TY - JOUR

T1 - Television is happening

T2 - Methodological considerations for capturing digital television reception

AU - Wood, Helen

PY - 2007/11/1

Y1 - 2007/11/1

N2 - The more fragmented that engagements with the media become, the more important it is to understand changing audience practices for theories of social shaping. However, capturing the ways in which audiences respond to television is challenging when current technology makes new demands on the viewer: digital television packages offer 'interactive choices coterminous with computer interfaces. This article proposes a new methodology and demonstrates the kind of data that it makes available for studying digital television audiences. It suggests adapting the traditional metaphor of 'flow and combining an understanding of television-as-text with television-as-technology to explore the social contexts of new textual possibilities against the backdrop of claims made about 'new media. This is achieved by allowing the phenomenological aspects of television to inform an empirical study of television in sociocommunicative contexts. Locating mediated communication within everyday social interaction invites questions about what is new about the social shaping of the digital TV interface.

AB - The more fragmented that engagements with the media become, the more important it is to understand changing audience practices for theories of social shaping. However, capturing the ways in which audiences respond to television is challenging when current technology makes new demands on the viewer: digital television packages offer 'interactive choices coterminous with computer interfaces. This article proposes a new methodology and demonstrates the kind of data that it makes available for studying digital television audiences. It suggests adapting the traditional metaphor of 'flow and combining an understanding of television-as-text with television-as-technology to explore the social contexts of new textual possibilities against the backdrop of claims made about 'new media. This is achieved by allowing the phenomenological aspects of television to inform an empirical study of television in sociocommunicative contexts. Locating mediated communication within everyday social interaction invites questions about what is new about the social shaping of the digital TV interface.

KW - Digital television

KW - Interactivity

KW - Methodology

KW - Old/new media

KW - Social interaction

KW - Textual navigation

KW - User flows

U2 - 10.1177/1367549407081956

DO - 10.1177/1367549407081956

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:35548999184

VL - 10

SP - 485

EP - 506

JO - European Journal of Cultural Studies

JF - European Journal of Cultural Studies

SN - 1367-5494

IS - 4

ER -