How Will the Mass-Audience British Soap Opera Survive Online Television and Mobile TV?

The aim of this study is to determine whether the mass audience British soap opera will be able to endure the technological changes currently happening in the media. In doing this, I investigate whether these new technologies will affect the soap opera as a social device, and how its current form might be adapted to suit today’s technological mobile culture. For the sake of this study, I use Mobile TV and Internet Television as models to exemplify the points I make.

I enjoyed researching this study as it was an opportunity to broaden my thinking and to look at and understand a number of high level theoretical concepts.

This essay first outlines the main features of the British mass audience soap opera and then I analyse three available models of online programming. Using Raymond Williams’ cultural analysis of the dominant, residual, and emergent cultural shifts, this essay then predicts an optimum model the soap opera may adopt and will consider the social and briefly suggest the economic implications this might carry. I see if Marshall McLuhan’s ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ dichotomy of the media, which has been a "...useful tool…for understanding the impact of new media"* (Levinson, pp 105), is still applicable to today’s technologies discussed in this essay.

References

* Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: a Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.