Jason Mittell

"Updating Television Culture for the Digital Era: From Hart to Hart to YouTube"

John Fiske's work forged American media studies in the 1980s and early-1990s, defining the nascent field in a way that you could not help but build upon, or argue against, his work. Twenty years later, Fiske's reputation and influence seems distant and dated to many scholars, with his work less centrally referenced in contemporary media studies. In this presentation, I take a close look at Fiske's most influential book, Television Culture, and reconsider its arguments and ideas in light of 21st century media. I argue that what appears most dated in Fiske's work are not his theoretical foundations or analytical insights, but the objects of analysis themselves – Fiske wrote in the present tense, encouraging his readers to engage with the most mundane and common aspects of popular culture. Not surprisingly, many of the aspects of everyday life that he used as his tutor texts were not to become the canonized, most remembered objects of 1980s television history, such as Hill Street Blues or Cheers, but the ephemeral everyday popular texts that would otherwise be forgotten: Hart to Hart, Sale of the Century, The A-Team, and Rock 'n' Wrestling. These choices raise key disciplinary issues, as television scholars must engage with contemporary programming, even at the risk of losing salience for future generations of readers. 

To update such case studies, I turn to some of Fiske's core ideas and consider how they might help illuminate contemporary examples of American television, and how major shifts within the television industry, textual forms, technologies, and viewer practices might encourage us to rethink some Fiske's conclusions. I consider how his distinction between readerly and producerly texts might apply to some examples of contemporary narrative complexity that encourage what I have called “forensic fandom,” such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Using Veronica Mars as a case study, I look at Fiske's distinctions between masculine and feminine modes of address, considering how contemporary genre mixing builds on the traditional categories laid out in Television Culture. Finally, I examine websites like YouTube and fan wikis as sites of tertiary textuality, considering how Fiske's theories of fan productivity still speak to participatory culture in the digital era. Throughout, I contend that Fiske's foundational analysis is not only still valid when applied to contemporary objects, but essential to understanding the cultural practices and possibilities found in television today.