(apologies for cross-posting)



Liveness

 

Oft described has ³being there as it happens² and considered to be the

aesthetic mode of television, liveness has been advanced as that which

distinguishes television from film. For technological reasons, early

television broadcasts were live, and much of television program demonstrates

this pedigree. Thus liveness seems essential to genres such as the sitcom,

broadcast news, talk shows, sports telecasts and, more recently, the

³reality² show. Nevertheless, scholarship on liveness has generally

emphasized the catastrophe and the disaster, in which the extraordinary

quality of the event is leveraged so that temporal immediacy can more easily

overcome spatial distance.

 

This panel seeks papers addressing the question of liveness today. In light

of recent digital technologies (e.g. DVRs) and new media (such as YouTube),

is liveness still relevant to television¹s viewers, programmers, and/or

technological apparatus? What is the status of liveness in television

studies? Have film and television converged so that liveness is no longer a

mark of distinction? Case studies on particular events, programs, genres,

and/or technologies are welcome, as are theoretical discussion of liveness

and its epistemological, ontological and ideological implications.



Deadline August 15.



Send proposals to Stephen Groening ([log in to unmask]).



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