Georgina Gonsalves- Supplemental Post #5

Post TV

I really liked Tara’s piece “Reload- Liveness, Mobility, and the Web.” I found that I had a better understanding of the web’s role in society at the time, and relative to today, by Tara’s thoughtful dissection of the Web’s purpose, its technological evolution, and the expansion of experience for the user. I found a lot of things were revisited from earlier discussions about audience, why medium matters and convergence of mediums. This was interesting to connect the dots and draw deeper into these topics in an article that discusses all of them simultaneously and their relation to one another.

As I was reading this piece, which I believe was written in 2002, I could not help but constantly compare Tara’s analyses of media then to media now, expanding beyond television and its convergence with the internet, to the current era of streaming and social media and the exponential growth that it has seen within the last decade. I noticed a lot of observations made still ring true to this day, but are not exclusive to the mediums referenced. 

We have entered another media revolution, where the meaning of consumer control is not nearly the same as it was in the early 2000’s. Media has become more interactive than ever. Referencing Rob Tercek, broadcast ideology was more comparable to controlling an audience, whereas a more “consumer-centric point-of-view” emerged in netcasting and has only evolved since. The internet is more interactive than ever and the ability to “watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it” has never been easier, now that streaming has become a dominant form of entertainment. Streaming even converges with social media now, with apps like Youtube and Facebook, all of which are designed to personalize content specific to the user. 

When dissecting the elements of the internet that attract us to it, Tara mentions the constant liveness (referring to chatrooms on MSNBC in 2002), instant gratification, and sense of connected presence in time. I think all of these things have exponentially evolved, granting us an unlimited array of choices when it comes to content consumption, we now even have the choice of creating our own content with social media. This era is more creative and interactive with media than ever before and will continue to grow for decades to come, though I cannot imagine what that might look like. 

One quote that really stood out to me was “Liveness remains a key dimension of our experiences of the internet, a medium which also promotes itself as essentially “up-to-the-minute” (reload). I never thought much about what it was that draws us to the internet and I think liveness is the perfect word. This era is much more accustomed to instant gratification and choice; and the current state of the internet, with streaming and social media is the complete embodiment of liveness today.