Streaming

This paper focuses on the continuities, rather than the ruptures, between digital television and past media forms. It situates the metaphor of “streaming” in contrast to and connection with previous fluid metaphors that have been used to describe different models of media transmission. From the early use of aqueous vocabulary that shaped popular and scientific understandings of electricity transmission to the seminal studies of mass communication concerning the flows of information, images of fluidity have long shaped cultural understandings of the inner logics of media infrastructures. Building on the work of media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo, I approach these metaphors as “recurrent topoi” in media culture.