Crossing Wavelengths
The Diegetic and Referential Imaginary of American Commercial Television
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7513060 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mimi White (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 51-51 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225459 |
| OpenAlex | W2322935087 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
The continuity and multiplicity of texts that comprise the medium of American television present the critic-analyst with a complex, multiform body of material. To analyze requires an operation of segmentation, fragmentation isolating a discrete sequence from the course of the flow of television programming according to a critical principle of pertinence. In this vein an array of strategies borrowed variously from textual analysis and/or the industry's own terms of distinction are engaged. From this perspective the episode, the program, the programming slot, the genre, the station, the network, the director, the producer, and the audience (defined demographically) are all important grids for analytic contextualization and understanding. These may in turn include or exclude consideration of the advertisements, news breaks, station identifications, and so forth that regularly appear in the course of broadcasting. Each of these provides a way into television's dense textual network and can provide the grounds for describing particular textual structures and modes of address at work in the medium. By the same token, none of these accounts for the idiosyncratic and individual patterns of viewing that habitually cut across or disregard these critical and institutional divisions. This article offers a reading of American television that describes the medium in terms of more dispersed mechanisms of continuity. It disintricates an alternative conceptual and analytic grid (which coexists alongside and simultaneous with more familiar terms of distinction) whose regularity emerges through the accretion of individual, diffuse instances of continuity that cut across the more conventional unities. Their effectivity and force is established in proportion to their frequency, even as each case seems to be nonstandardized and unique. Moreover, this particular strategy of description and analysis provides a basis for theorizing the process of flow, a principle of continuity, in relation to and as it is inflected by the habits of individual viewing. The larger question and point refer to the fascination and hold of television in general, in its multiple textuality, for and on its viewers with each of their distinctive patterns of watching
Advertising · Business · Contextualization · Epistemology · Linguistics · Media studies · Reading (process · Sociology · The Imaginary · Computer Science · Media Studies and Communication · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,21 |
| Citation span | 1987 - 2021 (35) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |