Core Response #5 - Emma

Lisa Parks’s article on “Flexible Microcasting” this week stood out to me as touching on a lot of points made throughout this class, whether explicitly calling out other theorists like Williams and Spigel, or indirectly, by discussing reality TV and quiz shows or network organization and “narrowcasting”. Maybe it’s because I have been in this class for nearly 15 weeks, but it seems like Parks synthesizes a lot of existing television theory before her and adds her own theories about internet-TV convergence, which are really interesting themselves. She theorizes “flexible microcasting,” her idea of “the industry’s visions of a new kind of personalized TV” (134), which includes “how technological convergence overlaps with the politics of gender, race, class, and generational differences” (134).

Now, Parks says, (in the year of this article’s publication) we are in an era of personal choice in television, though it is “more to do with new industrial structures of individuation geared toward profit making” (135). As we’ve discussed in this class, we are given the illusion of freedom of choice, but in reality our choices are determined already—it is about the “experience of…mobility” rather than actual mobility (137).

Parks’s discussion of the computer-TV convergence is so fascinating to me, as on the one hand it has absolutely nothing to do with today—we don’t see TV trying to “rearticulate itself as a computerized form” (141) because TV today already is a computerized form. On the other hand, however, I have noticed a similar but different convergence of “television as integrated with the computer interface” (144).

While reading Parks’s description of Oprah Goes Online, I had to find it on YouTube, and it’s incredible. Oprah and Gayle really do learn how to use a computer (“they cover everything from the mousepad—‘I thought it was a coaster’—to navigating the web”). Oprah sends an email to Hillary Clinton, visits her own website for what she says is the first time, and reads an email from Diane Sawyer referencing nude pictures. Because this clip is on the OWN YouTube page, when the clip ends, present-day Oprah pops up on the screen saying, “Hey YouTubers!” and asking us to subscribe to the OWN channel for new videos every day. This is something that I’ve noticed at the end of other clips from TV shows. Stephen Colbert will pop up at the end of a clip of his show and ask you to subscribe to the Late Night channel. Is this another form of “television as integrated with the computer interface”? Or is it the other way around? So many people only watch these shows through clips on YouTube, so these broadcast channels and shows are surviving through YouTube clips. What kind of new convergence is this?

The clip from Oprah Goes Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmv5n9QHsTY