Flow Conference: University of Texas at Austin, September 30–October 2, 2010

The biennial Flow Conference, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Radio-Television-Film, brings together scholars of television and media culture with television critics and producers to discuss the evolving state of television and Television Studies. As a rule, the conference’s roundtables address issues of historical, cultural, and textual analysis, interdisciplinary methodology, and pedagogy. With topics ranging from “The State of American Network Television” to “The Mass Audience Lives! (Or Does It?),” the 2010 conference tackled the transitional state of television media, television culture, and, perhaps most significant, Television Studies itself.

The Flow Conference developed in 2006 as an offshoot of the FlowTV website (www.flowtv.org), an online critical forum in which scholars share short pieces on industrial and cultural developments and on television programming. The conference’s innovative, dialogic approach echoes the ongoing conversations at the FlowTV site. Because of its nonstandard, decentralized format, the conference facilitates an evolving, in-person dialogue between faculty, students, and media practitioners. As the years have passed (2010 marked the third meeting of the conference), Flow has also served as a forum for the in-person manifestation of online television criticism (both academic and popular) taking place at FlowTV, Antenna, and In Media Res, and more generally in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

The most fundamentally innovative aspect of the Flow Conference is its structure. Organized around roundtables rather than panels of papers, Flow was originally created to foster the types of exciting conversations that are often limited to spillover in the hallways of conferences. Rather than reading or even talking their way through papers, roundtable participants share written provocations online in advance of the conference, with the hope that participants and attendees alike will read the provocations ahead of time.¹ Each roundtable opens with brief (five minute) statements by the participants, in which they reframe or build on the ideas they have shared in their written provocation. Roundtable contributors thus have the opportunity to situate their thoughts within the context of the roundtable as a whole. Dialogue quickly moves to encompass both attendees and roundtable participants. In this way, conversations evolve within roundtables and recur and transform over the course of the conference. While perhaps not everyone reads every provocation—and this may hold back the conversation to some degree—more often than not, roundtables dig deeply into the issues at hand, producing engaging, sometimes provocative, free-flowing dialogue.

As with any conference, the fact that multiple roundtables are held simultaneously means that each individual’s experience of the conference is specific and incomplete. Indeed, as I could attend only one of the four simultaneous panels held at any given time, this report can reflect only the version of the conference I experienced. However, the conversational, modular nature of the conference combined with the active use of a Twitter “hash tag” (officially “#flow10,” though some used “#flowtv”) enabled attendees to have a fairly strong sense of the larger concerns of the conference and the debates taking place in multiple panels simultaneously. Thus, despite each individual’s partial experience of the conference, in total the roundtables raised webs of interconnected issues and questions, which were often echoed in Twitter conversations emerging from other, simultaneous panels. In certain moments, Twitter enabled conversations to bridge panel divides. Indeed, Twitter became a tool for participants to map out connections between simultaneous panels as well as across the three-day conference.

These conversations often intertwined issues of scholarship and pedagogy; participants explored questions ranging from the boundaries and necessary foci of Television Studies to our complicity as scholars and teachers in the canonization of particular modes of television programming and engagement. In one of the opening panels, titled “Putting the TV Back in Television Studies,” roundtable convener Max Dawson called for a return to a focus on television as technology. The contributions of the participants in the roundtable made clear how such attention to technology encompasses awareness not only of the materiality of the TV set proper but also of the diverse materialities of expanding televisual infrastructures, from game consoles to...