Non-Core Post 5 – Longevity and Short Attention Spans

It's that time of the year! Show finales are being aired while also battling to stay on air for another season. Many shows are ending this year, two of them being Scandal and New Girl, while there are those shows that are being renewed constantly. Grey's Anatomy was renewed for another season, bringing their season count up to 15, Big Bang Theory has been renewed till 2019 making their season count to 12 and Law and Order: SVU has been on for 19 years.

This is amazing, especially now, because with the rate at which audiences are munching on content and spitting them out, there are still those shows that have resonated enough to last decades. But I don't think this trend is something that we will see with shows created today or in the recent past. There are probably many reasons for it, with the biggest being an influx of streaming platforms + broadcast companies trying to survive the brutal entertainment market, as well as a confusing gamut of content being thrown at audiences. What will be interesting to observe is to see how much longer this long-running shows will last.

Non-Core Post 4 – Love for Documentary Series

I have always loved watching the History Channel, Nat Geo, and Discovery since I was a child. There's something about seeing the true (well as true as it can be) nature of the world we live on television in a stark and streamlined manner. But while those channels have been at it for years, I've been noticing a lovely trend of documentaries popping all over the streaming channel. In this past month itself, I have watched Wild Wild Country, March of the Penguins, Chef's Table, Ugly Delicious, Cooked (yeah I have a food obsession) and god knows how many more documentary series to help me cope with finals.

And I recently read that A+E has just signed on Gretchen Carlson to create and host a series of documentary specials on sexual harassment in the workplace. Will be interesting to keep an eye on. You can read the article here – http://deadline.com/2018/04/gretchen-carlson-deal-ae-networks-produce-host-documentary-specials-1202375126/

I would also love some new suggestions of series to watch over this summer.

Westworld Season 2 - noncore post

In honor of the new season of Westworld, I thought I’d share this article. Respond in the comments if you are a Midwesterner* who feels personally attacked by this content.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-midwestworld

*Full disclosure: I am not from the Midwest

Non-Core Post: Drag Race has taken over Latin America!!

After reading Krystal's comment as a response to my last non-core post about Drag Race Thailand, I realized that there was another international translation of RuPaul's Drag Race.  This one takes place in Latin America, specifically in Chile.  It's called The Switch Drag Race and the show has actually just started airing Season 2 on WOWPresents streaming service called 'WOWPresents Plus+.'  Many of the contestants are obviously from Chile, but some of the contestants in the first season are also from Argentina and Uruguay which is awesome!  What's interesting about Season 2 (which hasn't happened at all in the USA version), is that the contestants are divided into two teams where one is, of course, contestants from Chile/Argentina and the second team incorporating drag queens from other parts of the world.  Two of them on the international team are from past seasons of the USA version (Gian Gunn and Kandy Ho) which is also quite intriguing that the show went this direction further emphasizing the globalization of television.   

The Link to the main website is below if interested:
http://www.mega.cl/programas/the-switch-2015/

The trailer for the 2 seasons streaming on WOWPresentsPlus+ is below if anyone is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfMnQQOf9eo&t=50s

Core Post #5

With thoughts about television and the ideology of liveness in mind after reading Professor McPherson’s piece, I was struck by Parks’ discussion of the late 1990s game show revival and its resonances with the present-day mobile game HQ Trivia, which launched in 2017, averages 1 million players per day, and could itself be read as a kind of “liveness” revival. At certain points in a given day, HQ Trivia allows its users to participate, live (!), in a kind of massively multiplayer game show-style trivia quiz experience, the stakes of which are a real monetary reward split between the winners of a given match.

What’s immediately striking about Trivia HQ is that its basic premise seems predicated on a kind of fetishization of televisual liveness—a quasi-lost object in the age of streaming. Where other trivia game apps (Trivia Crack, Quiz Up) involve live multiplayer components, or otherwise reference TV game shows (like, of course there are mobile versions of Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire), these can be played at any time. HQ Trivia, which bills itself as “A Game Show To Go,” instead reinstates appointment viewing—or rather appointment playing—with gameplay taking place only at scheduled times (users receive push notifications when the game “goes live”). Moreover, where various digital games reference televisual modes of address, this one actually adopts them. Each daily match alternates between a gameplay interface and a live video stream of a host who welcomes the audience/contestant to the game and comments upon its progress following each elimination round. There is a multiplicity of modes of positioning/address at work here. The game plays upon nostalgia for familiar game show models, recalling the feeling of implicit simultaneity that comes with watching a broadcast of Jeopardy at home and imagining that other people watching Jeopardy in their homes are, like you, anticipating or calling out the answers. But it also makes actual contestants of us. Alex Trebek may look directly into the camera while, in studio, he is “really” addressing the contestants and live audience before him; with HQ Trivia, it is us on the viewer/user end of the screen who are the extent of both the live audience and the contestant pool.

