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'Your Window-on-the-World'

The Emergence of Red-Button Interactive Television in the UK

London Metropolitan University, UK, j.bennett{at}londonmet.ac.uk

Interactive television (iTV) has enjoyed increasing penetration within the UK's emerging digital television market. As with many new media technologies, its initial marketing positioned iTV as a spectacular new form of television. This has since given way to representations and applications that rely increasingly on a positioning of iTV as `everyday'. Drawing on the work of Tom Gunning, William Boddy and Lyn Spigel, I suggest that the discursive formation of iTV is not simply one of the now familiar stories of a new technology's movement `from the spectacular and astonishing to the convenient and unremarkable' (Gunning, 2004). Rather, this movement is one that is facilitated by the prominence of `window-on-the-world' discourses that not only relate television's digitalization to the initial inception of television into everyday life, but are also illustrative of the particular institutional backdrop of the UK's television landscape and, in turn, suggestive of particular gendered assumptions and positionings.

Key Words: digital television • gender • interactive television • new media • window-on-the-world

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