Hot from the press: Not Only Entertainment

Just released: my book on television entertainment offering a theory of entertainment and analysing its revaluation in the past 25 years. Available at Herbert van Halem Verlag in Colgne or at amazon.de for the equivalent of 25 Euros.

‘Since the introduction of commercial broadcasting in Europe and the emergence of digital media, entertainment has become a dominant cultural concept in political, economic, pedagogical, scholarly and aesthetic discourses. In his collected essays on the Pragmatics and Aesthetics of Television Entertainment, I develop an aesthetically grounded theory of entertainment and analyses the revaluation of entertainment as cultural concept and practice. My critical analyses of trend-setting programs and genres of television since its deregulation, such as football programming, music videos, soap operas, American quality drama series, show how television entertainment works as a formative economic and aesthetic power in the digital media landscape. In constant dialogue with academic debates, my book not only contributes to a new understanding of entertainment, it also sketches out new perspectives for the research into media entertainment in an era of convergence and participatory media.’

New journal on digital television launched

In the recently launched International Journal of Digital Television, Jinna Tay and Graeme Turner, editors of Television Studies After TV (Routledge 2009), comment: ”The question for us now… is not so much a matter of whether we are seeing the end of television as a form of content, but rather a way of mapping the varying formations and configurations of the presentation and distribution of television – and asking of each… ‘how is this still television?’”  Well, whether all these forms are still ’television’ or not is less relevant than the question how the new screen-related formations and configurations affect our ways of communicating. The first issue of  the International Journal of Digital Television is accessible online.

More Internet does not equal less TV

A current quantitative research into Dutch children’s’ and adolescents’ media consumption shows – at first sight – that young people of the age groups from 15 to 19 spend more time surfing on the Internet than watching TV (100 vs. 78 minutes per day). The Dutch daily paper Volkskrant reports that according to Paul Sikkema from Quirius marketing research children’s’ and young adolescents’ media consumptions patterns show a huge diversity and fragmentation: old and new, lean-back and lean-forward media are used next to each other, often at the same time. What the research does not tell -  and did not ask? – is that young adolescents tend to watch more and more traditional TV programming on their computers. They become more independent from broadcasters’ schedules, but TV programming seems to remain the dominant content consumed.

Entertainment in the Age of Convergence

My piece on “Entertainment in the Age of Convergence”  [pdf] has just been published in a reader honoring Hans-Otto Hügel’s contribution to the theory of popular culture. The reader is published in German language, edited by my colleagues Udo Göttlich and Stephan Porombka: Die Zweideutigkeit der Unterhaltung: Zugangsweisen zur populären Kultur. Cologne: Herbert von Halem, pp. 202-238.