The book’s most important insights are articulated in terminology that mixes established academic concepts with industry and tech lingo – think of ‘auteurist spin doctoring’ or ‘ontological stripmall’. In this context of exciting and pathbreaking research, Caldwell’s book stands out because of its style, the breadth of topics it covers, and its simultaneously eclectic, inventive, and rigorous approach. Ien Ang’s Desperately Seeking the Audience Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV John Hartley’s Tele-ology Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events Richard Dienst’s Still Life in Real Time Jostein Gripsrud’s The Dynasty Years Marie Gillespie’s Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change). The early and mid-1990s were an especially fertile time for books that helped to understand television as a complex cultural phenomenon consisting of much more than individual texts and modes of reception books that made clear that television – similar to photography or film – provokes particular questions which might be productive for culture and media theory more generally (e.g. The book’s central claim that, during the 1980s, television had transformed into a visual medium in which program styles became an economically-valuable, technically-shaped, and culturally-reflexive category turned attention to previously ignored historical and theoretical features of the medium. With its combined attention to television’s aesthetic, economic, and technological aspects, it was a highly innovative book that questioned a great deal of conventional wisdom. It has now been 20 years since John Caldwell’s Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television was published.
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