Peripheral Post V | Core Post 5.5 -JAE-

 Peripheral Post V (Core Post 5.5)

So this post is essentially a 5.5th core post because my previous post was just a bunch of “talking story” and diatribe, where I never really caught any form, or semblance of a stride.

Each reading this week touches base with questioning the purpose or vision of television, while also tackling nuances that the internet contributes to the discussion of television. 

Lotz’s essay urges scholars to be invested in the multiplicity of tv and complementary artifacts instead of trying to name another monolithic term or event to usurp tv. Thus, allowing televisual experiences their own room to breathe by fending off an overdetermined urge to assign a fixed/rigid label to it.

Yet, Lotz is less energized, or at least a bit more reserved, than Parks. Parks’ writing is heavily influenced by McLuhan, even employing the “cool” versus “hot” terminology of McLuhan, while similarly being a conflict theorist. Lotz follows lines of logic akin to a technological determinism; asserting media convergence as a set of events, more than strategies, that are imperative for societal change. 

I am intrigued by Professor McPherson’s concept of “volitional mobility” and the mention of the internet’s “illusory nature.” Volitional mobility being a presentness yoked to a feeling of choice, which shapes a mobilized live quality that we perceive having agency over. Which hearkens towards conversations of televisual flow we encountered while visiting the audience studies tradition. While the “illusory nature” of the internet reminds me of the procedural rhetoric found within video games that scholars argue about. Where the affordances and infrastructure of technology dictate the possibilities for production and change within.

However, Parks’s essay is the only one I have gripes with. I am bothered by the dissociation of leftists from elites that Parks poses. Leftist politics are often elite politics focused on mobilizing, or impacting, the working class. Utopian Marxist/Gramscian visions commonly have some form of elite specter that is tasked with leading the proletariat through class revolution. Separately, as a person who graduated high school in 2006, I am also bothered by the notion that the DEN could’ve staved off school violence. But I am from a family that only lived in impoverished urban centers and semi-rural cities where access and interest in things like DEN were not a possibility.