes in media aesthetics, spending of time and money, structuring of every day life, value structures, dominant experiences, social relations, etc. The paper will present evidence for the impact of TV on German media dynamics and cultural development. Correspondingly, it will show how media images, patterns of media use and media mentalities changed since TV entered the scene.

Oprafication, Media, and Culture
Sherra Schick, Indiana University
After two decades on the air, Oprah Winfrey has transcended the role of talk show host to attain the iconic status of a movie star or a pop music idol. The foundation of her fame, The Oprah Winfrey Show, is seen by 26 million viewers each week in the United States, and millions more in approximately 110 international markets. My paper examines the global implications of Oprafication, as a way of framing global media debates with Americanist assumptions. In consideration of the centrality of media, the ideological leap from Communism to Oprah raises questions about the shifts in the patterns of national and local culture. Thus, Winfrey, as object of adulation, becomes a target of criticism, and therefore a figure in larger global public debates about society and culture.

Life Lies - Live Lies: The Effect and Function of Blurring the Genres in Television
Claudia Schwarz, University of Innsbruck
In this presentation I will juxtapose the theme of life-lies, as it is frequently used in series and soap operas, with the notion of "live lies" that are presented to the audience in news reports. One attempt to explain the blurring of fact and fiction in the two genres will be to look at how series and soap operas work with life-lies, why they fascinate the audience and how they influence our daily lives. I will draw on examples from ER to show how the "real" or possible is used to make the series authentic and interesting. The next step will be to examine how information is created in (live) news broadcasts and point out their fictional elements. Examples from the news coverage in connection with the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the "resulting" wars will illustrate some effects of this media practice. My aim is to show how the awareness of a distinction between reality and fiction is blurred and how, as a result, these "lies" affect our lives. Does reality get lost somewhere between soap opera and news coverage?

TiVo: TV, Imagination, and the Politics of Total Fulfillment
F. Scott Scribner, University of Hartford
Through an overview of the convergence of television and computers, through the example of TiVo, this paper explores the farthest reaches of the socio-political implications of a technology that aspires to micro-map individual desire for its fulfillment through a highly targeted marketing of infinitely customizable products. By offering a historical genealogy of the intimate relation between the imagination and socio-political intersubjectivity, I am able to outline the broader trajectory of the TV's attempt to monopolize the time of the imagination by trading free-images for free-time. Against prevailing views, I contend that the extreme aspirations of TiVo's paradigm of infinite micro-marketing marks the total eclipse of the former imagination in the immediacy of near feed-back loops of desire and fulfillment.

The Historical Evolution of the Korean Television Broadcasting Industry: An Economic Perspective
Sangho Seo, Penn. State University
Korean television broadcasting has enjoyed more than a forty-year history. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the historical evolution of Korean television broadcasting by looking at the historical changes of the market structure of Korean television broadcasting industry. To achieve this goal, this study has chosen the industrial organization model as a theoretical framework. This model of structure, conduct, and performance (SCP) provides a powerful and useful analytical framework for economic analysis. Using the industrial organization model, this study will give a picture of how the Korean television broadcasting industry looked in the past and how we can expect it to look in the future.

The Digital Television Future: Convergence With Computers
Simone Seym, Georgetown University
TV is never going to be the same. We have to rethink how digital television reflects the changing conditions for culture, knowledge, learning, government policy and economic and ecological opportunities. My project DigiTV investigates how we become most effectively involved in a creative, collaborative and critical discourse.

Let There Be Light: Who "Creates" American TV Programs?
Jane Shattuc, Emerson College
This paper attempts to reconcile the tension in American television between a highly rationalized system of production and the creative process. Budgets, production schedules and audience share prescribe its process. Yet TV producers continually speak of their "creativity," "inspiration," and "originality." But how are innovation, creativity, or originality understood and factored into American television? In order to understand this complex process, I offer a production ethnology of the sitcom Friends-perhaps one of the most successful and internationally renown of current American programs. Through interviews, on-site observation and publicity research, I look at how the makers understand the creative process. For too long media studies have written off the ideas of the majority of television producers as self-promoting or inarticulate. Friends offers a fascinating study of how these corporate professional understand their work as an "art."