To bring this more explicitly back to the readings: Parks reads the late 1990s game show revival in terms of the major networks’ bids to reassert mass appeal and recoup ratings. For her, game shows’ erudition-testing premises and techy formal components (video playback, screens, telephony) “[enabled] the medium to represent itself as a far-reaching center of knowledge” at a moment “when digital technologies threaten[ed] to absorb and forever alter the medium’s specificities” (140). While I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to the answer the question of “why HQ Trivia, why now,” I suppose one answer would simply be that such a form is now relatively easily technologically realizable. It seems almost like a “natural progression,” even, what with other successful couplings of older forms of televisual liveness with network-enabled connected gaming, e.g. Twitch. But whereas Twitch is pitched at people who are already gamers, we might, following Parks, note the ways in which HQ Trivia capitalizes on the “mass appeal” of earlier game shows, and on nostalgia for the particular sort of veneer of liveness and simultaneity such shows instantiate in their broadcast forms. Indeed, the “HQ” in HQ Trivia seems to harken back to a time when broadcast programming could be sensed as a kind of national hearth.

Yet, we might also note that HQ Trivia is itself pitched to a particular kind of techy audience. Parks’ broader argument alerts us to the ways in which digital media literacy and access has been unevenly distributed along classed, racial, gendered, and generational lines, and while this is purely anecdotal, I think such histories are evident in the fact that the few people I’ve seen actually playing the game have fallen somewhere along the “early adopter” spectrum. Also rather anecdotal: at least one article characterizes the app as a “millennial obsession” popular mainly among young adults working in corporate settings, who play together as a sort of unofficially sanctioned communal diversion during breaks. This, plus the various ways in which the app is, like any app, connected with larger systems of finance and monetization, perhaps suggests that HQ Trivia calls for analysis in terms of McPherson’s assertion that the experience in face of web-based interfaces “model[s] particular modes of subjectivity which can work all to neatly in the service of the shifting patterns of global capital” (207). HQ Trivia’s coupling of the allure of liveness with masculinized, rational, “active” participation (a la Parks' reading of computerized game show aesthetics and discursive constructions of digital media more broadly) might thus be read as a form of “[instruction] for our bodily adaptation into virtuality,” literally “incorporating” the worker and their leisure time into capital with every thumb stroke (McPherson 207). 

GO-PRO wins award for BEST INSTAGRAM PRESENCE (???)

In the Open TV article, Christian briefly mentions The Streamy awards, and it seemed appropriate to share a debacle that went down at this year's ceremony. A guest presenter, actor Adam Pally, went off script and completely trashed the awards and their purpose. Eventually his microphone was cut off and he was taken offstage; but I found it both funny and fascinating to watch someone involved in what could be considered "traditional" media channels be so direct and incisive in laying out the many issues surrounding online media content (it is also important to consider the fact that he was asked to announce the award for "Brands with the best year-long presence on Instagram") (Which is just....why)

It makes me think about the main arguments against these new forms of media, and the sort of judgements passed on them (warranted or not).

Watch here: https://youtu.be/AR7WdXCbulU?t=1h34m11s

Or read a better summary than the one I provided here: https://news.avclub.com/adam-pally-didnt-even-try-to-hide-his-despair-on-stage-1825293715

Core Post 5 [Laurel]

I found Dr. McPherson’s article a great reminder of the ways in which our familiarity with televisual viewing practices structure our experience of the internet. It’s an interesting reminder that our understanding of and experiences of “old” media will always influence the ways that we approach “new” media, whether it be through continuities or differences. Of course, as the article stresses, we shouldn’t take for granted “the seemingly natural links being forged between television and the internet by”—notably— “companies” already involved in the current models of broadcast and television (McPherson 200). On the other hand, it seems natural that new media (in this case the internet) would be approached, not as an entirely new or unknown object, but with interpretive and navigation strategies brought from familiar media (such as television).
I am also intrigued by the idea of temporality as a structuring mode of experience on the web. Though the internet often is presented as an eternal database, archive, or warehouse of data, we also know that data accessed over the internet can be ephemeral. While on the one hand it is true that those photos sent over Snapchat never truly disappear, it’s also true that entire websites, like news archives, can disappear overnight. Websites can update to add or remove information, leaving no trace of the page as it existed before. (These are probably the two most common reasons that the Wayback Machine gets used). Nevertheless, even as data might disappear, the architecture that our explorations of the web build around the data remain. Dr. McPherson presciently, and still relevantly, reminds us that “as we roam the web, the computer remembers where we’ve been” (202), a process that can be both helpful and deeply chilling. It’s helpful that my browser auto-completes the address of that half-remembered website; it’s terrifying that my paths through the internet are maintained, and can be accessed by anyone with the right skills.
The temporal connections between the impression of “liveness” and the fact that “community on the web ... is as much about meeting times as meeting places” (203) is also extremely evocative. It is likely most visible through social platforms, from forums (to a lesser extent) to hyper-time-sensitive social media platforms like Twitter. If you aren’t “online” during those explosions of Twitter conversations, for example, it’s difficult to reconstruct, or even to join the conversation, after the moment of explosion has passed. The social aspect disappears, though the tweets might remain. (“Disappears” might be a strong word—of course conversation is still possible—however, consider the temporal difference between a Twitter conversation thread and the comments underneath a post on Livejournal.) Tumblr is similar; the constant feed of reblogged content means that the user’s experience of the site and of content is very much rooted in the particular moment of encounter. Popular Tumblr users will often “reblog” posts twice: once in their daytime, for those in the same and neighbouring time zones, and once at an approximately 12-hour time shift, for those in distant time zones. The fact that this is done at all indicates an understanding of the ways that, as Nash is quoted saying, “temporality connects our bodies to the computer” (203) and how the metaphors we use to structure our experiences on the internet are constructed temporally as much as they are spatially.

