Hi everyone. I'm happy to announce the publication of my book, *Social TV:
Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture
<https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Social-TV>*, with the University
Press of Mississippi.
*Description: *In *Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture*,
Cory Barker reveals how the US television industry promised—but failed to
deliver—a social media revolution in the 2010s to combat the imminent
threat of on-demand streaming video. Barker examines the rise and fall of
Social TV across press coverage, corporate documents, and an array of
digital ephemera. He demonstrates that, despite the talk of disruption, the
movement merely aimed to exploit social media to reinforce the value of
live TV in the modern attention economy. Case studies from broadcast
networks to tech start-ups uncover a persistent focus on community that
aimed to monetize consumer behavior in a transitionary industry period.
To trace these unfulfilled promises and flopped ideas, Barker draws upon a
unique mix of personal Social TV experiences and curated archives of
material that were intentionally marginalized amid pivots to the next big
thing. Yet in placing this now-forgotten material in recent historical
context, *Social TV *shows how the era altered how the industry pursues
audiences. Multi-screen campaigns have shifted away from a focus on live TV
and toward all-day “content” streams. The legacy of Social TV, then, is the
further embedding of media and promotional material onto every screen and
into every moment of life.
*Select Reviews*:
"An especially timely volume, *Social TV* is an impressive study of the
Social TV archive for several key case studies, each of which speak to
different subsectors of Social TV, while commenting on the broader cultural
and industrial ramifications of social media engagement. *Social TV* offers
readers a rich archive through which to examine shifts in the TV industry. "
- Jennifer Gillan, author of Television Brandcasting: The Return of the
Content-Promotion Hybrid
"Barker’s meticulously researched ‘ephemeral historiography’ of the rise
and fall of Social TV offers fresh insights into some of this moment's more
notable experiments, from ABC’s #TGIT to AMC’s Story Sync. Vitally, it also
excavates under-theorized industrial experiments to gauge and reward fan
participation from this era, from check-in platforms’ efforts to gamify
television viewing to Amazon’s experiments with ‘fansourcing’ feedback on
their television pilots. The result is a comprehensive and compelling
account of the television industry’s attempt to embrace emergent platforms,
while managing audience engagement on their terms."
- Suzanne Scott, author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the
Convergence Culture Industry
--
Cory Barker
, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Bradley University
www.corybarker.com | @corybarker <http://www.twitter.com/corybarker>
*Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture
<https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Social-TV>*
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