Correction: the seventh paragraph should read:
In such a multitudinous field this overview provides a useful map for particular areas. Corner's archaeology of 'flow', from its earliest days in the work of Raymond Williams, through to the ensuing debate in work by John Ellis, Rick Altman and John Fiske, provides a kind of history of television studies itself. Williams's definition of flow offers a more fluid understanding of television production and consumption than that based on television simply as a sequence of programmes. As he states in _Television: Technology and Cultural Form_ (1978): 'There has been a significant shift from the concept of sequence as *programming* to the concept of sequence as *flow*' (cited by Corner, 61), and this perceived shift, together with the particular context in which Williams' work was produced (a British academic's experience of American television after a transatlantic crossing to Miami), provides a useful commentary on a term which is often employed casually but which, in this chapter, is opened up and examined as a diverse and suggestive concept. Summing up the discussion, Corner notes one of the central difficulties with the term:
'It is the problem of essentialism, whereby use of an idea of flow, wittingly or not, produces in the analysis an essential television artefact along with its related experience. It is a tendency consonant with a totalizing imperative in certain strands of television criticism: television has always to be seen in sum; attention to the parts is never enough.' (68)
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