Netflicks
Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era
The dead have risen and destroyed the world as we know it. A religious fundamentalist government has taken over America and enslaved the female populace. A woman wakes each morning and is forced to relive the same day, caught in a time loop. In a secret laboratory, soldiers are given a secret drug to remove traumatic memories so they can be sent back to war more quickly.
These outlandish scenarios are now quite familiar to us. We recognise them as the plots of some of our most loved shows and films. In this book, these situations are treated seriously for what they tell us about the world we are experiencing. In Netflicks Tony Hughes D'Aeth explains that screen dramas are a form of thought and that the streaming era has inaugurated a new kind of television — conceptual television.
The Vignettes Series from UWAP is aimed at sharing the knowledges that are emerging in the contemporary university and which that consider the complexities of modern life. Each book provides an image, or a vignette, of a particular phenomenon and how this is being thought through by intellectual practitioners in today’s academy.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. As well as Australian literature, Tony has longstanding teaching and research interests in comparative media and screen studies, and in the psychoanalytic study of culture.