Peripheral Post - Sebastian

    In his essay, “Where the global meets the local: notes from the sitting room,” David Morley makes an interesting point about how VCR relates to the tensions in studying media from macro and micro perspectives. He observes that “technological advances” like VCR are “often seen to have transformative (if not utopian) consequences for television audiences” (6). The hope is that VCR and other similar devices will grant the spectator a degree of autonomy that was previously unavailable to them. Yet Morley contends that this optimistic view “[runs] the danger of abstracting these technologies’ intrinsic ‘capacities’ from the social contexts of their actual use” (6). In other words, VCRs may have this utopian potential, but more often than not they get integrated into preexisting domestic frameworks of television spectatorship. This reflects a larger macro/micro dynamic that all three of this week’s readings address to some extent. On the one hand, overfocusing on macro issues can lead to a lack of specificity that subsequently ignore sites of resistance and subversion that exist at a micro level. On the other hand, solely studying the micro can lead one to overestimate these sites of resistance and subversion at the expense of considering how they are still implicated in macro systems.

    This is, of course, far from a new topic in terms of the readings we’ve covered this semester. Both Henry Jenkins’ “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten” and Jane Feuer’s “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today” point to different (micro) sites of potential resistance to (macro) hegemony – Star Trek fanfiction in the case of Jenkins and the narrative form of serial dramas like Dynasty in the case of Feuer. But, as with VCR, the question remains: Do television audiences actually take advantage of these sites, or do these sites once again become subsumed by hegemony? I think there’s an understandable impulse to say that the latter scenario is more accurate. After all, while they might open up cracks in hegemony, VCRs, Star Trek fanfiction, and the narrative form of serial dramas clearly haven’t toppled it. The same systems that dominated when Morley, Jenkins, and Feuer wrote their papers in the 1980s and 1990s largely dominate today as well. That said, this framing potentially seems too “all or nothing” to me; it risks implying that because hegemony persists, resistance to hegemony does not exist and/or is futile. Yet as Jenkins argues in relation to fanfiction, “Nobody regards these fan activities as a magical cure for the social ills of post-industrial capitalism” (491). But they can, often at a deeply personal level, constitute a meaningful form of resistance for some fans. How can we as scholars better acknowledge and account for these personal interactions without dismissing them or overestimating their impact, influence, and frequency. In other words, how can we better acknowledge that some people use these personal strategies just to get by on a daily basis without losing sight of the fact that these strategies on their own are not enough to alter hegemonic circumstances?