This book deals with the ways Netflix influenced the contemporary television landscape and built the infrastructures of streaming. It focusses on various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television’s existing institutional structures. This comprehensive study ...

This book deals with the various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of significant changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television’s existing institutional structures. This comprehensive study explores the pre-history of Netflix, the role of binge-watching in its organisation and marketing, and Netfli...

The way detectives access and attain the 'truth' about a crime is an important indicator of how they relate to contemporary political developments. This book explores these methods of detection and positions the genre in a specific political, aesthetic, narrative and industrial context.

YouTube hosts one billion visitors monthly and sees more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. In her award winning book, Thanks for Watching, Patricia G. Lange offers an anthropological perspective on this heavily mediated social environment by analyzing videos and the emotions that motivate sharing them. She demonstrates how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube. Lange's book reconceptualizes an...

The renowned philosopher and political theorist presents a summation of his influential work in this series of Columbia University lectures.A pioneer in the fields of modern linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky is also one of the most avidly read political theorist of our time. In this series of lectures, Chomsky presents more than half a century of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas.In precise yet accessible language, Chomsky e...

YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demons...

Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back is a study of action cinema, exploring the ethics and aesthetics of the genre with reference to its relatively short history. It moves from seminal classics like Bullitt (1968) and Dirty Harry (1971) through epoch-defining films like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Die Hard (1988) to revisions, reboots, and renewals in films like Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), Taken (2008), and The...

Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The**Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television...

Classic film noir was Hollywood's 'dark cinema' of crime and corruption; a genre underpinned by a tone of existential cynicism which stripped bare the myth of the American Dream and offered a bleak, nightmarish vision of a fragmented society that rhymed with many of the social realities of forties and fifties America. Mean Streets and Raging Bulls explores how, since its apparent demise in the late fifties, the noir genre has been revitalized during the post-studio era. The book is divided...

A concise introduction to the genre about that one last big score, The Heist Film: Stealing With Style traces this crime thriller's development as both a dramatic and comic vehicle growing out of film noir (Criss Cross, The Killers, The Asphalt Jungle), mutating into sleek capers in the 1960s (Ocean's Eleven, Gambit, How to Steal a Million) and splashing across screens in the 2000s in remake after remake (The Thomas Crown A...

An anonymous musician plays Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar in a clip that has been viewed over sixty million times. The Dramatic Gopher is viewed over sixteen million times, as is a severely inebriated David Hasselhoff attempting to eat a hamburger. Over 800 variations, parodies, and parodies-of-parodies are uploaded of Beyonce Knowles' Single Ladies dance. Tay Zonday sings Chocolate Rain in a video viewed almost forty million times and scores himself a record deal. Obama Girl en...

Conspiracy theories are everywhere in post-war American culture. From postmodern novels to The X-Files and from gangsta rap to feminist polemic, there is a widespread suspicion that sinister forces are conspiring to take control of our national destiny, our minds, and even our bodies. Conspiracy explanations can no longer be dismissed as the paranoid delusions of far-right crackpots. Indeed, they have become a necessary response to a risky and increasingly globalized world, in whi...