The emerging televisual: technology futures and screens for all things

Abstract

ABSTRACT The use of high-speed broadband and internet-enabled television sets (smart TVs) for movies, news, documentaries, and television programs, amongst other services – for the convenience of the listener/viewer at a time chosen by them (on-demand) – is vital to television's survival through networked options for choice. Individuals engage with a variety of increasingly interconnected technological devices. Multiple open screens, akin to those switched between on the personal computer, are now available across a single ‘surface’. These can be displayed congruently, even on whole walls whereby multiple screens are able be placed next to each other to create a single continuous display with modularity in shape and size. In parallel to these technological developments, audiences are looking to the mobile-first platform of small globally connected mobile screens or scalable media. Consider too, that user-generated content streamed online is proving popular for a number of viewers. In this paper, we will explore today's complex and shifting mediascape, analysing survey data collected in Australia to consider which screen media are currently made use of, how frequently various media are interacted with, and in what settings and purposes they are used. Reaching outward, we additionally use pseudo-anonymous data drawn from TriSMA, an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analytics (TrISMA) developed by QUT, Curtin, Swinburne and Deakin universities to provide detailed analytics regarding Australian social media use, specifically in order to evaluate how social media production works within the overarching process of television production. Through this lens, we evaluate the future of new screen technology offering digital content production, curation and dissemination in order to ask ‘what now?’