Non-Core Post - The Americans

LOL that I started this post forever ago and just never actually wrote anything...but now that we're three weeks into the newest/last season, I can fully voice my frustrations in having to wait a week between plot advancements for one of the most densely plotted serial shows I've ever been seriously invested in. The Americans is one (in the tradition of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.) TV series which continually amazes me with the way it treats its ensemble character development, with casual and minuscule references here and there to events, big and small, which happened years/seasons ago in the show's timeline. The normal challenge of keeping up with significant moments of development in every character's arc is amplified by the political weight and specificity behind every plot line in The Americans. It's a great show to binge (the end credits music has no small part to play in this) but it also makes a huge difference in my overall reception of what I'm seeing. When I asked my friend (another superfan) if she and her boyfriend had seen the new season yet, she said they were probably going to wait to binge it once it was over. Now, this is an approach I can understand for some shows (Riverdale, for instance, or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend--shows I like a lot but not enough to need to keep up as it happens), but with the current political climate and everything in the news to do with Russia, trust, alliances, conspiracies, WMDs and other dangerous technologies, I don't know...there just seems like there's something urgent about The Americans right now, and the idea of not watching it at all until the entire season/show is over is (I'm showing my TV obsession) borderline unthinkable to me, tbh.

mini YouTube rant

Maybe I am "too old" but I still don't really understand YouTube celebrities. I understand an awesome video, but I cannot wrap my head around the popularity of some of these YouTube channels. I have an abnormally long attention span (I have sat through Wagner's Ring Cycle), but I get bored after 15 seconds of a makeup tutorial or unboxing video. My little cousins have YouTubers they are obsessed with and maybe it is just an age thing? Furthermore, I have read Spreadable Media twice in the last 5 years, and I am still unsure how virality happens. Especially now, when every other person has a YouTube channel, how do certain ones really take off? When there is (in my opinion) truly compelling television shows, what makes someone tune in to a teenager talking about their day? I am still studying this, because I am oddly fascinated by it.

As a side note, it is really interesting to see how YouTube is influencing "mainstream" television and movies. I used to work as a casting assistant, and I was often tasked with making lists of social media influencers. I would have to mark how many followers they had on their YouTube channel and other social media platforms. More often that not, our office would call them in for auditions - not because of talent - but because the producers liked that they had a builtin audience if they were cast. Also, if it came down to two actors for a role, the producers would look at their social media presence and way more often than not, they would cast the actor with more followers. It makes sense, but I don't know how I feel about it.

Non Core Post 3 – Rise of Reboots

So every time I read the news on television in recent times, I've been seeing a surge of old shows being rebooted or renewed after years of being off-air, with the latest release being 'Lost in Space' on Netflix, Roseanne, and another season of American Idol. While, I don't have a problem with well-crafted shows released, I'm curious to know as to why producers are choosing to revisit older shows rather than create fresh new content. Considering the success and fanfare behind the new Gilmore Girls season or Will & Grace, I am wondering what the appeal is beyond the original fan base.

What do you all think? 

Core Post 5 – Week 13 – Post-Digitization TV

Post digitization television is a topic that has always intrigued me but one that I have never understood. As someone who has been an avid television audience member since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to feel more involved with the content as well as the makings of each show. When reality television came into fruition, I realized that the television industry had found a way to engage with their viewers and could feel involved with the outcomes of their format. But as time went by and more reality TV shows were on-air, it also started becoming more scripted, with other audience members and I only seeing what production houses wanted us to see. However, the one thing I did understand was that this idea of an even more personal relationship with the audience was the only way television would be able to survive with the introduction of the Internet and digital media platforms. 

