The business of self-reflexivity: Network television's promotional strategy to seduce the young, the hip, and the restless

This thesis investigates specific self-reflexive institutional promotional strategies as they were developed and set in place in the last part of the twentieth century. I analyze network promotional institutional practices using self-reflexive functions to study three major institutional objectives: creating and maintaining audience, creating a cohesive network brand, and maintaining integrated audience viewing flow through segregated programming texts. These three functions have become particularly urgent given network television's changing institutional environment in pursuit of a younger viewing audience: the young, the hip, and the restless.; The television industry's increasingly voracious desire for and pursuit of a relatively younger audience, the 18–34 demographic, frames the context in which network television employs the use of self-reflexive strategies and devices and must be taken into account by any treatment of self-reflexive strategies at the intersection of text and institution.; In this study I identify and delineate a typology of the institutional functions of self-reflexivity within prime time television promotional texts, and the mechanisms by which these functions operate. This is accomplished through critical analyses of specific network prime time programs, programming blocks, and the concurrent network self-promotion campaigns that framed those programming elements. Within these analyses I consider the needs of the institution of network television, and how the functions fulfill those needs to the extent that they are used by the institution as a textual strategy of survival.; Finally, I consider the future evolution of self-reflexive mechanisms and strategies in the context of continued changes in television networks' changing institutional and technological environment.