Idiomedia: The rise of personalized, aggregated content

Thirty years ago, prominent cultural critic Raymond Williams accepted a job as Visiting Professor at Stanford University. Fresh off the boat from his hometown in Cambridge and 'still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner' (Williams 2003, 92), he found himself in Miami for the night and decided to watch a film on TV. Williams considered this medium to be an important cultural form, and had been writing a monthly review on TV for the BBC weekly journal The Listener. According to his own arguably apocryphal account of the experience, he was quickly interrupted by a commercial break, and another, and another. He found it striking that someone at the station had actually sat down and planned these breaks; the film had obviously not been made to be interrupted in this way.