Core Post #5 - Alexandria

Here’s the passage of Tara’s chapter that stuck out the most to me: “Thus, unlike television which parades its presence before us, the Web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the movement [...] The Web's forms and metadiscourses thus generate a circuit of meaning not only from a sense of immediacy but through yoking this presentness to a feeling of choice, structuring a mobilized liveness which we come to feel we invoke and impact” (202).

This sense of causality, the feeling of choice and “volitional mobility” is really interesting, because over time, both scholars and public discourse alike have come to recognize the wearisome aspects of endless volitional mobility, particularly in regards to things like “doom scrolling.” For an STS seminar I’m in, we read a piece this week by a scholar named Ludmila Lupinacci in which she also thinks about this idea of liveness in digital spaces. For her, she is interested in how platforms condition users to expect “eventfulness” to occur online and to anticipate it and take responsibility for not missing it, but over time, this becomes wearying. The feeling of choice that Tara’s piece explains so well has in this case mutated into a burdensome feeling of obligation and into a connectivity that is often inescapable. In terms of how this relates to newer modes of how tv is experienced, could we relate this to bingeing as a mode of watching? Or to the inescapability of tv content as it proliferates across the web through memes and reposted snippets? (i don’t really mind the memes at all...)

In Parks piece, I mistakenly thought she was writing about the Netflix + Hulu era of streaming until she started writing about Real.com and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The rhetoric of personalization that she was grappling with was very much the same—though the whole discourse about algorithms had not yet emerged. I was pretty disappointed to discover that the beginning of the streaming era was also marked by gendering of particular modes of watching tv and differing relationships to tech. I guess it makes sense, given longer lineages of gendered technological gatekeeping… but still so tiring.