How to Watch TV

'How to watch TV' may seem like the most obvious thing in the world. Yet when we look at the historical development of television as a technological, social, and cultural form, we find that people have engaged with it in a variety of different ways. There is not, in other words, a single right way to watch TV. This is because television itself has undergone transformations on all of these levels: Technologically, changes such as those from black-and-white to color, analog to digital, standard to high-definition, and broadcast to cable to interactive all play a role in changing our relation to what 'television' is. Socially, changes in television¿s integration in corporate and industrial structures, its mediation of political realities, and its ability to reflect and shape our interactions with one another all play a role in transforming who 'we' as viewers are. And culturally, varieties of programming including live broadcasting, prerecorded content, and on-demand streaming of news, movies, sit-coms, and prestige dramas series all indicate differences and distinctions in what it means to 'watch' TV. In this course, we will engage with these and other aspects of television as a medium in order to rethink not only how but why we watch TV.