This thesis examines the diffusion and adoption of digital television (DTV) in the UK by its first generation audience. It reveals how the spread of this innovation took place, and what were its early users and uses. The main objective is to investigate the processes through which a new medium and its new audience are shaped. The study focuses on Sky digital and its subscribers, covering the first four years of the life of DTV from its launch in October 1998. My analysis draws on empirical data derived from a UK-wide postal survey of Sky digital subscribers, a series of in-depth interviews with Sky digital users, and an analysis of advertising and marketing materials. By revealing a slice of time in British media and audience history, I argue that a number of forces influence the shaping and meaning construction of a new medium. I exemplify these by analysing early DTV in terms of the circuit of culture, showing how these forces contributed to its social and cultural shaping. DTV is a hybrid medium encompassing both old and new services. In discussing how it was promoted, taken up, used and made meaningful in the lives of early users, I address wider issues of how people understand and accept novelties and whether/why they are receptive to change, or resistant to it, staying attached to old habits. In demonstrating that early users focused on the offer of more channels/bigger choice/better picture and did not rush to embrace the new interactive internet-like features of DTV, I discuss how despite the hype presenting DTV as transformative, and despite fast take-up, access to it did not necessarily equate to use of all its services. For early users, DTV was a relatively conservative enhancement of traditional TV. I argue that the introduction of a new medium entails continuity not only in technological development, but also in consumption processes, resulting in the co-existence of 'old' and 'new'. Several theoretical perspectives and methodologies are integrated in the emergent history of this now old medium when it was new. The thesis recounts DTV's biography as manifested in the moments of production and design, representation and, particularly, consumption. The thesis is informed by and adds to theories of diffusion of innovations and of domestication. Its core theoretical contribution is that, in empirically addressing the relationship between new media diffusion and social change by drawing on domestication theory, it advances the theory of diffusion of innovations, expanding its theoretical and methodological scope by examining social and cultural processes within the household and people‟s lives.

This thesis investigates the Brazilian television mini-series as a cultural form in the media landscape of Brazil, examining it as a reflection of the political, cultural and social history of Brazil. The research question asks in what ways does the Brazilian television miniseries represent continuity and change in Brazilian national culture, values and identity. In this thesis, I construct a theoretical framework based on two strands of the concept of hybridity: the sociocultural dimensions of hybridity in the postcolonial context, and the textual-generic implications of hybridity for popular texts, their producing institutions,and their readers and viewers. Methodologically, my sample consists of 41 mini-series from a twenty-five year production history. I also engage with press commentary on the mini-series and conduct interviews with mini-series creators. The analysis examines the discourses that these sources produce in tandem with tools from television studies. In this study, I find that Brazilian national culture is represented by geography and gender. Geography serves as a physical and symbolic mode of representation in the mini-series. We witness historical and contemporary negotiations of the temporal and spatial divides that separate the foreign from the Brazilian, and we often follow stories about ‘becoming Brazilian’. Gender appears through a practice-based discourse that informs the difference between the emotional and educational dimensions of the genre. Gender also appears in the mini-series narratives through the archetypes of sufferer and malandro, who in turn reflect the transgressions and the limits of gendered representations in Brazilian popular culture. In relation to national values, I find a continuous dialectical exchange between authority and resistance in the mini-series’ historical and contemporary representations of Brazil. Not only do authority and resistance transcend the value frameworks of class, family, morals and politics in the mini-series narratives, but they also inform the ways in which creators assert their position in the space of Brazilian television production. Critics express resistance to the narratives and the institutions producing the mini-series as well, which enables us to recognize a wariness of the historical tendency of Brazilian television to insert its values into the public sphere. Finally, I find that Brazilian national identity is represented by a mix of foreign and national traditions in the mini-series form, and by strategies that differ from conventional narrative modes. These qualities demonstrate the persistence of tensions between the foreign and the national and imitation and originality that have defined negotiations with modernity in Brazil, but they also show how these tensions have shifted inward to reflect Brazil’s changing awareness of its role on a global stage. In addition to the social, cultural, political and institutional dimensions of Brazilian experience that this study reveals through the mini-series, it adds to knowledge on the ways in which cultural forms enter and shape public discourse about nationhood.

The thesis investigates the application of the public value notion in UK public service broadcasting (PSB). In the context of technological change from analogue to digital broadcasting and the reduction of applicable market failures, the notion has been used to describe the remit and assess the performance of PSB, thus providing sustained justification of PSB in the digital age. The overall research interest is to investigate the public value notion in the context of evolving media policy paradigms to examine whether its institutionalisation represents a paradigm shift in the ideological justification of PSB. The ideological justification is investigated in the form of economic and noneconomic regulatory rationales as different academic approaches to market intervention and public service provision. As a fundamental type of policy change, the paradigm shift concept is operationalised by devising an analytical framework that consists of two analytical strands; an ideological shift and a policy process analysis. Based on a case study approach of the notion’s application at the BBC and Channel 4, the research design employs interpretative textual analysis of documents and expert interviews to investigate the ideological composition of the public value notion and its wider policy process. The research finds that no paradigm shift has taken place in the justification of PSB as the public value notion continues the overall more economic than non-economic focus of the incumbent media policy paradigm. These findings contribute to media and public policy studies with regard to the understanding and classification of (media policy) paradigm shifts as a fundamental type of policy change and the use of economic and non-economic rationales as different ideologies in informing policy ideas and decisions-making in media policy.

