Dear Colleagues, Liz Rodwell will be talking about her book, Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan, in two weeks -- March 29th. She has asked us to read chapter 5. Please read as much as you can, but do feel free to join us even if you haven't managed to read everything. The reading can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XZ5QlKe9-KVb7fbE3vpTMNlm4qvfh7_X/view?usp=s... PLEASE NOTE: The reading group meets from 12-1 pm EST on the last Friday of the month in a semester based US-American academic calender. The meeting will be 12-1 pm EST on March 29th and can be reached by clicking on this Zoom link: https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698 Looking forward to seeing you all virtually, Ilana Press blurb: 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.