Amongst the three readings, Parks’ readings were what drew me in the most. In the initial few paragraphs she goes into detail about ‘postbroadcasting’ and ‘personal television’ and how they have become vital to the growth of television today. For me, her definition of postbroadcasting stuck the most – ‘referring to television’s current transformations as part of an ongoing set of historical struggles played out over and around the medium rather than as a “byproduct” of the digital revolution’ (pp. 134). Since its inception, television has gone through a constant evolution to keep up with the times. From big bulky television sets that required an antenna to get a fix on the channels to the streaming channels of Netflix or Hulu being played on sleek paper thin television screens, it has seen a the maximum amount of change amongst all mediums of communication. And the biggest factor that played a role in this transformation is the demand for different types of content by the audiences every time. In order to stay relevant, show formats have had to undergo tremendous amounts of change, reaching the format of Twitch shows today, where you spend time watching people play games or watch a show themselves.

This kind of format resonates with what Parks’ ends her piece with i.e. ‘we need to turn on our television, engage with them, and talk more about what we want to see’ (pp. 153).  That is exactly what has given rise to platforms like Twitch, YouTube Red, and Facebook Watch etc. where audience members have interacted with the content creators directly to voice their opinions and tell them what they need. It’s going to be an interesting format to watch out for, especially in terms of how it will continue to evolve and what forms it might take. 

Core Post 5–Sarah Johnson

So in regards to the chapter on “Open TV” I feel that the piece started feeling really dated. Not only does Disney now own Maker Studios, but Viacom recently bought Vidcon a conference for online video that is used to promote creators. The conference has slowly become more industry related as the years have gone by and now while also offering a career-track ticket they are now owned by one of the top six companies that control 90% of the media most people consume in this country. The mainstream media does not fully understand online content so their way of dealing with it is by buying it all up. You can see Disney’s influence on content by the handling of Maker dropping Pewdiepie after his scandal because he no longer could be justified as advertiser friendly content due to some of the controversial videos that had come out at the time. What a lot of mainstream media conglomerates don’t seem to understand is that the rules and regulations that apply to television and film are not the same as what works online. Independent online video is getting harder and harder to find because of the interference of these companies. YouTubers who have had successful careers in the past are now having to move towards more traditional platforms to continue to thrive in the entertainment industry due to their content not always being advertiser friendly. We are seeing more YouTuber books and podcasts sometimes than output on their original platform. The change in the way these people are able to make money has hit everyone hard. By trying to now enforce television policies on something that started out as not as regulated let consumers decide with their views what they  found acceptable without input from the mainstream media. Videos that were popular were getting featured on the homepage of YouTube. Now videos that are produced by larger entities are getting an unfair advantage so smaller creators are having more trouble getting recognized for their content.

Many televisions - core post

Over the last few weeks I had been thinking about writing my final paper about the return to televisual liveness that the internet has encouraged, talking in part about Twitch, but also Facebook live, YouTube live, and a few other streaming services. But reading Tara's article reminded me about some of the ways that this dialogue is far from new and instead is "ideology once again masquerading as ontology." One of the interesting pieces to me is the reference just after that — that the illusion of liveness that we get from the internet isn't so different from the way the nightly news, both are delayed and ultimately repackaging older content as new. What got me about that is the way that old articles relatively frequently get recirculated as if they are breaking when in fact they're years old, underscoring that what the internet provides is not liveness itself but a feel of liveness so strong that even old content feels breaking.

Over the course of the article, I started thinking more about the way that internet-based TV has brought together the trends of so many different trends in television history and allowed each to reach new heights. There's the sense of liveness, much of which is more feel than real, but also more unrehearsed liveness that's accessible. One of the trends we talked about early on was the sense of being with others without having to actually be with anyone — and watching something on the internet let's us (sort of) engage with others via comments or chat rooms on Twitch, without having to actually interact with anyone. Really, most of those chats are like shouting into the void where only expression, not interaction, is possible. Then there's the huge amount of edutainment, and the re-rise of cheap, cheap contest productions like Nailed It! that mirror (only better?) the turn in production we discussed a few weeks back once the range of choices expanded beyond the big three networks.

In some ways it seems easy to argue that the reason so many of these trends present to new heights is because there's just more content being produced for more outlets. The Christian piece does a pretty solid job of illustrating that explosion of channels. But I think there's more to it, something more akin to what Lotz talks about — how we should be talking not about television as a singular entity anymore, but rather as a set of televisions as the "singularity and coherence of this experience has come to be fleeting." Certainly it was never really singular, but it does certainly seem to be less singular than before.

I like thinking about the difference between home and public consumption as a way of understanding some of this — which has, in many ways, always been the divide though the gap between the experiences has consistently grown as control and choice of a certain type expand far more rapidly in one sphere than the other.

