| Part I | Broadcasting | |
| 1 | Entertaining Audiences | 3 |
| Making Media Meaningful: Audiences | 5 |
| Globalization's Involved Viewer | 9 |
| The Playful Audience | 11 |
| Audiences Bringing Meaning Back Home: Television's Critical Consumption | 14 |
| Ethnography: The Empirical Turn | 16 |
| So... | 24 |
| 2 | Understanding Global Television | 27 |
| In The Virtual Vicinity of Others | 30 |
| The Cognitive Cancelling of Distance: Production of Meaning | 33 |
| Comprehending Content: Identification "Of" and "With" | 35 |
| "We Don't See That Here": On Not "Making Any Sense" | 39 |
| Projecting Program Narratives: Identification With Others | 41 |
| Audiences and Alterity: Consent, Criticism, or Considered Comparison | 45 |
| Global Programs: From Pluralism to Postmodernism | 48 |
| So... | 49 |
| 3 | Audiences at Play | 51 |
| Conceiving of Media Consumption as Playful: Ethnographic Evidence Revisited | 53 |
| Constructions of Viewing Experience: On Ethnographic Hermeneutics | 57 |
| Philosophy and the Flow of Meaning: Understanding "At Play" | 61 |
| The Play of Interpretation: Constructing Meaning | 66 |
| So... | 74 |
| 4 | The Play of Identification | 75 |
| Identification and Insight | 77 |
| The Very Idea of "Identification" | 79 |
| Television: The Familiar Flexible Friend | 85 |
| Identification--Playing With Positioning | 89 |
| Participating in Programs: Identification's Hermeneutic Focus | 94 |
| So... | 98 |
| 5 | Global Media, Local Selves | 101 |
| Cultural Consumption As Pragmatic | 102 |
| Being A Person--Playfully | 103 |
| Globalization and the Production of Personal Identity | 105 |
| Television's "Reasonable Recipes" for Living: Audience Perception of its Prescription and Persuasion | 108 |
| Forming Identity in Everyday Life | 112 |
| The Playlike Production of Personal Identity | 116 |
| Developing Divergent Selves | 120 |
| So... | 122 |
| Part II | Narrowcasting | |
| 6 | Television in Transition | 125 |
| Focusing on the Familiar | 127 |
| Channel Changing: From Broadcasting to Narrowcasting | 130 |
| The "Interest Sort of Thing": Niche Narrowcasting | 133 |
| Talk Shows: Typically Televisual | 135 |
| Talk Shows: Familiar Friends | 137 |
| On Typical Television: Moments of Playful Identification | 141 |
| Menus of Multiple Address: Talk Shows and Narrowcasting | 144 |
| So... | 149 |
| 7 | Narrowcasting's Narrative Menus | 151 |
| Televisual Narrowcasting: Menus for Playful Consumption | 152 |
| Monolinear Narrative Menus On-Air as "Narrative Sketches" | 154 |
| Television's Narrative Menus: Prompting Audiences to Action | 160 |
| Multilinear Narrative Menus Online | 165 |
| The Hypertext Narrative Menu: Accessing a New Order Online | 170 |
| So... | 172 |
| 8 | Converging Media Communities | 173 |
| Familiar Narratives of the "Life-Worldly" | 174 |
| Absorbing and Aligning Audiences | 178 |
| Talk Show Communities | 180 |
| Constructing Communities On-Air | 182 |
| Identification Online | 188 |
| Constructing Communities Online | 192 |
| So... | 197 |
| 9 | Public Spheres On-Air/Online | 199 |
| The Talk Show's Public Sphere | 200 |
| Talk Shows as Ideal Speech | 201 |
| Ideal Speech as Responsive to Diversity | 205 |
| The Talk Show's "Self-Centered" Horizon of Social Understanding | 207 |
| Television's Public Sphere On-Air | 213 |
| The World Wide Web's Public Sphere Online | 216 |
| Projecting A Virtual Public Sphere of Meaning | 219 |
| Hosts and Horizons of Understanding: The Political Economy of the Portal | 221 |
| So... | 223 |
| 10 | Converging Aspects of Consumption | 225 |
| Conceptualising Interaction with the Internet | 226 |
| Playfully Going Online: Toward Convergent Consumption | 232 |
| Internet Use as "Play-Full" | 236 |
| Net Games: Huizinga's "Play" | 239 |
| Interaction Online as Cognitive Distraction, a Playful Absence | 240 |
| Interaction Online's Projection of Meaning, Its Purposeful Play | 242 |
| Interaction Online as Holistic Play, Synthesizing Understanding | 244 |
| Interaction Online as Unlimited Play: Indeterminate Involvement | 246 |
| Interaction Online as Decision Making: Circumscribed Play | 247 |
| So... | 252 |
| Concluding Hypertext: The Generic Online Cinema and Cyberspace | 253 |
| Going Online: Generic Forms of Audience Absence | 255 |
| Going Online as Holistic Play: Constructing Generic Coherence | 261 |
| Going Online as Generic Serious Play | 265 |
| Identification: Sharing the Generic Experience of Playing | 267 |
| Distanced Play, Generic Criticism | 272 |
| Toward Reception Ethnographies of Consuming Play | 274 |
| Notes | 277 |
| References | 291 |
| Author Index | 321 |
| Subject Index | 329 |
