Core Response #1

    Using Turner’s conception of television as ritualistic and supplying a metalanguage for processing culture makes room for inputs other than strictly hierarchical ones in message formation. It allows for the entrance of audience reception and the agency of individual writers and producers into our model as more than ideological vessels for power. At the same time, it seems like we have to acknowledge the presence of power within the systems of production and distribution. Perfectly egalitarian societies are probably as rare as rituals free of all power dynamics. When Newcomb and Hirsch write, “We recognize, of course, that this variety works… within the limits of American monopoly-capitalism and within the range of American pluralism. It is an effective pluralistic forum only insofar as American political pluralism is or can be,” (566) it’s important to recognize the scale of the concession. The prescription appears as one of “diversity.” If only the publics and creators were sufficiently “plural,” then television would constitute a real (level?) cultural forum. Not only is this a high bar, but it elides the fact that the structure of the ritual is designed to stabilize a particular configuration of power. The ritual framework seems to obscure this. It’s well and good to say that television (or all of art) is the place where “common sense” can begin to appear uncommon, where “our monsters come out to play” (564) but isn’t it possible that the ritual does little more than stabilize power by presenting its other in an arena carefully demarcated from the “real?” (Reading over this again, I’m unsure of how this applies to the news. I had the TV drama in mind when writing.) 

“Then too, by organizing the ‘free time’ of persons into end-to-end interchangeable units, broadcasting extends, and harmonizes with, the industrialization of time. Media time and school time, with their equivalent units and curves of action, mirror the time of clocked labor and reinforce the seeming naturalness of clock time... duration is homogenized, even excitement is routinized…” (Gitlin, 255)

    The above quote from the Gitlin really got me thinking about the relationship between different forms of television and time. On the one hand, the shift from the time of Gitlin’s writing to the present has seen the rise of streaming TV, which allows many viewers to exit the logic of Williams’s programmatic flow, with its particular rhythms and particular relationship to the school or work day. On the other hand, the move to streaming clearly facilitates its own forms of temporal regimentation, of which the binge would seem an important one. I would pose two questions: first, what is the relationship between the increasing informalization of work (à la Prop 22) and the increasing obsolescence of “flow” as a viewing modality? (You can work whenever you want (you will work all the time), and you can watch whenever you want (you will watch, also, all the time)). Second, transposing Williams’s conception of flow to the most addictive forms of new media (the “feed,” broken up intermittently with related ads), and attuning ourselves to Gitlin’s observations about the regimentation of time, what is different and what is similar about the way that social media regiments time?   

- MB