The digital ‘revolution’: another way of watching television

Abstract

The article revolves around the much hyped phenomenon that is currently known as “digital revolution”, putting forward an exhortation to ‘curb the enthusiasm’ toward the techonological innovation and its supposedly all positive and progressive impact. Relying on a selected body of scholarly works, the author warns against the risks both of technological determinism and historical amnesia: two intellectual stances which lead to undermine the decisive role of the human factors in the processes of social change. However, the advent of the digital in the television field has put in motion undeniable transformative streams. They are first and foremost manifested in terms of pluralization: of channels, content supply, range of choices and ways of viewing. In regard to this latter, the author points out that the most innovative turn related to digital – that is the removal of television contents from the schedules and their materialization as DVDs – it does to a large extent nothing more than reproducing the conditions of cultural consumption already established since the Nineteenth century by the diffusion of the book.

Keywords: television, digital revolution, pluralization, book.