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. 

Core Post #5 Kimberly

I always thought of the internet as a somewhat timeless space, but reading "Reload" by... McPherson? Well, reading Tara's chapter for this week made me think more deeply about what constitutes that sensation of timelessness. While Tara discusses at greater length temporality as a function of/tied to mobility and spatiality on the web, the way the internet combines the functions of an archive and a crystal ball bringing the future to the present in "real time," really caught my attention. At a certain point I began wondering why the "History" tab did not come up as much as I thought it would, though maybe that's a function of the age I was introduced to the internet.

On the one hand, the history tab or search history are (or were? I guess I just never close my browser now...) essential to navigating the internet, as Tara describes constructing a sort of information geography. Even though I'll rarely use the history pull down bar these days, the last time I had to type a url in its entirety into the address bar I nearly collapsed from exhaustion. But that trail of footprints, the trace memory left in the browser then whipped up into useful shorthand has taken on significantly different meaning as I've grown into a new internet autonomy. Coming of age in the era of the "family computer" (do folks still have those or are we just giving kids iPhones now?) the history was my greatest source of anxiety, simultaneously mapping internet bypasses and hording incriminating evidence of my pre-pubescent curiosities. On the one interesting to think of this as a relationship to web-temporality that is specific to millennials on and something Tara would likely not have encountered being a grown woman who could google whatever she liked, thank you very much. On the other hand, it makes me wonder about the development of workarounds like incognito and VPNs and how creating space outside of a web geography might impact how we interact with/conceive of the web.

(And for folks keeping score at home, yes I in fact did manage to make this a little bit about porn for perhaps the last time in this class. It's been an honor.)

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.

Max – Supplemental Post 5

I watched Chernobyl and it deserves a post. Again, structure here is very interesting, although I can see how to some this structure would appear much less characteristic of television than as, variably, three or four movies jammed together. For those who haven’t seen the show, uh, structural spoilers ahead.

So you have the first episode which covers the event of the disaster, or meltdown. You have episodes two, three and four, which follow different aspects of the effort to clean up the site and prevent further, slow-motion disasters from unfolding. The final episode covers what is intended to be a show trial, deflecting blame to a few individuals in order to avoid an effective (and costly, difficult) structural solution. This has the interesting almost film noir or mystery genre effect of, in the text’s final moments, reentering us around the event that gave rise to the rest of the text, and ultimately transforming our understanding of what in fact took place. Also, what is signified by what took place. 

As I write I’m more and more certain that this structure is not really of television (if that means something). It’s a pretty cinematic strategy. And the series is never digressive in the way of, say, I May Destroy You (from my last post). There are no strange corners of Chernobyl. And if it does appear to be digressing, that’s only because the viewer is at the beginning of what will ultimately turn out to be a narrative thread with a beginning, middle and an end, and a coherent ending beat that will bear upon our reading of the primary thread. 

Core Post #5 - Alexandria

Here’s the passage of Tara’s chapter that stuck out the most to me: “Thus, unlike television which parades its presence before us, the Web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the movement [...] The Web's forms and metadiscourses thus generate a circuit of meaning not only from a sense of immediacy but through yoking this presentness to a feeling of choice, structuring a mobilized liveness which we come to feel we invoke and impact” (202).

This sense of causality, the feeling of choice and “volitional mobility” is really interesting, because over time, both scholars and public discourse alike have come to recognize the wearisome aspects of endless volitional mobility, particularly in regards to things like “doom scrolling.” For an STS seminar I’m in, we read a piece this week by a scholar named Ludmila Lupinacci in which she also thinks about this idea of liveness in digital spaces. For her, she is interested in how platforms condition users to expect “eventfulness” to occur online and to anticipate it and take responsibility for not missing it, but over time, this becomes wearying. The feeling of choice that Tara’s piece explains so well has in this case mutated into a burdensome feeling of obligation and into a connectivity that is often inescapable. In terms of how this relates to newer modes of how tv is experienced, could we relate this to bingeing as a mode of watching? Or to the inescapability of tv content as it proliferates across the web through memes and reposted snippets? (i don’t really mind the memes at all...)

