First Core Post

While working through the readings for this week I found myself wondering how ideas about television in the 70s and 80s would apply to TV watching today. As a 'cord-cutter' I no longer watch any live television or commercials, a viewing experience that all three authors comment on extensively. Ideas about 'flow' and advertising from McLuhan, Williams, and Feuer speak to a formula that many of us without a cable subscription are not likely to experience.

I want to focus specifically on Jane Feuer's article, as Good Morning America provides an example of the kind of TV watching and programming that has become less common to me. Her article reflects on how "live television" has come to mean more of an ideology around what is real rather than a formal practice of shooting events as they happen. She speaks directly about GMA and how it's 'flow' is fragmented by different types of live and pre-recorded segments and advertising. As she summarizes: "Indeed, as television in fact becomes less and less a "live" medium in the sense of an equivalence between time of event and time of transmission, the medium in its own practices seems to insist more and more upon an ideology of the live, the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, the real" (14). I bring up this quote because I want to reflect on how as TV has framed itself as a purveyor of reality; new forms of technology have made this no longer exclusive to television. Using other platforms (Twitter, Facebook etc) to react and interact with live broadcasting creates a new form of fragmentation as posts on these platforms contribute to the live-ness of the event. Where Feuer examines how the definition of the term "live" has expanded, media as we currently use it has allowed us to engage with live reporting in a way that I think would mean an entire reconsidering of her ideas around what it means to be tuned in to a live program. Are tweets around live events a part of the 'reality' of the broadcast? And does this interactive ability help answer her questions around the subject of the audience of a show such as GMA? To answer these questions would mean going into how exactly these audience members are using these other platforms, a task that I am not sure would lead to a conclusive answer. What I want to reflect on more broadly is how the "ideology of liveness" has changed as new platforms allow us to conceive and interact with live broadcasting in different ways. Does the ideology of live television, and how it is a necessity for news and event broadcasting, contradict with how people without a cable subscription engage with this kind of media? Or are we looking into a new version of the same thing?