Much has been written about the way in which social media has reinvigorated live television, particularly from the perspective of the audience (for example, Liz Evans, Sheryl Wilson, or Inge Sø renson). But much less is known, or written, about how the liveness of social media has affected the production of a range of forms of live television that have made increasing use of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, Instagram and

It’s been over a year since I took up my post as Lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Salford, so I thought that this week I might say a little something about the gleaming edifice in which I now live and work: MediaCityUK. No, that’s not a typo; there is no space between ‘Media’ and ‘City’, and if you think there should be you are simply displaying your ignorance. We who operate at the heart of the media know best.

Is VHS essential to the study of television? This is a debate I’m currently engaged in with the institution I work for which desires to ‘upgrade’ the audio-visual facilities in teaching rooms and sees the removal of VHS as part of this. This upgrade would result in all rooms having DVD and Blu-ray players, but video would be gone;

@james_a_bennett Television production is often thought of as taking place either in the studio, on location or in the edit suite.

The theory/practice ‘divide’ has long bedeviled media studies. But this divide cannot be sustained in the face of new concerns in the field. Studies of gaming and computing emphasize issues that studies of audiovisual media have been able to suppress: questions of the body, of the haptic, of physical engagement, of technologies and their complicated relationship with the humans who use them… or are used by them.

The doctoral thesis is the most problematic aspect of academic endeavour, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unlike the sciences, where a doctoral student is typically part of a team attached to a research project, in our area it is typically a lone pursuit… and a very lonely one at times.

Elke Weissmann starts, David Leventes Palatinus continues. Please feel free to chip in. A few years ago my wonderful supervisor, Christine Geraghty, asked me what my experience was of speaking to other academics about television. My experience was fine – people seemed interested and polite. They spoke about programmes that they enjoyed and compared their experiences to mine.

In conversation with a colleague from English Literature recently, a question was posed that inspired this blog: ‘Is it ethical to charge students £9,000 in fees on the basis that a degree will get them a better job?’ I’m not sure I can answer either yes or no to this question, but it certainly provoked me to think about the various factors and contradictions at play for degrees in subjects like media, film and television, from either the

After my last blog on academic work culture almost brought the CST site down I was going to resort to less fraught ground today and write about the brilliance of Claudia Winkleman.

As the UK moves closer to the end of its annual academic teaching period and we are becoming reflective and perhaps also a bit optimistic about the future, I am struck by one big question: what does it mean to teach television today? A few weeks ago, in his CSTonline Blog, Toby Miller made a case for the continuation of television in its most traditional of forms.