Something I appreciate about Amanda Lotz’s essay, “Television Outside the Box: The Technological Revolution of Television,” is how carefully it lays out the ways in which television as a medium has changed over the decades due to technological innovations, particularly in relation to the recent rise of the internet and digital technologies. For instance, she describes how mobile devices “substantially eroded the degree to which television tethered its audience to a specific physical space, which had been a defining attribute of the medium in the network era” (Lotz 50). Moreover, television spectators are no longer beholden to network-mandated schedules; with the right devices, connections, and subscriptions, they have nearly endless opportunities to watch practically any show any time anywhere. As Lotz notes, “In the network era, the conventional use of television was so uniform and unexceptional that it was not widely contemplated” (77). While I am somewhat skeptical of the homogenizing nature of this assertion, it did also strike a very particular chord with me. I realized that I have never truly had direct interactions with the “conventional” mode of television viewership during the so-called "network era." My experiences are almost entirely the product of the more recent developments that Lotz’s tracks. I was not permitted to watch television as a child, so the closest I came was watching compilations of episodes from certain children shows on VHS. After that, I basically didn’t watch television until high school when I started to self-select the shows I wanted to see, all of which I accessed via streaming services or DVDs from my local library. This remains true to this day. For fiction programming, I rely almost entirely on streaming services, and for non-fiction news programming, I prefer print and online sources. All things considered, the experience of sitting down in a living room to “watch television” as it is being aired is remarkably foreign to me.
In fairness, I don’t get the sense that this is necessarily true for all of my peers. Based on my interactions with them (and people of my age more generally) I can surmise that many of them have had some experience with the basic contours of television spectatorship during the network era. After all, as Lotz acknowledges, that experience hasn’t disappeared entirely, it has simply become less common. But given that it is becoming less common, how will that shape future television audiences and, crucially, future television scholars? What will television studies look like in the hands of scholars for whom television has always meant watching Netflix shows on your phone?
On the one hand, I wonder what might be lost. Will a lack of firsthand experience with the network era lead to a misunderstanding or forgetting of what television under the network era looked like? To be clear, I don’t ask this question for nostalgic reasons. As Aymar Jean Christian’s Introduction to Open TV demonstrates, the networks are deeply implicated in racist, heterosexist, and classist structures of power. The more egalitarian and independent vision of “open TV” that he describes is only possible due to many of the same technological developments that facilitate my own mode of television spectatorship. Nevertheless, Christian is also extremely attentive to the continuities and tensions between network TV and open TV. While his analysis seeks to move beyond the networks, it also relies on understanding them. Yet I wonder if that understanding will be harder to come by as the years progress.
On the other hand, the very notion of open TV illustrates at least one reason to be enthusiastic about what the next generation of television scholars will look like. If Open TV is a standard (perhaps even outdated) text to them, what fresh and exciting paradigms will they come up with to account for how television will undoubtedly evolve and change in the decades to come? As a point of comparison, while reading Raymond Williams’ “Programming: distribution and flow,” I remember feeling somewhat distanced from his argument. I could understand the concept of “flow” from an abstract perspective, but his actual breakdown of television programming felt borderline outdated because I don’t really know anyone who watches television that way anymore. I wonder, what core concepts that we take for granted now will seem outdated and outmoded to the next generation of television scholars? And ought the inevitability of that fact in any way change how current scholars approach their research and writing about television? To be clear, I don't know that I really have any sort of concrete point here. But as someone whose research interests lie largely outside television studies, I'm nevertheless very curious how this field will continue to evolve given that it appears to potentially be at a key juncture in its self-definition. Per Professor McPherson's comment in our last class, the parameters of television seem even more uncertain now than they did a few months ago.
This a really interesting point! Though I do question your assumption that "the next generation" will be less equipped to study television of the past. I'll point out that television has basically been changing ever since it was invented, and what every generation grows up with will be different from the previous. to use an exaggerated example, I'm not particularly equipped to study the medium of the telegram, but there are presumably people my age who are becoming historians of technology in that area. That said, your point about what feels intuitive now, that won't feel intuitive later, is super interesting. "Flow" definitely feels less like something that today describes an everyday phenomenon and more like a niche concept that's either sequestered off in television history studies or needs to be reworked a bit to be applicable to modern television. (For the record, I definitely do think that it can be reworked in this way.)
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