Article:

Still TV – On the resilience of an old medium

For more than a decade now the very status of television as a medium has been one of the predominant themes in television studies. The tone is mixed – both jubilant, welcoming all the exciting innovations which make television so much more than it was before, and fearful, for it is not clear whether television as we know it will survive all these changes. The sense of an end is looming, both in conferences (e.g. Ends of Television in Amsterdam, 2009) and in book titles (e.g. THE END OF TELEVISION?, TELEVISION AFTER TV, and BEYOND THE BOX). While the discipline as such is quite young – not so long ago we were wondering ‘What is the television of television studies?’ – and has not yet established its disciplinary boundaries it is already questioned, as are many classical fields of communication and media research in the era of digitisation and convergence. Convergence, in this context, refers to ‘the new textual practices, branding and marketing strategies, industrial arrangements, technological synergies, and audience behaviours enabled and propelled by the emergence of digital media’.