Television as Fragments: From Broadcast Logics to Platform Imaginaries

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past two decades, television has undergone a transformation that can no longer be understood as a mere technological transition: it is a profound reconfiguration of industrial logics, modes of reception, and cultural imaginaries. Its hybridization with digital platforms has generated an ecosystem in which the boundaries between linear broadcasting, streaming, and social media are increasingly porous, reshaping both production processes and audience experiences in accordance with the dynamics of platformization (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2018; Poell, Nieborg & Duffy, 2021).

This reconfiguration first emerged in the sphere of production, where global platforms set the conditions of labor, creativity and visibility. OTT operators do not simply distribute content: they actively shape its forms, imposing technical standards and narrative strategies that redefine the entire value chain (Lotz, 2017; Chalaby, 2023; Jenner, 2020). Such dynamics raise pressing questions about the redistribution of creative power and the tension between local cultural industries and new forms of global centralization.

Equally profound are the transformations in modes of reception. While linear television once organized collective rituals and moments of simultaneity (Dayan & Katz, 1992; Couldry, 2003), access to content now take place through interfaces that filter, rank and order what becomes visible (Casetti, 2015; Lobato & Lotz, 2022). Fragmented and mobile practices—scrolling, short clips and highlights—generate a new tension between attention and distraction, actualizing an aesthetic of the fragment deeply rooted in modern experience (Benjamin, 2006; Rafele, 2013). This is television consumed as a mosaic, where narrative totalities coexist with ephemeral digital fragments. Practices of friction, production and reproduction thrive within what Bolter (2019) has described as digital plenitude, where abundance and redundancy are coupled with the continual reconfiguration of attention. It is not only cultural products that fragment, but also audiences, which regroup around narrative objects to form shifting cultural archipelagos, far removed from the static dichotomy of culture and counterculture (Hebdige, 1979).

These changes also reshape the imaginaries that television continues to generate. Once a symbolic factory of everyday life (Morin, 1960), television today participates in a landscape of fluid and unstable imaginaries, fragmented, personalized by algorithms, yet capable of sudden recomposition through viral phenomena. Here, one may recognize both the persistence of the social imaginary as an instituting principle (Castoriadis, 1987) and the communal, tribal dimensions that underpin collective identities (Maffesoli, 1996). At the same time, the growing centrality of interfaces reveals how imaginaries are constantly negotiated in users’ everyday interactions, where expectations, myths and the opacity of algorithmic power intersect (Airoldi, 2022; Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Hybridized television does not abandon its imaginative role: it reframes and fragments it, producing discontinuous mosaics and ephemeral communities.

We perceive television and its digital fragments as ‘civilizational ordering devices’ (Peters, 2015), and for this reason, this Special Issue seeks to explore the reconfigurations of the televisual medium in its encounter with platforms, so as to understand the ongoing evolution of media, society, and the self. We therefore invite contributions that critically address these transformations, linking global dynamics with local specificities, examining the reshaping of creative processes and cultural industries, the evolving morphology of audiences and the rearticulation of media imaginaries in the platform age.

Submitted papers should be original theoretical essays or empirical studies addressing, among others, the following themes:

• Transformations in production practices, labor conditions, and industrial structures, with particular attention to the growing influence of OTT platforms and the new parameters of cultural value they impose.
• Shifts in viewing practices, from linear rituals to fragmented and mobile consumption, including scrolling, clipping, and remixing, that reshape temporalities of attention and narrative engagement.
• The reconfiguration of media imaginaries, between continuity and rupture, algorithmic shaping, and the tension between fragmentation, personalization and collective recomposition.
• The role of interfaces and platform logics in structuring visibility, accessibility and the circulation of television content across digital environments.
• Negotiations between local, national, and global television ecologies, exploring dynamics of resistance, hybridization and asymmetry.
• Theoretical and cultural implications of digital plenitude, conceived as an ecology of excess, redundancy and multiplicity.
• The evolving morphology of the audience, conceived as a pivotal cultural figure oscillating between spectator, user and prosumer.

References

Airoldi, M. (2022). Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Benjamin, W. (2006). The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (M. W. Jennings, Ed.). Harvard University Press.

Bolter, J. D. (2019). The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media. MIT Press.

Casetti, F. (2015). The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. Columbia University Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1987). The Imaginary Institution of Society. MIT Press.

Chalaby, J. K. (2023). The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution. Polity.

Couldry, N. (2003). Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. Routledge.

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.

Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Harvard University Press.

Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge.

Jenner, M. (2020). Netflix and the platformization of television studies. Television & New Media, 21(3), 223–239.

Lobato, R., & Lotz, A. D. (2022). Streaming interfaces, recommendation systems and genre on television platforms. Television & New Media, 23(4), 375–392.

Lotz, A. D. (2017). Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television. Michigan Publishing.

Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Sage.

Morin, E. (1960). The Stars. Grove Press.

Peters, J. D. (2015). The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press.

Poell, T., Nieborg, D., & Duffy, B. (2021). The platformization of cultural production and television ecosystems. New Media & Society, 23(3), 843–861.

Rafele, A. (2013). Representations of Fashion: The Metropolis and Mediological Reflection Between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries. San Diego, San Diego Stat University Press.

van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.

Dr. Marica Spalletta
Dr. Federico Tarquini
Dr. Tito Vagni
Guest Editors

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