Unsettling TV: Social Connectivity and Television in the Post-Network Era

Abstract

This doctoral project analyzes the socio-cultural implications of social television through a lens that takes into account the influences of a number of factors – the role of technology, audience practices, and industry logics. The dissertation posits that contemporary social television taps into long-existing practices that have been central to the experience of watching television, shifting away from perspectives that frame social television as a recent development that emerged from the fusion of social media and television. This limited perspective negates the reality that television has been rooted into practices of sociality from its early days, and elides the long history of experimentation with social television. Furthermore, it suggests a “before” mode of engaging with television that is devoid of the practices that have come to be associated with the social television phenomenon. The dissertation’s importance derives from the contributions it makes to scholarship about liveness and television, sociality within television, and critical media industries. The project explores industry logics that are tied to sustaining myths about technology as a powerful instrument deemed capable of instituting radical societal transformations. These myths about technology have been manifested through experimentations with interactive television and earlier social television prototypes and reveal an instinctual belief in sociability as a fundamental motive for engaging with television. Case studies on the NFL, and cable networks AMC and Bravo, provide a more nuanced understanding of this instinct toward sociability. The dissertation proposes a theory of telesociality to explain the matrix of relations that structure interactions between the viewer and the text, between viewers, and between viewers and the industry. Telesociality emerges as the heart of the audience’s relationship to the television text and affords new understandings of liveness and sociability, suggesting both are moored into the everydayness of television and critical to the ways in which audiences interact with and experience television More importantly, it suggests that the industry-audience dynamic is rooted in the affordances of sociality that television provides the audience, and the pleasures of television are revealed through aspects of play and bonding that define social television in the contemporary era.