Homecasting: the end of broadcasting? by JosÉ van Dijck

Established broadcast organizations are currently renegotiating their relationship with the new kids on the block: internet giant Google recently bought up YouTube for the hefty sum of 1.6 billion dollars after Murdoch Inc acquired MySpace about a year ago. Ever since the popularization of the internet in the mid-1990s, technology gurus have prophesied the decline and eventual demise of broadcasting. The trendy expression “postbroadcasting” has come to signify the idea that television, after its convergence with the internet and other digital technologies, will gradually disappear as a distinct institutional practice. Projections of a postbroadcasting age are generally warranted by a deterministic logic: they tend to reduce broadcasting to a technological system that is bound to affect social use. However, the internet never replaced television, and the distribution of user-generated content via sites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo, in my view, will not further expedite television’s obsolescence. On the contrary, they will introduce a new cultural practice that will both expand and alter our rapport with the medium of television - a practice I refer to as “homecasting”.

Book - Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, JosÉ van Dijck
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=5623%205624%20