I concur that what we call it in 20 years should be more accurate than today, and hindsight matters. But I’m pretty sure that post-network will not be the best term, while digital convergence or digital renetworked/-ing might be. I’d rather risk being wrong than knowingly use a term that’s bound to cause problems in hindsight.

And I look forward to the next generation of media scholars mocking us for talking about the “digital” when quantum computing becomes commonplace!

Words matter, but they have their limits and at some point I’ve found as an author, you need to accept some baggage and just pick a word. I spent the better part of the last decade arguing the merits of a particular definition of postfeminism—and that was a theoretically-based distinction. I don’t relish a repeat with post-network. Jason offered this critique when I was drafting The Television Will Be Revolutionized and I gave it a lot of thought and responded to his key concerns in presenting it in the book—so I’ll not rehash that here.

I think the tail of this discussion that gets to the socio-historical context of naming is particularly helpful. I don’t think I could have identified the multi-channel transition as such in the late 1980s or even early 1990s. It is only with the passage of time that it becomes clear that of all of the changes television experienced in that timeframe, it was the development of a more multi-channel environment that truly defines that period’s shift.

Maybe a decade or 15 years from now, we’ll be able to say that the shift that begins in the early 2000s is one of digital convergence. As of today though, I don’t buy it. Sure the technical capability is there, but we need time to see what really happens with the way most people really use television, how industrial practices adapt, etc. I suspect digital will be key, but maybe not in the ways that currently seem most obvious.

Sure, post-network has its limits, but I remain in the camp comfortable with it as the best of current options (thanks to others who have articulated them here).

But I guess this relates. I have used the word “new” before in naming (“New Political Television”), but as with what Jonathan writes above, it is a bit difficult to offer a name for something as it is newly emergent or rapidly developing (for me, in the late-1990s/early 2000s, though we still don’t have an adequate name to describe the intersections of entertainment and politics–at least a term that would take those interactions seriously). But maybe as Jonathan correctly suggests in a similar post (http://www.extratextual.tv/2009/06/isnt-new-getting-a-bit-old/), we are rapidly coming up on 20 years of “new media” language–perhaps time for some precision. But in many ways, isn’t that difficulty what this whole post and discussion points to?