This paper will discuss some of the methodological and theoretical challenges for media studies scholars provoked by contemporary technological changes in moving image delivery and display in the home. Analyzing a range of promotional texts and trade debates over the putative convergence of home computer and television set, the paper will consider the way in which such self-serving industry discourses resonate with long-running scholarly accounts of the moving-image screen and spectator. As many scholars have noted, the dominant pejorative scenarios of the living-room TV set and its passive viewer have provided a polemical antipode to the ubiquitous culturally-privileged figurations of Web surfer and home theatre connoisseur. The ongoing efforts of firms in the consumer electronics and computer hardware and software industries to promote competing versions of technological convergence have put such long-established, if often implicit, cultural assumptions and scenarios about media use into crisis and conflict. This essay will explore how the shifting cultural scenarios of moving-image media consumption in the home, in the form of the ephemera of TV commercials and industry press releases, in order to illuminate and challenge traditional scholarly accounts of the media audience. 

This paper explores our changing relation to the screen itself-- the physically embodied and subjectively disembodied object relation to 1) the distant and large cinema screen with projected images, 2) the closer and light emanating television screen and, 3) the even closer computer screen, one that we put our faces very close to, often touch, one that sits on our laps or in our beds. The screen is considered here as a piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways; a "virtual window" which changes the materiality of built space by adding new apertures that dramatically explode the previous conception of space and also (even more radically) of time.

The attention received by the promise and performance of the hypertext-based World Wide Web has obscured the increasing hypertextual nature of television. However, it is important  to see hypertext for what it truly is -- a step in the evolution of media.  In this paper, we explore the convergence of hypertext and television, and investigate their relationship to the concept of hypertextuality in order to illuminate the interplay of influence in the latest metamorphosis in media. Our approach uses hypertextuality as a prism, or new instrument of insight, to reveal unnoticed, naturalized and mystified aspects of the medium of television. We focus our analysis on the application of these concepts to television, explore what hypertext and hypertextuality imply for our present media culture, and extrapolate to what these notions mean for the future.