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Selling Jennifer Aniston’s Sweater: The Persistence of Shoppability in Framing Television’s Future

2018; Michigan Publishing; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3998/mij.15031809.0005.101

2373-9037

Lee McGuigan,

Fashion and Cultural Textiles

This paper contributes to historiography on new media in the United States by investigating the concept of "shoppability," a capacity to purchase directly from advertisements and media content.With a focus on developments related to the cable television and telecommunications industry, the study demonstrates that the ambition of merging medium and marketplace has been part of a commercial logic framing technological and industrial continuity and change.Looking historically at efforts to engineer transactive television systems, we see how ways of imagining and talking about strategies for exploiting the marketing affordances of media convergence and digital technologies have shaped information and entertainment environments.The persistence and failures of shoppability are documented through analysis of cable's expansion in the 1970s and 1980s, the development of digital set-top boxes in the 1990s, and ongoing t-commerce initiatives.