Flow TV - Michael Kackman

From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on smartphones and beyond, TV has overflowed its boundaries. If Raymond Williams' concept of flow challenges the idea of a discrete television text, then convergence destabilizes the notion of television as a discrete object.

Flow TV examines television in an age of technological, economic, and cultural convergence. Seeking to frame a new set of concerns for television studies in the 21^st century, this collection of all new essays establishes television's continued importance in a shifting media culture. Considering television and new media not as solely technical devices, but also as social technologies, the essays in this anthology insist that we turn our attention to the social, political, and cultural practices that surround and inform those devices' use. The contributors examine television through a range of critical approaches from formal and industrial analysis to critical technology studies, reception studies, political economy, and critiques of television's transnational flows. This volume grows out of the critical community formed around the popular online journal Flow: A Critical Form on Television and Media Culture (flowtv.org). It is ideal for courses in television studies or media convergence.

Michael Kackman is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture

Marnie Binfield is a doctoral student in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Matthew Thomas Payne is a doctoral student in Radio-Televison-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is coeditor (with Nina B. Huntemann) of Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, also published by Routledge.

Allison Perlman is Assistant Professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark.

Bryan Sebok is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Lewis and Clark College.

"Flow TV brings together a wide array of scholars to provocatively interrogate the sprawling and converging world of televisual media culture. Both celebrating new potentials of the digital age, and acting as a canary in the gemeinschaft, the book dramatizes why critical media studies matters now more than ever."--Matthew Jordan, Pennsylvania State University

"The essays in this collection offer exciting, but level-headed analyses of television at the beginning of the 21st century. Together, they offer wonderful tributes, extensions, and complications of Raymond Williams' concept of 'flow,' analyzing television's still developing technology and cultural form without simply embracing the hype of the 'digital age'."--Brenton J. Malin, University of Pittsburgh