This is a novel study of the German press’ visual and textual coverage of the wars in Bosnia (1992-95) and Kosovo (1998-99). Key moments have been selected and analysed from both wars using a broad range of publications ranging from extreme-right to extreme-left and including broadsheets, a tabloid and a news-magazine, key moments have been selected from both wars. Two sections with parallel chapters form the core of the thesis. The first deals with the war in Bosnia and the second the conflict in Kosovo. Each section contains one chapter on the initial phase of the conflict, one chapter on an important atrocity – namely the Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia and the Račak incident in Kosovo – and lastly a chapter each on the international involvement which ended the immediate violence. The coverage of nine national publications is closely examined for each timeframe. The thesis examines how the various events were covered, what sources were used and what insights the publications conveyed. Where possible, a further comparative perspective has been added by the inclusion of German parliamentary debates and the relevant UN press releases. This provides a useful comparison between the political discourse and the coverage of the German press. Special attention has been paid to four key themes, which emerged from the research. Firstly, the changing perceptions of the Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and the issue of who was to blame for the conflicts; secondly, how various armed forces, including the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army and the Kosovo Liberation Army were presented in the German press; thirdly, the persistent presence of the Second World War as well as the Holocaust and how they shaped the press’ interpretation of the violence; and lastly, how Germany’s role in the Balkans – both in the realms of diplomacy and military intervention – was evaluated by the national press. Pictures and cartoons accompanying the textual coverage were included to present a more rounded picture of press coverage.

Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theoretically, two challenges in particular have proved persistent: (1) defining the purpose of public communication under conditions of pluralism, and (2) defining the composition of the public sphere as communication becomes increasingly transnational. It is argued that shared definitions of these, among actors participating in public communication, are prerequisites for the democratic legitimacy of collective decisions. Achieving this is difficult, particularly because it remains unclear how practices of public communication relate to ideals such as participation, inclusion and public reason. In part these difficulties can be attributed to a lack of congruence between the way political theory and empirical social research frame questions about the public sphere. To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere. The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication. This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literature

This thesis explores the concept of reputation-making with the aim of explaining how the rise of user-generated content websites has influenced organizational reputationmaking practices in the travel sector. The findings are based upon a corpus of data including: a field study at the offices of the largest travel user-generated website operator, TripAdvisor and an adaptation of virtual ethnography called “netnography”. Rating and ranking of hotels on social media websites has not only disturbed the established reputation-making practices of professionals in the travel sector and contributed to a significant redirection of reservation revenue but has performative consequences for tourist encounters. In other words, it is argued that if key assumptions underpinning the rating and ranking of travel change, the enactment of travel itself is reconfiguring and this has important implications for how reputationmaking occurs. The reconfigurations documented in the study are theorized using the lens of Process Theory. Originally inspired by philosophers such as Bergson and Whitehead and adopted in the work of organizational theorists such as Tsoukas, Chia, Langley, and Nayak, the choice of Process Theory to inform the conduct of this study resonates with key streams of existing reputation research that view it as a dynamic phenomenon. Core concepts within Process Theory, such as “becoming” enable further investigation into the precise nature of this dynamism by focusing on relations as always fluid and on the move. The challenge, even for literature that acknowledges phenomena as dynamic, is how to temporarily pause the flow for the purpose of analysis and thereby approach becoming without disturbing its inherent nature. This is taken up in the first analysis chapter which uses the notion of place to illustrate and analyze reputation-making using the process of becoming. The chapter argues the importance of recognizing the temporary pauses produced by rating and ranking mechanisms as generative rather than merely reductive algorithmically produced representations. In this way, we get closer to understanding the performativity of phenomena such as TripAdvisor and produce fundamental insights informing organizational reputation-making. It is argued that the organizational devices through which travellers’ engage with the places they visit are not only “making” reputations but are also making formative differences to the practice of travelling. In the second analysis chapter, a key issue associated with these changes - the intensification in focus on service – is explored further and in-depth examination of the field data is used to highlight ways in which TripAdvisor amplifies attention given to the specific characteristics of practices when they are performed. This provides evidence to ground Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) proposal that organizational change is achieved through ‘microscopic changes’ thus reinforcing the processual nature of change. In so doing, key insights are generated to inform organizational reputation-making. Returning to the tenet of becoming in the third analysis chapter, the “circle of (il)legitimacy” embraces processual principles - for the nature of the circle is to have no beginning or end – but acknowledges the cumulative outcome of configuring practices for hoteliers through a discussion of key issues emerging in the travel sector. The relationship between reputation-making and legitimation is highlighted with examples of the additional processes through which reputation can now be made vulnerable within multiple jurisdictional contexts. The thesis concludes with the assertion that if we aim to understand the phenomenon of reputation-making, we have to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated way to conceptualize its formativeness. It is suggested that this extends beyond snap shot assessments or post-hoc crisis management to on-going maintenance of its emergence and development as well as processual changes across time and space.

