ABSTRACT
Television is an ever-expanding entity, showing no sign of slowing down. It is becoming an entity that transverses time, space, and multiple technologies and viewer practices, each year growing larger yet. Television can be found on or in cell phones, DVDs, TiVo hard drives, PSPs, iPods, bedspreads, clothes, toys, videogames, podcasts, CDs, novels, role-playing games, official websites, spinoff websites, fan sites,YouTube and iFilm, magazines, newspapers, radio talk,VCRs, and likely many more sites by the time you are reading this.Television is even the topic of movies (such as The Truman Show), novels (such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise), magazines (Entertainment Weekly), and other television shows (Entertainment Tonight, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). As Will Brooker (2001) notes, television is now accompanied by significant “overflow,” as we are invited to “live” such-and-such a program, interact with its characters in games and online spaces, wear the clothes of the show, and so forth. Television, in other words, “is no longer limited to the television medium” (Brooker 2001: 457), has
overflowed from the box, and is frequently off-TV. Ours is a transitional era (see Lotz 2007b) in which each week brings new ideas, experiments, and lawsuits that set the parameters for the television of the future. In the meantime, though, the barrage of changes and expansions of television that have already taken place must be accounted for.