In Parks piece, I mistakenly thought she was writing about the Netflix + Hulu era of streaming until she started writing about Real.com and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. The rhetoric of personalization that she was grappling with was very much the same—though the whole discourse about algorithms had not yet emerged. I was pretty disappointed to discover that the beginning of the streaming era was also marked by gendering of particular modes of watching tv and differing relationships to tech. I guess it makes sense, given longer lineages of gendered technological gatekeeping… but still so tiring.

Core Post #5 - Daniela

 This week's readings all focus on an important and rapid growth in television: TV and Internet convergence. Throughout these readings, I couldn't help but think about my own rapid growth at this time: teen to adult convergence, to coin my own term. In the Lisa Parks reading, "Flexible Microcasting", Parks uses the term "flexible microcasting" to refer to the "post-broadcast" moment "where computer and television technologies are combined to produce the effect of enhanced viewer choice in the form of a stream of programming carefully tailored to the viewer's preferences, tastes, and desires" (Parks 135). Although I did not have internet in my house until 2008, I remember when networks like NBC would air promos that advertised exclusive web content. Advertised, of course, being the key word here: "The personalization of TV is ultimately about developing... content that commodifies layers of individual identity, desire, taste, and preference" (Parks 135). The reason why NBC web promos stuck out to me is because I was a huge fan of The Office and began watching it in its second season which had aired around 2006. 

    I believe it was around the second or third season when NBC began to create exclusive web content that expanded the show's universe first through fake online blogs (www.creedthoughts.gov.www/creedthoughts) and eventually through mini webisodes that featured secondary characters as primary ones. I vividly remember this because I felt so excluded from an online world that I could not participate in. Eventually the webisodes came out on DVD (another way to make money off this content), yet watching these webisodes on DVD not only divorces the content from its initial medium, but also takes away any possible contact or connection I may have made through online comments. I found it funny that Parks ends their essay by urging the reader not to have contempt for "old analog TV", when I have nothing but deep nostalgic love for analog. The contempt I have, it seems, is for the moment of convergence of which I could not be a part of; this moment that Parks as well as the other readings stated allowed for a greater democratization of content.

Parks's term "Flexible Microcasting" is limiting, despite her desire to discuss a moment of greater democratization of television. I instead am more drawn to Christian's term "Open TV", which I see as discussing the era post post-broadcasting where network content isn't just being expanded onto the world wide web, but is being created first and foremost online. Christian defines "open TV" as "digital, on-demand, and peer-to-peer, meaning any participant in the web—a producer, a fan, a sponsor—can directly connect to another at any time, eliminating the need for legacy network executives" (Christian 4). Not only does this term seem more, well, open, but it also refers to an online television era that I was able to be a part of. 

Michael Feinstein Supplemental Post

 Recently I finished the first season of HBO’s new comedy series Made For Love. The season consisted of eight 30-minute episodes and I watched them over the two weeks that HBO released them. The show is a high-concept comedy where our current fears of technology and loss of privacy are used to tell a story about toxic masculinity and the ways in which relationships— like technology— force us to cede over parts of our identity and sense of self. I enjoyed the early episodes where we are introduced to the technologically advanced (but not that technologically advanced) world of the show and I quite liked all of the actors (including Ray Romano, whose sitcom I loved as a kid) who are given interesting, emotionally complex roles that also allow them to be broadly funny in this heightened world. However, despite all of this, I didn’t like the ending and because of that, in my mind, I’ve kind of written off the show. Over the last ten years, as both the amount of episodes in most TV show seasons and the duration in which I watch them has decreased, I have found myself placing more and more significance and weight onto the season and series finales of shows than I ever did before.  I watched Lost, as it aired, while I was in high school and, while I wasn’t crazy about the way it finally wrapped up, after dedicatedly watching the show for six years, one really bad episode didn’t completely color my experience with the show (and this was a mystery show where the ending/reveals meant a lot!). But if I had watched the show for the first time today—binging multiple episodes at a time on most days of the week— I know I would have balked much more at the ridiculousness of the finale. As my time with television series’ becomes truncated it becomes more difficult for me to see them as made up of separate, different, episodic pieces that make up a whole. Instead, closer to how I view film, television seasons— and sometimes entire series— have become one unified piece, making the line between a finale falling short and a season/series disappointing all the more thin.