This thesis examines the process of storytelling on television police drama, The Bill. It explores how factors such as commercial imperatives, working processes and artistic constraints affected representation of the police. The study argues that, in the early days of the show, stories originated with the freelance writers and were based on research and observation of police work. Representation of the police was favourable, partly due to the ideological views of the makers and partly due to the format: stories had to be resolved within a half-hour timeslot, which militated against writers being able to tell stories about issues such as racism, sexism and corruption. However, due to changing market forces in the television industry, the show reinvented itself as a serial in 2001. The exigencies of the new schedule meant less time for research. There was also pressure on the makers to attract a younger audience demographic. Stories were now originated by an in-house team and based on other media sources, setting up “media loops” (Manning 2003) and a recycling of ideas current in media culture about policing and law and order politics. Story-lines became inaccurate and controversial. Findings from focus groups with officers from the Metropolitan Police Service and the Greater Manchester Police also showed that, on occasion, story-lines concerning the handling of witnesses on the show and interview procedures had hampered officers when carrying out investigations. The study concludes that, to echo Silverstone (1985), there is an arbitrariness at the heart of making any television show – that whether the police are depicted favourably or unfavourably is determined as much by the need to attract a certain audience demographic and restrictions in the format as by any ideological intent on the part of the programme-makers.

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one.

This thesis examines the impact of writers, producers and directors on programming and production in several periods of US television drama history. I address the role authorship plays in shaping US television drama aesthetics and how creativity functions within its production cultures. I also address the personalisation of programmes through media and textual visibility and the place of authorship within the commercial and industrial contexts of US network television. My methodology involves textual analysis of a large viewing sample of programmes and a combination of archival research into original production documentation and analysis of US TV coverage in newspapers, magazines and trade journals. The thesis is divided into four case studies, each looking at the spaces for authorship, creativity and personalisation in key historical moments of US TV drama production and programming: early 1950s anthology writers, producers and directors (e.g. Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann); anthology producer-hosts of the late 1950s (e.g. Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock); executive producers of the 1980s-2000s (e.g. Steven Bochco, Jerry Bruckheimer); and guest writers and secondary producers in the 1980s-2000s (e.g. David Mamet, David Chase). The thesis aims to debunk the critical notion that authorship is present only in boutique quality television or that authorship is purely an invention of branding strategies and suggests new formulations of US TV authorship specific to historical production contexts. The thesis extends the author paradigm to include multiple authorship and a range of production roles and also revises several historiographical assumptions about authorship, programming and production. The thesis offers a model of authorship studies in television studies which frees authorship from quality prescription. It addresses the issue of industrial collaboration and incorporates it into our understanding of TV authorship. I relocate authorship studies from cultural mythology to aesthetics and production analysis, and provide more medium and industrial specificity.

Comic mockumentaries have been a regular fixture on cinema and television screens since the early 1960s, and texts such as A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap, The Thick of It and the work of Christopher Guest have all achieved mainstream popular success. However, current scholarship has side-lined virtually all discussion of these comic texts, which are both the most popular and the most common examples of the fake documentary form, in favour of those instances which exhibit an intense reflexive relationship with the straight documentary. This thesis proposes a critical and aesthetic re-evaluation of the comic mockumentary form, by using detailed textual analysis of a range of radio, television and film texts, to explore how they function critically and historically, and how the comedy within them works. I also argue for the consideration of the mockumentary as a genre rather than simply an aesthetic mode. My main contention is that the primary aspiration of the comic mockumentary is entertainment, rather than the construction of a reflexive critique of the straight documentary form. As a result, the mockumentary has begun to sever its direct links to documentary, and it is no longer useful to examine these texts solely in terms dictated by their relationship with documentary proper. By emphasising the role that comedy and tone play within the genre, I hope to open the form up to a wider range of critical approaches than current discussions have so far allowed. The thesis also highlights the centrality of performance, suggesting that the performative aspects of genuine musicians such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the public personae of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, are the focus of the mockumentary text. Examples such as This is Spinal Tap and The Thick of It can be seen to create an ironic critical distance, complicating the way that we understand the straight documentary through the comedic interplay of the real and the fictional.