From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on cell phones and beyond, this book examines television in an age of technological, economic, and cultural convergence. It contains essays that establishes television's importance in a shifting media culture.

For nearly two decades, Television: Critical Methods and Applications has served as the foremost guide to television studies. Designed for the television studies course in communication and media studies curricula, Television explains in depth how television programs and commercials are made and how they function as producers of meaning. Author Jeremy G. Butler shows the ways in which camera style, lighting, set design, editing, and sound combine to produce meanings that viewers take away from their television experience. He supplies students with a whole toolbox of implements to disassemble television and read between the lines, teaching them to incorporate critical thinking into their own television viewing. The fourth edition builds upon the pedagogy of previous editions to best accommodate current modes of understanding and teaching television. Highlights of the fourth edition include: New chapter and part organization to reflect the current approach to teaching television—with greatly expanded methods and theories chapters. An entirely new chapter on modes of production and their impact on what you see on the screen. Discussions integrated throughout on the latest developments in television’s on-going convergence with other media, such as material on transmedia storytelling and YouTube’s impact on video distribution. Over three hundred printed illustrations, including new and better quality frame grabs of recent television shows and commercials. A companion website featuring color frame grabs, a glossary, flash cards, and editing and sound exercises for students, as well as PowerPoint presentations, sample syllabi and other materials for instructors. Links to online videos that support examples in the text are also provided. With its distinctive approach to examining television, Television is appropriate for courses in television studies, media criticism, and general critical studies.

This work examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny. A series of original essays focus on a range of programmes, from 'The Daily Show' to 'South Park'.

Television has been called the "boob tube," "goof box," and even a "vast wasteland" of American culture. Yet, for all its banality, television is in many ways a mirror of culture, and communicates messages within culture through the multiple channels of visual images, language, sound, and music. All of these channels contain their own unique coded messages to create the larger meaningful text of television. As one of these sensory channels, music contributes to meaning in television through its artistic language and through television viewers' association of music with certain aspects of culture. Music has always been an integral part of the American television, even from its earliest days. Like its parent medium of radio, television broadcasts music to entertain viewers with live and video taped performances, but music has also come to play a much larger role in television beyond its pleasurable performance aspects. Music is used in narrative programs to evoke moods and identify characters and setting, it is used to sell products through commercial jingles, and most importantly, music generally aids broadcast television in navigating through the continuous "flow" of daily programming. This navigational aspect of television music is a distinctive feature, and functions to transport the viewer through three "spaces" of TV: the flow of the televisual apparatus, with commercials, newbreaks, and promos; the storyworld of each narrative program, and the representational space between narrative and flow. As Heard on TV is an examination and analysis of music in American television during the first fifty years of its history. The book focuses on how music has functioned to serve as a navigator through the flow of television and contributing to structure narrative programs, while also conveying meaning to its viewers by correlating with the images and sounds that it accompanies. Drawing from precedents of the cinema and radio, the book examines music in a number of "classic" television genres by positing a theory of "functional musical spaces" adapted from theories of Charles Morris, Umberto Eco, John Fiske, and others.

Provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field.

No longer a niche or cult identity, fandom now colors our notions of an expansive generational construct—the millennial generation. Like fans, millennials are frequently cast as active participants in media culture, spectators who expect opportunities to intervene, control, and create. At the same time, long-standing fears about fans’ cultural unruliness manifest in rampant stories of millennials’ technological over-dependence and lack of moral boundaries. These conflicting narratives of entrepreneurial creativity and digital immorality operate to quell the growing threat represented by millennials’ media agency. With fan activities becoming ever more visible on social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, Polyvore, and Tumblr, the fan has become the avatar of our digital hopes and fears. In an ambitious study encompassing a wide range of media texts, including popular television series like Kyle XY, Glee, Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Pretty Little Liars and online works like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as well as fan texts from blog posts and tweets to remix videos, YouTube posts, and image-sharing streams, author Louisa Ellen Stein traces the circulation of the contradictory tropes of millennial hope and millennial noir. Looking at what millennials do with digital technology demonstrates the molding impact of commercial representations, and at the same time reveals how millennials are undermining, negotiating, and changing those narratives. This generation—and the fans it represents—is actively transforming the media landscape into a dynamic, culturally transgressive space of collective authorship. Offering a rich and complex vision of the relationship between fandom and millennial culture, Millennial Fandom will interest fans, millennials, students, and scholars of contemporary media culture alike.

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in the population of mobile users demanding high performance, reliability and quality-of-service (QoS). Wireless networks are undergoing rapid developments and dramatic changes in the underlying technologies, in order to cope with the difficulties posed by the scarce wireless resource as well as keep up with the increasing day-to-day demand for cost-effective service of multimedia applications. Predicting and optimising the performance and QoS of wireless networks using analytical modelling, simulation experiments, monitoring and testbed-based measurements are crucial to the proper design, tuning, resource management and capacity planning of such networks. This book is dedicated to review important developments and results, explore recent state-of-the-art research and discuss new strategies for performance modelling, analysis and enhancement of wireless networks. The objective is to make analytical modelling, simulation and measurement tools, and innovative performance evaluation methodology possible and understandable to a wider audience.