Core Post #5 - Daniela

 This week's readings all focus on an important and rapid growth in television: TV and Internet convergence. Throughout these readings, I couldn't help but think about my own rapid growth at this time: teen to adult convergence, to coin my own term. In the Lisa Parks reading, "Flexible Microcasting", Parks uses the term "flexible microcasting" to refer to the "post-broadcast" moment "where computer and television technologies are combined to produce the effect of enhanced viewer choice in the form of a stream of programming carefully tailored to the viewer's preferences, tastes, and desires" (Parks 135). Although I did not have internet in my house until 2008, I remember when networks like NBC would air promos that advertised exclusive web content. Advertised, of course, being the key word here: "The personalization of TV is ultimately about developing... content that commodifies layers of individual identity, desire, taste, and preference" (Parks 135). The reason why NBC web promos stuck out to me is because I was a huge fan of The Office and began watching it in its second season which had aired around 2006. 

    I believe it was around the second or third season when NBC began to create exclusive web content that expanded the show's universe first through fake online blogs (www.creedthoughts.gov.www/creedthoughts) and eventually through mini webisodes that featured secondary characters as primary ones. I vividly remember this because I felt so excluded from an online world that I could not participate in. Eventually the webisodes came out on DVD (another way to make money off this content), yet watching these webisodes on DVD not only divorces the content from its initial medium, but also takes away any possible contact or connection I may have made through online comments. I found it funny that Parks ends their essay by urging the reader not to have contempt for "old analog TV", when I have nothing but deep nostalgic love for analog. The contempt I have, it seems, is for the moment of convergence of which I could not be a part of; this moment that Parks as well as the other readings stated allowed for a greater democratization of content.

Parks's term "Flexible Microcasting" is limiting, despite her desire to discuss a moment of greater democratization of television. I instead am more drawn to Christian's term "Open TV", which I see as discussing the era post post-broadcasting where network content isn't just being expanded onto the world wide web, but is being created first and foremost online. Christian defines "open TV" as "digital, on-demand, and peer-to-peer, meaning any participant in the web—a producer, a fan, a sponsor—can directly connect to another at any time, eliminating the need for legacy network executives" (Christian 4). Not only does this term seem more, well, open, but it also refers to an online television era that I was able to be a part of.