That said, I had the funny situation last night of wanting to watch something but not actually caring so much about what it was and I oddly longed for being able to just channel surf rather than feeling like i needed to actively pick something. And so I tried Netflix Roulette for the first time in a while... and then I remembered why that's not something I actually want once it spun up A Christmas Prince, Caspter's Scare School, and Brother Bear 2 as its first three suggestions in comedy. Good thing right under "spin again" it says, "no one likes that anyways."

Noncore Post - Youtube's Illusion of Discovery

Inspired by Professor McPherson’s chapter on Web-based experiential modalities, I wanted to take a look at my own engagement with Youtube, and to reflect on the illusory “choice” and “discovery” promised by certain features on the site. I’m a bona fide Youtube user – I am currently subscribed to 44 channels, though I keep up with new content from fewer than 15 of those channels. I visit the site several times daily, both to listen to music and to catch up on the latest content from my favorite creators. I sift through content using two tabs – “Home” and “Subscriptions,” which respectively promise “discovery” and “choice.” The “Subscriptions” tab lists new content from the channels to which I am subscribed, with today’s releases listed across the top of the page, followed by videos released yesterday, this week, and this month. This feature presents my curated content in reverse chronological order, much like Twitter’s newsfeed or Instagram’s home page. “Home” offers a selection of videos curated by Youtube and tailored to my taste based on my activity. This tab presents a selection of playlists based on music that I’ve listened to, as well as “Recommended” content, which includes videos from channels that I subscribe to but have not yet viewed, as well as content from channels that I’ve visited but not subscribed to. These tabs have changed somewhat over the past few months, inspiring frustration from both content creators and viewers who preferred older incarnations of these browsing features. I tend to visit “Home” first, trusting Youtube’s algorithm to “recommend” the content that I actually want to watch, rather than delving into my bursting subscription box in which ~60% of the videos present will remain unwatched. So, rather than availing myself of the “choice”-oriented modality of the subscription box, I opt for the “discovery”-oriented modality of the Home page, which essentially learns my viewing preferences and feeds them back to me. I put too much trust in these features – content from certain creators sometimes does not reach their subscribers, and Youtube will occasionally unsubscribe groups of viewers from a given channel (about which there is no shortage of conspiracy theories).

In light of the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I’m wondering how we can navigate between features that promise interactive ease and the data-mining that those features mask. Professor McPherson asks us to “investigate the ideological implications of actual interfaces and other programming choices,” and scrutinizing the features with which these platforms tantalize us seems like a sound starting point (206).

hurra to web series (and bonus track)

While reading Christian's OpenTV intro, I immediately thought of the web series I have watched online (I'm sure you already know this, which I think he references). One of my all-time favorites is an Argentinian web-series called Electrica, which tells the story of a TV production company (albeit a cheap one) that's trying to produce a short-series of interviews with a very famous comic artist (Liniers) as a host (it's very meta!). The story of this production fits Christian's description of OpenTV because Electrica's first season was produced by UN3.TV, which is the TV channel of Universidad de Tres de Febrero (public university) - meaning "film students and graduates, and television professionals" (p. 8). But also because the second season was financed by fans thanks to the crowdfunding campaign initiated in Ideame (they created a narrated pitch - you can see here), which also demonstrates direct connections between producers, fans and sponsors (I did not fund this, but I tweeted about the second season when it came out and the "lead character" replied back). The web series is currently available on Vimeo and YouTube, but I couldn't find any videos with English subtitles. For those who speak/understand Spanish, there's a link above, but also I'm leaving here a link to Episode 2 of season 1, which "renders visible the stakeholders necessary to create television" in a very meta way -- the production company has run out of money and needs to find sponsors, and so, when they eventually get a soup brand to give them money, the main assistant is shown leaving packets of instant-soup in the picture frames of the comic artist to get him to drink it.

Bonus track:
Because I couldn't find a video of this with English subtitles, I'm leaving below another Argentinian example of indie production that's gone viral (but it's not a web series), based on the messages left on a voice recorder found at a flea market. Enjoy!

Baby's First Localization - noncore post

After Sebnem's lecture yesterday, I was thinking about my first experiences with foreign media as a child. Like many American kids, my first exposure was to Japanese anime and video games, particularly Pokemon and Sailor Moon (the latter I used to watch "reluctantly" with my sister - I loved every minute). So, I thought I would share my favorite example of a localization of children's media that probably resulted in more cultural confusion, not less:

Non-Core Post: Drag Race Thailand?!?! (Phil Miller)

After the great presentation that we had in class and inspired by the readings for this week, I thought it would be interesting to share an LGBTQ program that has been acclimated on a global scale which I mentioned in class.  This happens to be RuPaul's Drag Race being adapted for Thailand called Drag Race Thailand.  I actually forgot about this show until this weeks topic.  Since we also mostly talked about scripted programming in a globally distributed context, I thought it would be cool to share an adaptation of reality television.  Below is the link to the trailer if people want to watch it!  It's pretty Fabulous!! 