Late Night After 9/11: Examining the Opening Monologues of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Jon Stewart in Their First Televised Shows After the Terrorist Attacks
Kathleen Sohar, University of Florida
This paper examines the opening monologues of late-night television talk show hosts in the immediate wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Using dramatistic fantasy-theme analysis, categories are generated for the following programs: Late Night with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Conan O'Brien Show, and The Daily Show. An overview of humor theory, particularly as it relates to political and macabre material is included. The trend toward increased infotainment of traditional news programs is also discussed in context with late-night television's role as a genre for social and political satire.

Chilean Media and Discourses of Human Rights: Chilevisión's El Termómetro
Kristin Sorensen, Indiana University
I am looking at the manner in which media in contemporary Chile discuss human rights violations committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. One of my case studies is the television debate show El Termómetro (The Thermometer) on Chile's newest commercial network, Chilevisión. Every show has a poll in which you can vote on a yes or no question through the phone or internet, expanding its conversations across the country and even internationally. This study demonstrates how media communication can influence the ways in which members of a divided society choose to deal with a traumatic past and negotiate their competing historical memories.

TV Noir 101: Genre as Discourse in the WB's Angel
Louisa Stein, New York University
In this paper I will explore the ways in which audiences use the language of genre to understand, interpret and discuss television. Specifically, I will look closely at generic discourse elicited by the television program Angel, the horror/noir spin-off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This paper will examine the generic discourse among Angel viewers who congregate in online forums. I will explore discussions of episodes and fan fiction and art that incorporate generic elements.

Extending Television -- Noggin's Degrassi: The Next Generation and the Fine Line Between Education and Advertising
Laura Tropp, Marymount Manhattan College
Degrassi Junior High, a Canadian television program designed for teenagers and broadcast in the United States in the 1980s, retains cult status among that generation of television viewers. Recently, in both Canada and the United States (on the Noggin Channel) a new installment of this series, Degrassi: The Next Generation, has reached popularity among a young audience. In the new version of the program, the producers have created what they refer to as a "convergent TV/Internet project." The use of the companion Web site with Degrassi: The Next Generation creates a new type of television experience. This paper will explore the impact this new television experience has on the viewer, the producer, and our definitions of television.

Muse Tube: Television and the American Avant-Garde
Peter Walsh, Massachusetts Art Commission
Both radically opposed to and completely fascinated by television, artists such as Nam June Paik, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, and the graphic artist David Carson have created work that is at the same time a radical critique of the medium, a reflection of its many roles in contemporary society, and a celebration of its realized and unrealized potentials. The paper will begin by noting some often overlooked contributions artists have made to earlier mass-communication technologies. Then it will explore how American artists of the late 20th-century explored and exploited both formal and social elements of television, including electronic texture, bureaucratic control, celebrity, divided narrative, and ubiquity.

Confessional Reality TV: Recuperation through Mediation
Amber Watts, Northwestern University
While 1950s "audience participation" shows like Queen for a Day and Strike It Rich were ostensibly classified as quiz shows, their contestants received prizes simply for confessing personal hardship-a means of recuperating their social selves through mediation. These shows appear to be the precursors of the contemporary breed of confessional programming. On talk shows, court shows, and especially relationship programming like Temptation Island and The Bachelor, non-actors verbally disclose emotion in the hopes of being somehow rewarded (whether with prizes, a relationship, or simply the relief of unloading emotional burden). It is the act of confessing and the subsequent display of emotion that ultimately determines their reward. This paper will address the discourse inherent in confessional television, the way it functions for both confessant and audience, and how its meaning has changed since Queen for a Day.


