This week’s readings constitute
my first encounter with television theory, so please forgive me if my response
is obvious and/or amateurish. I was struck by the notion of flow, as
articulated by Raymond Williams and critiqued and clarified by Jane Feuer, as
an essential component of the televisual experience. Both Williams and Feuer
conceive of television in opposition to more thoroughly delineated media
experiences, such as viewing a film or play or reading a newspaper. Williams’
three-level analysis of flow in Chapter 4 of Television: Technology + Cultural Form reveals the broad scope of
the televisual experience and helps distinguish television from media with
which it is often associated (film, radio); he starts with a simple run-down of
a given network’s programming on a certain evening, then incorporates the
content and advertisements that intersperse the primary programming, and
finally notates every word and image that compose a given period of a
broadcast. Feuer teases out Williams’ notion of flow further, implicating the
physical positioning of the television set into the flow of televisual
experience: “The set is in the home, as part of the furniture of one’s daily
life; it is always available; one may intercept the flow at any point” (Feuer
15). She then rejects Williams’ conception of flow as inhibiting the analytical
segmentation of television, favoring a definition of flow as “segmentation
without closure” (16).
While Feuer deploys this conception of flow in order to
interrogate the ideological implications of (not so) live television, I’m
interested in how flow can be brought to bear on current viewing practices.
Writing in the 1970s and 80s respectively, Williams and Feuer presume a viewer
who (at least intermittently) tunes in to a certain channel on a static
television set placed somewhere within the domestic space. Their conception of
flow would therefore not seem readily applicable to the largely ad-free visual
space of Netflix or HBO, or to the screen of a smartphone flitting among a
livestream of a football game, a Youtube video, and a podcast. But Feuer’s
notion of “segmentation without closure” is detectable among these various
media platforms. One episode flows right into the next on Netflix and Youtube,
a brief countdown giving us the illusion of segmentation. I see ads for the
current season of Brooklyn 99 while
watching past seasons on Hulu. Perhaps my application of flow here is faulty,
but I’d like to continue to consider the blurred edges of episodic consumption across
historical and technological contexts.
I've been pondering flow and segmentation in relation to streaming ever since first reading William's piece a few years ago. I feel like there's more continuity than not because the goals are the same: to keep people watching at the end of the current program. In addition to more linear platforms with direct rollovers (Netflix and Hulu as examples), what about something like YouTube? How does flow change when user choices are thought to be part of the flow in a more active, rather than passive, sense?
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I've been thinking about is how flow applies to the world of cable news. It seems, in some ways, like they ran with the concept and then took it so much further because it's always struck me like the advertisements presented are so much more clearly part of the ideological packaging than anywhere else (if not because of the station owners, then certainly because of the amount certain advertisers are willing to pay for that ad space).