Link Below:
Drag Race Thailand Super Trailer (English Subtitles)

Core Post 4 [Laurel]

While I like his concept of media capital and think it’s a useful way to think about global media flow, I feel like I want to push back a little against Michael Curtin’s assertion that media imperialism is a concept that we can completely disregard. With his principles of the logic of accumulation, trajectories of creative migration, and forces of sociocultural variation, Curtin has developed a way of accounting for the movement of media products that disregards, or at least downplays, the importance of national boundaries. However, just because the power structures initially theorized in media imperialism (like “the self-conscious extension of centralized power” [111]) have proven inadequate to fully account for global media flow doesn’t mean that media products and the power structures and imperial ideologies associated with them don’t travel.

In her post, Krystle mentions American programs in Vietnam, but the most accessible example for me comes from my everyday experiences with television in Canada. Curtin notes that Canada is a nation “thoroughly saturated by Hollywood media” (Curtin 110), and this relationship to American media is echoed in television, both in fiction and in news programming. It’s just as easy to catch the Fox or CNN nightly news broadcast as it is to watch the National on CBC, or to tune into Seattle’s Komo-4 as Vancouver’s local CityTV or Global station. Further, it’s just easier for CityTV to import Modern Family and black-ish than to create enough Canadian-specific programming to fill the week.

Tomorrow’s Global schedule, for example goes from MacGyver (a U.S. government agent), through Hawaii Five-O (the setting is literally in the name), through Madam Secretary (there is no Secretary of State in the Canadian government), to Stephen Colbert, compared to an hour and a half of Canadian news. And this is one of the few Canadian channels—which are easily overwhelmed by the multitudes of American channels available in cable packages. This sort of media dominance—even in “a wealthy developed nation like Canada” (109) (which nevertheless economically depends quite a lot on America)—has real effects on the construction of nationhood, politics, and social structures that Curtin seems to be pushing aside as he tries to move away from ideas of media imperialism.

I love "The Killing"

I am rewatching The Killing, which my wife had never seen, and I find myself just as sucked in the second time around. If you haven't seen it you can find it on Netflix. It is a detective murder mystery that is so detailed and attentive to the nuances of each of its characters that it progresses on an approximate ratio of 1 episode = just less than 1 day in the narrative. This may sound excruciating to some of you, but I promise that all four seasons are intensely satisfying and so compelling that even on the second viewing make me want to abandon my entire life to immediately binge watch the entire thing.

It also rains in virtually every scene which I find a calming reprieve to the oppressive and eternal heat of Los Angeles.

Core Post - Kumar is great and other jumbled thoughts...

There is so much that excited me about Kumar’s piece that I hardly know where to begin. Her anecdote about Derrida giving a lecture about a theory of titles as a middle finger to the administration was hilarious. Her salient genealogy of global television studies and the challenges of approaching it through standard academic disciplines was really impressive. And as others have noted, her conclusion was brilliant. And it is this paradox that she ends with that I would like to focus upon.

If global television studies is both necessary because of the pervasiveness of the rhetoric and economic practice of globalization and impossible because it will necessarily result in “unequal discourse”, then it requires of us a process-oriented methodology of intellectual examination. By this I mean that the Hegelian model of dialectical progress in thought, wherein one philosophical (or in Kumar’s terms disciplinary) mode clashes with another and through that collision subsumes much of the old mode into a new synthesis. I take Kumar to be rejecting the universalizing nature of this model and accepting that there is no universal progression of thought without a colonial power dynamic taking place, and therefore is advocating a world wherein a diversity of perspectives can exist side by side along one another, without needing to be fit into a neat “interdisciplinary” universal. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about myself, and feel vindicated to see it in this essay (assuming I am not misreading her argument).

Another theoretical possibility of this process-oriented methodology is an inversion of values whereby the means is more valuable than the end, precisely because there is no longer the possibility of an end for an end will necessarily result it breaking down, as Kumar put it. This may be another way of phrasing the rejection of a universal, but I think it is worth stating again, for if the ends can no longer justify the means, then perhaps we can rethink the dominant academic reification of competition and dialectical struggle. This doesn’t mean an end to it so much as and ethical rewiring that might mean a change in the way universities and research initiatives are funded antagonistically, which seems to me to harken back to this classical Humanist methodology. I realize that these thoughts might not make sense to anyone but me; I am writing them because they have been on my mind for months and this is the first excuse I’ve had to give them voice, so please forgive the rawness of my half-formed thoughts.