Reconstruction of Sport by Television
Gilad Weingarten, Zinman College, Wingate Institute
This paper deals with the reconstruction of sport, due to the pressure of television, which is obvious on two levels: organization and conduct and the rules of the game. Regardless of its nature the underlying motivation of all changes is directly related to the desire to appear better and more often on the screen in order to attract wider and more variable audience, higher rating and sponsorship. Examples from various sports will illustrate this trend.

The New National Frontier: New Zealand Identity and American Television, 1960-1965
Jim Welch, University of Southern California
This paper will address, in an historical context, issues regarding the globalization of television, national identity, and audience reception. Specifically, it will consider the case of the first five years of television in New Zealand and how New Zealanders reacted to the preponderance of American programming on their screens in that period. I will examine the responses of the state broadcaster and that of "amateur" viewers' groups, which both generally avoided addressing the question of the origin of television programs by focusing instead on the technical aspects of building a transmission infrastructure that would reach the entire population of New Zealand. I will also look at the particular example of how New Zealand television audiences "used" television Westerns both to highlight similarities between American and New Zealand mythologies about their respective frontier histories and to differentiate New Zealand's history and way of life from America's.

The "Good Box" and the "Idiot Box": Television, Computer Monitors and the Webcam Frame
Michele White, Wellesley College
In the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ms. Calendar describes computers and the Internet as the "good box"-presumably because they seem to enable knowledge, user interaction, and critical examination-and television as the "idiot box." However, webcam operators and other Internet programmers employ such television conventions as real-time, immediacy, intimacy, and the correlation of representations to the spectator's lived space in order to elide the produced aspects of computer representations. The labeling of certain sites as "home," maps that make it seem like there are connected rooms, and webcam operators' invitations to "enter the life of a college student" and to "ENTER … with an open mind" suggest that an empowered user can move into a material space. Despite such narratives about access, webcam representations are not fully available because of the incremental appearance of the image, scrambled surfaces or "noise," the loss of image at the edge, the visibility of the pixels, and the omnipresence of the rectangular format. A webcam operator may title her pages "Live: The Wikked Show" but the limits of real-time are emphasized by such ironic titles as "They're alive!!" and the acknowledgment that depicted users "are known to not move for a few hours at a time." These recurring limitations and technological failures demonstrate that webcams and other Internet settings do not deliver real bodies and environments. Malfunctions present problems for programmers and users who want to engage with the Internet as a continuous material space.

Film and Television in Interaction
Magnus Widman, Lund University
The text emphasizes aesthetics in post war American film and is more precisely a study of directors, which started their career within live television and made a transition to cinema. The influence of their television background on their films is central to the text The most contributing factors in this context are changes in the overall technology within TV, changes from live productions to the use of film, and later to the use of video tape. The technological change will be seen through the works of representative names from live television era such as John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Franklin J. Schaffner, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, and Delbert Mann. Television's transitional nature through technical changes lead to changes in methods which ultimately also lead to changes in style.

Watching Rape on American Television
Courtney Young, New York University
Using Sarah Projansky's 2001 text entitled Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture as a framework, this paper will look at the portrayal of rape in current television programming. Some of the primary questions and issues that I will be tackling are: How do popular narratives about rape also communicate ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and sexuality? How has media, specifically television, defined rape over time? Has rape become only a device used to further the narrative? How does popular culture articulate rape discourse and what does this say about its future? What are the likely outcomes of the personification of rape on television and what are the darkest possibilities?

The Audience and the Imagination of Freedom
Usha Zacharias, Westfield State College
This paper examines a phenomenon that marked the inception of consumer television in India in the nationalist context of the late 1980s, and continues to be a part of globalized Indian television culture today. This is the telecast of Hindu mythological series that dominated popular audience imagination and propelled the political growth of Hindu right-wing ideology. Serial narratives based on ancient Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata continue to be telecast today, providing ideological environments that interlink religion, politics, and communities. My paper specifically examines the local context of the viewing of mythological television epics through ethnographic research in a marginalized working class community in New Delhi, India.

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