Max – Core Post 5

 “The DEN’s executives prided themselves on their radical departure from commercial television. In their mission statement, they defined the online network as ‘a hip alternative and replacement to the passive, brainkilling experience of watching network and cable television.’ “ (Parks, 149)

This just struck me as hilarious. It is interesting, with Parks and Lotz, to return to a time when “surfing the web” and “watching TV” were seen as clearly comparable activities that you could, like, rank. The other thing that makes this quote age poorly is, of course, our contemporary anxieties about (and produced by) social media.

At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, I read the Lotz, then the Parks and then the McPherson, and Reload is really putting the industry’s own discourse in context for me. The idea that “minimal interactivity” was what was desirable and sought after, and that the internet is going to replace (or consume and metabolize) TV, actually works for me in terms of explaining a relationship currently common between people and social media. Maybe it explains a part of how we got there. What could be more “minimally interactive” than scrolling (at your own pace of course) and liking. Even the sticky discursive trends on a platform like Twitter (“I’m trying to see something”) signal and prompt this: interaction, but a form that doesn’t seem to demand much planning. 

Re page 204, where there’s a discussion of “flow.” At the beginning of this course, I think I made the leap many of us did and remarked how some of the concept of “flow” mapped easily onto social media. (So you’d remark you were “on Facebook” in the same sense you might remark that you were “watching TV,” not noting particular pieces of content you consumed there.) But now I’m struck again by the way “flow” has vanished from the way actual episodic television or news is consumed. I suppose you could say you, “watched Netflix” for a given period of time, but it seems more likely that you’d cite a specific show that you chose to watch at a certain point, and there’s not much that gets packaged around that media. (Except “recommendations,” which can’t be consumed in a predetermined flow.) 

Re page 205, this picture of transformation as a key particularity of the internet, part of its phenomenology, was initially the hardest for me to see. But it makes complete sense when positioned against media like television, but also consumer products and toys. As McPherson notes, lipstick offers a particular type of transformation, but the internet and all of its tools and platforms offer the extremely attractive opportunity to remake oneself in accordance with one’s own desires (echoing the “mobility” aspect, the sense of pursuing one’s own desires through virtual space in real time). Early social media, like MySpace, and blogging platforms like Xanga, really reflected this. I mention MySpace because, much more than something like Facebook, it demanded visual and audio customization. Choosing colors, images, backgrounds, fonts, etc. It makes sense to compare this to the kind of transformation offered by lipstick, or a car, or clothing, but the mobility aspect also goes some way towards explaining, for me, the uniquely hypnotic properties of the transformations that the internet has on offer. There are often apparent limits to the interactions you can have with other consumer objects. The transformation is satisfying or isn’t. Internet platforms and spaces, the virtual spaces of video games, invite us to continue pursuing transformation from moment to moment. One observation: unlike certain consumer objects, unlike the lipstick, this attempt at transformation, when online, often unfolds alone. 

Regarding the end of Reload: I want to add the state into the mix here but I’m not sure how. The integration of consumers (not just workers) into capital in this particular way makes complete sense to me, and it is a form of conditioning. However, beyond our integration as viewers, users, consumers and workers, is something of civic life not being replaced or coopted (into a space which, because virtual, is more easily surveilled and molded)? I think to make headway here it would make sense to return to the “TV as forum” concept and think about some of the dreams of community the internet has offered. It seems like in some cases where desire is “mobilized elsewhere” to great effect, it comes in the form of sudden traction between online immersion and “mobility” and real world organizing and energy. In one moment, it seems like there are hundreds of thousands of like minded people discussing some goal, and nothing happening in non-virtual public, and in the next suddenly there is. I’m not sure how to explain such moments of traction, or even if they need to be explained anymore than by invoking irl “organizing.”