Edited Collection - Television as Digital Media

Editors: James Bennett (London Metropolitan University) and Niki Strange (University of Sussex/Cogapp Ltd)

Following the success of the Television (Studies) Goes Digital conference, contributions are solicited for the publication of an edited collection entitled Television as Digital Media.

Television is increasingly becoming a digital medium, making a ‘new media’ form out of a technology that has often been positioned as the old technology par excellence. Without taking a technologically determined view of television’s new digital form, we seek contributions that assess how television’s digitalization, as part of a wider cultural change, do bring about significant shifts in the ways we understand, theorize, use, watch and enjoy television. From the production practices and industrial strategies of the television industry, through to its regulation and its uses and place in the lives of its audiences, television is changing and requires us to re-think our understanding of it with these changes.

The collection already has an excellent line up of entries from esteemed and newly emerging scholars, including:

Professors William Boddy (Baruch College, City University NY)

John Caldwell (UCLA), Roberta Pearson (Nottingham)

Jeanette Steemers (Westminster)

Dr. Karen Lury (Glasgow)

Dr. Helen Wood (De Montfort).

This call for papers therefore looks to extend and build upon the focus of these contributors’ essays (please see www.digitaltvstudies.org.uk/abstracts.htm for details of provisional abstracts).

They particularly welcome papers that take a cross-disciplinary approach, converging fields of film, television, new media, cultural and media studies scholarship together with other disciplines that digital television increasingly asks us to touch upon.  Suggested areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• New ‘television’ technologies: YouTube, Joost, Internet protocol television etc;

• Public service broadcasting in a European context;

• The development of DTV outside of the US and UK;

• Digital television’s use by specific groups: subcultures, diasporas, migrants etc.;

• Surveillance technologies in digital TV;

• Digital television in a global context: e.g. global formats, digital distribution across borders; Bit-torrent, TV Without Frontiers Directive etc;

• Issues of digital rights management (DRM), Intellectual Property (IP), and Copyright;

• Ontologies of digital television: liveness, real-time, download streams etc.

Final essays will be approx 7,000 words in length, with drafts due in March of 2008 and final submissions by 1st of July 2008. Authors should submit abstracts of no longer than 500 words by October 1st 2007, together with a brief biography (250 words maximum).

For more information please contact James Bennett j.bennett@londonmet.ac.uk