Christopher Lucas and Avi Santo, coordinating editors of
Flow, a new online journal of television and media studies out of the University of Texas at Austin, write:
"Television and contemporary media are ephemeral experiences for most people, no less so for academics and cultural critics. Most of what we watch passes without notice. In an era of ever-increasing 'choices' it becomes ever more difficult to crown a particular televisual king or queen as representative of our current moment (not that this was ever possible. Certainly, the history of television in the 1950s is very different depending on whether you look at it through the lens of
Ozzie and Harriet or
The Adventures of Superman, and we are not simply referring to the stories told on these series, but their modes of production, their intended audience, their engagement with collective memory and popular culture, and so on).
"Yet, much critical writing about media has tended, even when addressing its complexity and diversity, to seize on particular programs, episodes, televisual moments and experiences. This necessity, despite the intentions of many, leads to canons, prescriptions, diagnoses that are antithetical to the ways most of us understand television.
"Flow [is] envisioned as an experiment in aligning the academic perspective more closely with the televisual experience."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 10/08/2004 05:14:00 PM
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