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In: Transformative Works and Cultures: TWC, Volume 22
ISSN: 1941-2258
Book review of Paul Booth, Playing fans: Negotiating fandom and media in the digital age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015, paperback, $45 (242p) ISBN 978-1609383190, e-book, $45, 978-1-60938-320-6.
In: Postmodern culture, Volume 22, Issue 2
ISSN: 1053-1920
In: Women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 13, Issue 1, p. 159-167
ISSN: 1748-5819
In: Media, Culture & Society, Volume 41, Issue 8, p. 1210-1227
ISSN: 1460-3675
In this essay, we take up three distinctive features of the US-based subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform Hulu: its ownership structure, its business deals, and its televisual aesthetics. Although there are substantial overlaps among these categories, we approach each of them separately so as to better enable us to link our analyses to some of the key questions and concerns about what contemporary television has become and how it should best be studied. By inserting Hulu into a conversation about today's television ecosystem – a context from which it has been absent for too long – we purposefully broaden scholarly debates about SVOD platforms beyond that of Netflix and Amazon to reconsider some of the emergent conventions or common-sense norms that currently underpin our understanding of television in the Internet era. In the end, we argue streaming television is a multi-sited, quasi-iterative, and rapidly evolving marketplace, in which legacy practices persist alongside and often in competition with new modes of production, dissemination, and consumption.
Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries. The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions. By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries