In Push the Button, Elizabeth Rodwell follows a battle over what interactivity will mean for Japanese television, as major media conglomerates took on independent media professionals developing interactive forms from new media. Rodwell argues that at the dawn of a potentially transformative moment in television history, content conservatism has triumphed over technological innovation. Despite the ambition and idealism of Japanese TV professionals and independent journalists, corporate media worked to squelch interactive broadcast projects such as smartphone-playable television and live-streamed and open press conferences before they caught on. Instead, interactive programming in the hands of major TV networks retained the structure and qualities of most other television and maintained conventional barriers between audiences and the actual space of broadcast. Despite their lack of success, the innovators behind these experiments nonetheless sought to expand the possibilities for mass media, national identity, and open journalism.

Elizabeth Rodwell is Assistant Professor of Information Science Technology at the University of Houston.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Pushing Buttons  1
1. The Interactive Consumer-Viewer: The Social TV Promotion Collective, Ratings, and Advertising  25
2. Interactivity and Gatekeeping: The Compass and the Limits of Conservative Corporate Culture  46
3. Cultures of Independent Journalism: The Free Press Association of Japan, Independent Web Journal, and GoHoo  64
4. The New Interactive Television  89
5. Teaching Citizen Journalism: Media Activism and Our Planet-TV  108
Conclusion  129
Notes  143
Bibliography  163
Index  179