Social Media Television and Distributional Aesthetics explores this distinct fictional form that merges the genres, structures and affordances of television with those of social media and what it entails for contemporary television and media culture and for our experience of new and old media in everyday life.

Centred around five key case studies – Skam, Lik meg, Dead Girls Detective Agency, Content and Eva.Stories – this book offers insight into how different social media platforms facilitate distinct aesthetics and content; transnational aspects of social media television; and how different production cultures and industries operate in its production. This analysis extrapolated out into broader principles and theoretical arguments that will help scholars working on a wide variety of questions of television and social media, digitalization, technology, convergence, media aesthetics, production cultures, audience cultures and globalization in the future. Developing new theoretical perspectives to understand what social media television is and can be and creating new methodological frameworks to analyze television and new media as an aesthetic experience, the author proposes distributional aesthetic as the main analytical framework arguing that distribution can be understood as an aesthetic form defined as a situated aesthetic experience in time and space.

This book will be relevant for scholars, instructors, students and practitioners working within television studies, social media studies, media aesthetics, and visual and digital culture.

Gry C. Rustad is an Independent scholar. She has a PhD in media studies from the University of Oslo, Norway.