The New Interactive Television

This chapter tracks interactive television in the service of entertainment and community-building. Producers sought to construct programs that not only enabled a dialog between themselves and audiences but also generated a sense of collective identity among audiences. This chapter uses two shows to question how television forms publics in multiple ways and explore how interactive television programming adapts new technologies to its practice of promoting national identity. Profiling one massive interactive television event and three smaller-scale ones, it unpacks what kinds of energies and interactions are made possible by their technological limitations and possibilities. It raises the question of what the modern “public sphere” looks like, and who is served by the notion of Japanese homogeneity.