Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan [Paperback]

InPush the Button, Elizabeth Rodwell follows a battle over what interactivity will mean for Japanese television, as major media conglomerates took on independent media professionals developing interactive forms from new media. Rodwell argues that at the dawn of a potentially transformative moment in television history, content conservatism has triumphed over technological innovation. Despite the ambition and idealism of Japanese TV professionals and independent journalists, corporate media worked to squelch interactive broadcast projects such as smartphone-playable television and live-streamed and open press conferences before they caught on. Instead, interactive programming in the hands of major TV networks retained the structure and qualities of most other television and maintained conventional barriers between audiences and the actual space of broadcast. Despite their lack of success, the innovators behind these experiments nonetheless sought to expand the possibilities for mass media, national identity, and open journalism.USElizabeth Rodwell follows the conflict between mass media conglomerates and independent media creators as they worked to redefine what interactivity meant for Japan’s television industry.Elizabeth Rodwell is Assistant Professor of Information Science Technology at the University of Houston.“Across a polymorphous array of new media engagements, Elizabeth Rodwell questions how and with what affects/effects television is being recrafted in Japan following the ‘crisis’ of news dissemination during 3.11. Attentively ethnographic and analytically astute,Push the Buttonexplores the implications—political, social, and technological—of inviting viewers to interact so intimately with their televisual machines.”Anne Allison, author of,Being Dead Otherwise

“Based on solid fieldwork with excellent theoretical analysis,Push the Buttonprovides a fascinating etl3&