One of the reasons why I find this approach so exciting is that it allows scholars to be wrong and for their wrongness to be generative and progressive, or as Kumar puts it “where, paradoxically, it breaks down.” It may be that scholarship from an Anglo-American perspective comes to conclusions about global television, that from another perspective, say an East-Asian feminist perspective is wrong on some accounts, and vice versa, but because we can hold the impossibility of a universal account of globalization both accounts are generative as long as they are done in good faith by “extending the discipline to its dialogical limits.” It seems to me that some of the fierce debates between scholars who should be natural allies, here I’m specifically thing of post-Marxist and feminists, could perhaps be less self-righteous and more collegial. But then again maybe I’m wrong, nevertheless isn’t that ok in this brave new world?

Core Post, Week 14

Curtin’s piece highlights the particular ways in which globalization does not necessarily mean an “imperialist media” at work but rather a complex dynamic that occurs via sociological, political and economic affordances. I found this piece thorough in understanding the logistics behind media produced within a global system. Curtin cites three principles of “media capital” that aid in the structuring of cinema and broadcasting: a logic of accumulation, trajectories of creative migration and forces of sociocultural variation. While otherwise understood superficially, these principles lay out the incremental ways capital plays into global media.

What I find interesting is the output that we receive in understanding a ‘global’ platform. In particular, the ways in which international news and television shows are broadcast stateside. With the proliferation of cable during the late twentieth century, international news is readily available, as opposed to public broadcasting that allocated specific hours for ‘global’ news programs. Subsequently, the role digital platforms have assumed garner the potential for consumption. Presently, satellite or subscription services like Murdoch’s Star counter with platforms like YouTube.

I find Curtin’s initial discussion of an “imperialist media” useful in further arguing his conclusion in favor of culturally apt media that can “foster identity, enhance social cohesion, serve local businesses, enhance property values, and provide spaces for public discourse.” Introducing particular television shows within a culture works both ideologically and politically. We can see an active example of this during the Vietnam War when American television programs, previously unavailable, were introduced to incite cultural values. In the same way this polarizing argument frames imperialist media as a benefit Hollywood film might come to inspire on a region, media was precisely used as a political tool for the indigenous population. In this lens, the implementation of media capital is a direct tool in promotion of imperialist ideology.

What happens after the discipline breaks? - Core Post 5 - Josh

We don’t know what will occur after the break; nonetheless, this is the target we ought to aim for, a target that should break. As Shanti Kumar concludes, “Therefore, within the university system practitioners of television studies may need to shed all pretensions of being ‘interdisciplinary,’ and engage with its disciplinarity by extending the discipline to its dialogical limits where, paradoxically, it breaks down” (151). This is Kumar’s solution, I think, to the double bind that is Global Television Studies; the double bind being the impossibility and necessity of studying television in a global framework. We certainly must take a global approach to T.V. studies, and to ‘study’ itself more generally, but a truly global, interdisciplinary approach is impossible for all the reasons Kumar lays out.

                This is quite a different approach from David Morely’s investment in empirical knowledge of television reception and from Michael Curtin’s genealogy of media capital. Yet, I don’t think Kumar is in disagreement necessarily with Morley and Curtin. It seems, instead, that Kumar is arguing for self-reflexivity in the terrain of Global T.V. Studies, or an awareness that while the discipline is useful, it is also impotent.

                This perhaps explains my gripe with industry studies last week, as I find that the accumulation of empirical evidence and the disciplines that espouse that approach are useless so long as they ignore questions of how academic inquiry is itself imbricated and enabled by structures of power, both global and local (though they might, in another sense, be useful to capital). Though it is obvious, it is perhaps not said often enough that where ideas come from, and how they are produced and distributed, makes a significant difference in the shape those ideas take. We might think back to McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and ask ourselves if the academy is not itself a medium that both produces and distorts our messages.

                As a concluding thought, I’d like to pose the question of what differentiates interdisciplinarity from lateral or horizontal thinking. The difference might be in the end towards which our intellectual questions bring us. Both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity operate according to a “pursuit” of knowledge, or even the pursuit of a break, as in Kumar’s case. I would argue that lateral/horizontal thinking is not about a unilateral pursuit (pursuit, I think, is always illusory), but something more like a return – a return to what is already “known” – such that we are invested in finding new questions for old answers. We might, then, already be living in the ruins of our disciplines, or the awareness that they will not lead us to satisfying solutions or conclusions. How then do we make do with these ruins? If these ruins are broken solutions, how might we live with questions and no answers?

You guys, Jennifer Holt is REALLY NICE!

