Television, Technology and Gender ─ New Platforms and New Audiences

The way we watch television is changing. While consumption of traditional broadcast television is going down, consumption of non-traditional platform television—including subscription viewing, box-set series and online streaming—is going up. This is the first study to consider the ways in which recent technologies of television can be understood in terms of the gendering of audiences. Taking a viewer-based approach, Sarah Arnold shows how old claims that television is a female medium are now being called into question, due to changes in the spatial practices of viewing and developments in content. Though film has commonly been characterised as 'masculine' and television 'feminine', this paradigm is now being complicated and challenged. This timely book offers important critical insight into current intersections between gender, television consumption and technology.

Sarah Arnold is Lecturer in Film and Digital Media at University College Falmouth (UK). She is the author of Maternal Horror: Melodrama and Motherhood (2013) and co author, with Mark De Valk, of The Film Handbook (2013).