The Television Social Network: Exploring TV Characters

Abstract

This article explores changes in television criticism through the lens of the online social network. This new lens reinvigorates television scholarship to reinterpret character relationships as central to the television text. By looking at the complex connections between text, character, and audience the network engenders, we can see how today's television links audience to character through a “social networking mode” within the text, redefining and updating television scholarship for the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Character
• Network
• New Media; Mass Communication
• Social Media
• Television
• Time

Notes

Barring any affiliate competition.

The concept of the narrator is also important here. However, in television studies the “narrator” is often conflated with the subjective position of the addresser (see Allen, 1992; Kozloff, 1992).

Other social network sites have recently been created that play on our real-world connections to media: The site GetGlue, for instance, asks users to share with other users what they're being entertained by.

This is not unproblematic, as detailed in Askwith (2009, p. 165): Many fans hated the characters and the change they created for the backstory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Booth

Paul Booth is an Assistant Professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University