So, remember how I mentioned that there was an invitation-only even on Thursday were she'd be speaking? I went and there she was, the only woman in a 4-person panel that was supposed to have a conversation on the histories of technological rupture. She talked about what we talked about in class, vertical integration and content production, particularly comparing new media (such as Netflix) vs. Hollywood studios. She said that the battle now is in the control of the wires, because no matter how ethereal we think the internet is, if you want to stream something on Netflix, you have to plug at least one thing. Therefore, her future work entails even more analysis on the infrastructure of entertainment.
After the panel, I talked to her and discovered that she's really pretty cool and easy to talk to. I told her that we had just read her earlier stuff on class - oh and by the way, Prof., she sends her love - and I asked her if her work resonated well with policy makers (remember how we talked about her work lacking some more theoretical fierceness a la McChesney?). By the end of the conversation, she hugged me goodbye!!!!!! #girlpower (<-- yeah, yeah, I know it's problematic, whatevs)

Core post — complexity and ritual

There's a very clear unifying thread this week about the complexity of considering television (and really, any media) studies at the global level. Each of the articles takes a slightly different tack in discussing it. Kumar's discussion includes a pedagogical framework for highlighting that complexity through a continual exploration of the paucity of any definition, which has done a great job structuring our class thus far and really does show how the paucity goes both ways, towards field and object. Curtin I think frames the complexity most simply: it's not about seeing the forest and the trees, but rather taking both into account together. And while both of those articles made their own interesting points, I was the most interested by Morley's article this week because I've spent much of the semester thinking about the ritual aspects of television.

James Carey describes it by way of example with the newspaper. "A ritual view of communication will...view reading a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed." I tend to agree with the idea not that the view is correct, but rather that it's an important aspect of our communicative practices that is often pushed aside in favor of considering almost exclusively what information is being presented and/or how the audience is reading a text. One particular set of texts that brought it to mind earlier in class was the screenings of Life with Luigi, when we were discussing the ways that the text served as instruction to viewers — in addition to the information gleaned (or not), there's a particular way that watching it means acting/becoming/being part of the community that is considering what it means to integrate. Participation comes not only through opening a line of credit, but also through the act of watching (without any valuation of that participation). Morley seems to take it into account really intelligently to me, asking how the "we-feeling" of community is continually engendered, and holding together the ways that television and similar communication technologies are able to simultaneously fragment and homogenize cultures — "the regular viewing of television news (or of a long-running soap opera) can be seen in the same light - as discourses which constitute collectivities through a sense of 'participation' and and through the production of both a simultaneity of experience and a sense of a 'past in common.'"

That sort of nuance and holding of contradiction is, to me, the most difficult and interesting part of high-quality writing because it creates space for questions and further research that promises to hold both the forest and the trees in view. Rather than speculating about homogenization in general, the question becomes for which groups is there a sense of homogenization, for which is there a sense of fragmenting, and in relation to which media and where? Of course, that kind of nuance and specificity is difficult — especially in the face of a question like, "so what?" But, frankly, I think some of the reason that arguments get overextended and don't navigate or investigate a contradiction without resolving it is because the drive to have a big, bold, "so what" gets in the way.

Core Post 5 - LeMaire

This week, I was especially drawn to Kumar’s closing discussion, in which he calls for a deconstructionist approach to “global television studies”—and more broadly, any academic “discipline”—in order to validate the notion that scholars can and should be both disciples and critics of his or her respective disciplines. He presents a familiar version of what this could look like in the classroom, arguing that classes should focus on a dialogical strategy “á la Derrida,” in which any given discipline is treated as a “signifier” which has innumerable functions and limitations (150). Here, I was reminded of our first meeting, when we were asked to define TV, an impossible task that has since established a theme throughout our course. I believe that by aligning with this strategy, rather than any particular set of disciplinary practices, we have been able to approach each week’s reading with a healthy amount of skepticism. Last week, for example, turned out to be a controversial set of readings because of our immediate attention to two of the authors, who more blatantly align with a particularly narrow view of TV (i.e. a socio-political industrial history). Kumar, citing Derrida, calls for scholarship that always exists “at the limits of disciplinarily in the modern university and in modernity at large” (151). Thus, we experienced the reverse of our observation about industry studies scholars during our week on TV & Genre, when it became apparent that the scholars were situating themselves at the boundaries of cultural studies (i.e. Jane Feuer’s and Jason Mittell’s surprising attention to textual readings).    

For Kumar, the real motive for deconstruction is to draw scholars’ attention to the “incommensurability” of any given discourse, particularly in relation to Western-Eastern discourse. I had never before really considered Western theory’s hierarchical dominance over Eastern scholarship. In true deconstructionist fashion, Kumar finds that even our attempts to generate a discourse about hierarchical structures in global media is itself an act of cultural dominance: “any global discussion of television in the current geopolitics of international communication necessarily means an unequal discourse” (151). This is not to say that we should abandon our disciplines, but rather examine its limitations, which for me, has been a big part of this class, and works as a fitting concluding thought, as our meetings begin to come to an end.