Core Post 5 - Rojeen

In Amanda Lotz “Television Outside the Box: The Technological Revolution of Television,” she looks at the emergence of post-network technologies (convenience, mobility, and theatricality) and how they have fundamentally changed tv and the viewers experience. She writes, “convenience technologies encourage active selection, rather than passively viewing the linear flow of whatever ‘comes on next’ or ‘is on’ and consequently lead viewers to focus much more on programs than on networks—all of which contribute to eroding conventional production practices in significant ways,” (59). While DVDs and DVRs have disrupted the linear flow of network television, as well as the portability of accessing television from our smart phones, it often feels like we don’t have an active choice or selection in what we are consuming. In Open TV, Christian writes how media conglomerates in legacy tv continue to hold centralized control over production: “employment for women and racial minorities barely rose as we entered the networked era: from 2007 to 2014, women composed 27–29 percent and racial minorities just 10–13 percent of all television writers…Top writers with more control over story and employment—showrunners and executive producers—were even less diverse, with only 5.5 percent of positions going to minorities in 2013–2014,” (Christian, 19). Between media conglomerates lack of non-white, non-male producers/writers, the conventional narratives they choose to tell, and the algorithms on streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu that curate your content based off what you previously watched, it feels like convenience technologies and active selection, while changing how we consume tv, doesn’t result in the viewer actively selecting the narratives they want to see on TV. But, as Christian writes in Open TV, new distribution technologies like the Internet have cultivated a space for writers and producers to generate content (open tv/indie tv) that can revolutionize the top-down approach in legacy TV, actually creating grounds for viewers/fans to be an active part in funding narratives and series that were/are underrepresented on TV.