The research questions
THE INTERNET AS AN AUDIOVISUAL MEDIUM: The internet is now central as a platform for the distribution of broadcast tv, for diverse forms of communication between tv institutions/corporations and their audiences/users, and for the distribution of tv-series and feature films through downloading. Newspapers also increasingly emphasise audiovisual material – “web tv” - on their websites. Online games are a form of audiovisual entertainment that television simply cannot offer, and which already for many years have attracted a big and rapidly growing number of fans and players – thus reducing the size of the television audience. But the internet also offers one of the historically and socially absolutely central features of broadcasting - simultaneity. Near simultaneity was, according to Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities (1983),very important for the role played by newspapers in the formation of a national public sphere and a national identity. Simultaneity is so important to television that the medium constantly tries to mimic it even when programs are pre-recorded, regardless of genre. With the internet, this varies with different genres, but is still important for the internet’s appeal as a medium/platform. The internet must furthermore be considered a competitor to television also as a uniquely attractive, flexible and comprehensive platform for an endless variety of “content” in non-audiovisual forms such as writing, still photography and multitudes of other, more and less innovative, written and/or graphic forms. And while mainstream television, once seen as producer and distributor of information and education, to some increasingly resembles an entertainment machine with news, the internet is the ultimate encyclopaedia, an enormous library and a fantastic set of archives which settles everyday arguments, supports student work and journalistic as well as scholarly research. And it is also a lot of rubbish. Research question 1: What are now the characteristics of the internet as an audiovisual medium, in comparison with television?