ABSTRACT
A printed book may well be the worst medium in which to discuss the quickly accelerating and recondite changes going on in television today. A book’s lead time of a year or more virtually guarantees it will be out of date the moment it appears.2 fie only future-proof aspect of media convergence is what was already evident in 1983 to the “prophet of convergence,” Ithiel de Sola Pool, who wrote, “fiere is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that.”3 Today, Old Media are Thailing about, keening about their precipitously declining revenues while New Media make grand claims about the digital revolution, but cannot seem to make that revolution profttable, to “monetize” it, in their parlance.4 fius, although it is clear that the broadcast and print media are changing in ways as signiftcant as the impact television had on radio affer World War II, there is little consensus on how the process will evolve or what the end result will be. When Jenkins assayed the state of television’s convergence with other media in 2006’s Convergence Culture he encountered a profoundly unclear situation and bemoaned, “Writing this book has been challenging because everything seems to be changing at once and there is no vantage point that takes me above the fray.”5 Yet even though the endpoint of the process remains unclear, there are important lessons to be learned from examining how the current process of convergence has historically developed. fie clumsy online eorts of NBC’s long-running, old-media program, ER (1994-2009), in the late 1990s can elucidate how convergence can both fail and succeed, semiotically and aesthetically. Most importantly in the context of this book’s overarching project, an examination of the show can help us begin to understand how convergence will aect television style. Technological changes frequently have their greatest impact in the realm of style, as, for example, the move to color television did in the 1960s. fie current evolution/ revolution is no exception. We can already see how the YouTube generation has dierent expectations for the look and sound of visual stories than do
previous generations raised on television and the cinema, sans Internet. ER taps into much of that stylistic change, making for an illuminating case study of the impact of technological and cultural change upon stylistic schemas.
