Call for papers for peer-reviewed online academic journal "View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture", issue 27 FORMATTING OF LATE TELEVISION

Television strikes us today as a medium of the past. But its position as a “new medium” had always been somewhat in question. In contrast to modernity’s other great visual media – photography, cinema or even the internet – television does not have a spectacular origin story (who among us can even recall the date of television’s “invention” or the name of its inventor?!) It was more the moment it spread across the world that signalled its arrival as a revolutionary medium. Television has failed to fulfil its promises: it has been a mass medium, but never a global one; it is international but in many ways attached to the nation state, even to nationalism; it offers the promise of simultaneity via “live transmissions” but cannot really cover the present etc. etc. But more than all this, in the face of what the internet can offer, television does not even try to hide its weaknesses (take, for example, the phoney exchanges in phone-in TV shows). Television affirms its own conservative, anachronic nature, even showing off its old-school style on the internet. The key to TV is the “format”, the very opposite of originality, of the unique, creative or novel – i.e. all those values that are, at least to some extent, offered by its internet alternative - YouTube. Can format television – with its boring, overwhelming (4 hours 17 minutes daily per Polish citizen in 2018; according to some estimates in 2016 we were second in the world, ahead of Japan and Russia and behind only the USA) and daily service – fend off the digital empires that fight for our attention? Or do television’s formats allow us to better understand the processes that internet industries use (but more effectively disguise) with their multitude of personalisation options and choices? What is the television format and who is the intended audience in each case? We have encountered so many exciting theses about new media, about the social changes they were supposed to bring. However, it seems more difficult to come up with a broad and clear story about a medium that is old and yet not a subject for archaeological studies. We do not need to dig television up out of the ground and remind ourselves what it was for; it follows our lives every step of the way, though it has dulled our senses and lost our interest.


Please send your submissions (full article, abstract, author’s bio) until June 10, 2020, to redakcjapismowidok.org

For editorial and technical requirements, go to: http://www.pismowidok.org/en/about/submissions.