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9781496840929

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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 Social TV was the future, until it wasn't. Cory Barker's Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture deftly explores the 'historical micro-moment' when television and social media promised tangible revolution in viewing audiences. Through numerous and compelling case studies, including HBO's collaboration with Twitter, Amazon Studio's use of fansourcing, AMC's Story Sync, and ABC's live-tweeting campaigns, Barker expertly defines the tensions, promises, failures, and repercussions of the moment when a social television revolution fizzled out. Social TV asks us to imagine a truly immersive viewing environment--and redefine what it means to be social in the age of ubiquitous content. A must-read for television and social media enthusiasts alike.--Paul Booth, professor of communication at DePaul University and author of Digital Fandom: New Media Studies and Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age Social TV advances our understanding of media industry practices of managing audiences and fans by taking a deep dive into television. Drawing on varied case studies, it builds from existing work on how media companies recruit fanlike behavior to trace out tensions between wanting passive consumers and active promoters, the intermingling of organic and artificial audience behavior, and the interplay of old and new media. By interrogating exactly how, when, and why audience activity is valuable to industry in the context of television, Social TV will be valuable to a wide variety of scholars across fan/audience and media industry studies.--Mel Stanfill, author of Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans and A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises 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 Social TV advances our understanding of media industry practices of managing audiences and fans by taking a deep dive into television. Drawing on varied case studies, it builds from existing work on how media companies recruit fanlike behavior to trace out tensions between wanting passive consumers and active promoters, the intermingling of organic and artificial audience behavior, and the interplay of old and new media. By interrogating exactly how, when, and why audience activity is valuable to industry in the context of television, Social TV will be valuable to a wide variety of scholars across fan/audience and media industry studies.--Mel Stanfill, author of Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans and A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises Social TV was the future, until it wasn't. Cory Barker's Social TV: Multiscreen Content and Ephemeral Culture deftly explores the 'historical micro-moment' when television and social media promised tangible revolution in viewing audiences. Through numerous and compelling case studies, including HBO's collaboration with Twitter, Amazon Studio's use of fansourcing, AMC's Story Sync, and ABC's live-tweeting campaigns, Barker expertly defines the tensions, promises, failures, and repercussions of the moment when a social television revolution fizzled out. Social TV asks us to imagine a truly immersive viewing environment--and redefine what it means to be social in the age of ubiquitous content. A must-read for television and social media enthusiasts alike.--Paul Booth, professor of communication at DePaul University and author of Digital Fandom: New Media Studies and Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age 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

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

This work is a solid piece of scholarship on an unusual phase in television history.--Noah Arceneaux ""Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media"" Barker has written a book about the intersection of television and social media that feels timely but also provides a historical perspective on media industry practices in the 2010s. . . . Each case is well-researched and deftly situated in other television scholarship.--S. Pepper ""CHOICE"" 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 Although histories of media industries often retrospectively look linear and straightforward, Social TV not only reminds scholars that the development of media industries is complicated and awash with failed experiments but also showcases how industry successes are often built on industry failures. . . . Many other areas of focus within media studies could draw on Barker's approach to better map the ways ongoing practices emerged from specific historical and industrial contexts that included both successes and failures. This will lead to not only a more thorough and encompassing history of media industries but also a better lens through which to view the present.--Ryan Stoldt ""Media Industries"" Barker delivers a substantial analysis of the intersection between Hollywood and Silicon Valley during the 2010s. As a historicization of an ephemeral culture, Social TV offers a deep, critical understanding of the media industries in flux--beneficial for those interested in the relationship between the industries, their viewers, and users, as well as the dynamics of power and agency within a hyper-corporate ecology.--Rusty Hatchell ""Transformative Works and Cultures"" While the text functions as a historical analysis of a specific moment in the American television industry, Barker's Social TV is a timely addition that provides a historical framework to current debates within media studies on the remediation of television through platforms like TikTok. . . . As Barker illuminates in his analysis, Social TV contributed to the continuously evolving shift toward networks prioritizing video content through platforms to create new circulatory flows shaped by the discursive logics of brand culture.--Aidan Moir ""International Journal of Communication"" Social TV was the future, until it wasn't. Cory Barker's Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture deftly explores the 'historical micro-moment' when television and social media promised tangible revolution in viewing audiences. Through numerous and compelling case studies, including HBO's collaboration with Twitter, Amazon Studio's use of fansourcing, AMC's Story Sync, and ABC's live-tweeting campaigns, Barker expertly defines the tensions, promises, failures, and repercussions of the moment when a social television revolution fizzled out. Social TV asks us to imagine a truly immersive viewing environment--and redefine what it means to be social in the age of ubiquitous content. A must-read for television and social media enthusiasts alike.--Paul Booth, professor of communication at DePaul University and author of Digital Fandom: New Media Studies and Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age Social TV advances our understanding of media industry practices of managing audiences and fans by taking a deep dive into television. Drawing on varied case studies, it builds from existing work on how media companies recruit fanlike behavior to trace out tensions between wanting passive consumers and active promoters, the intermingling of organic and artificial audience behavior, and the interplay of old and new media. By interrogating exactly how, when, and why audience activity is valuable to industry in the context of television, Social TV will be valuable to a wide variety of scholars across fan/audience and media industry studies.--Mel Stanfill, author of Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans and A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises 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

Author Information

Cory Barker is assistant professor of communication at Bradley University. He is coeditor of The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery, and Instant Access, among other collections on media studies. His work on Social TV, streaming video, and branding has appeared in such publications as The A.V. Club, Complex, TV Guide, TV.com, and Vox.

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