ABSTRACT
Screens are now ubiquitous in our lives. Those of the movie theatre and television in the last century have been supplemented with laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Alongside this, too, there has been a huge change in the ease of access to media texts. The amount of time spent patiently waiting for the next episode of a television drama, or a video game to load, or for a film to be made available in home entertainment formats, has been reduced dramatically. We are, it seems, increasingly impatient audioviewers. It has never been easier to access historical texts or to encounter media from across the world, and such texts can be experienced and re-experienced with time as the only barrier to ever further consumption. Such plenitude might be thought of as somewhat overwhelming, but it has also enabled the forms presented on screen to be dissected with a critical scalpel of ever-increasing sharpness.
