Film and Media Studies 310: YouTube, Netflix and Facebook: Television after TV

Television, which started out life encased in wood and set in the center of our homes, has leapt out of its box. Those interested in analyzing the various roles that television plays in constructing our social, political and economic realities now find themselves chasing their object of study as it leaps across platforms, national borders and generic borders. If, in the past, television was primarily worthy of study because of its centrality in American social life, if television was the very space where the imperfect American public sphere lived, how do we begin to trace our shared culture when we no longer share television? If the primary strength of what we used to call television was to gather the largest numbers of citizens/consumers using the lowest common denominator of narratives, what are we to make of a situation in which citizen/consumers are increasingly segmented off into smaller and smaller target groups? How was ‘narrowcasting’ transformed what ‘broadcasting’ used to at least appear to hold together? This class will center around the question: what to make of television now that television as we knew it is largely gone. This class will use the theoretical backbones of public sphere theory, network theory and imagined communities to analyze how information is produced, distributed and consumed in a post-tv era. How has the shift from networks to cable and then to the Internet impacted both the industry and its consumers? How have the economics changed? How have politics changed in an age where people can ‘talk back’ to television through their own visual productions on Facebook or YouTube? Is there a relationship between the splintering of audiences, or narrowcasting, and the increasingly fractious political atmosphere in the world? What promises of progress or regress do the new regimes of media production and distribution set the stage for? How have new modes of producing and distributing entertainment and news had an impact on productions of the self? Or on privacy? How, in the contemporary era of mass self-communication, has the relationship between individual and society been transformed?