Core Response, Week 2

This week's readings seem preoccupied with determining what exactly television is. Williams and Feuer attempt to methodically break television down into its constitutive elements of programs, institutions, and time, while McLuhan does his signature style of broad, but provocative generalizations. What each have in common, however, are their attempts to figure out what exactly television does as a technology and cultural form. For Williams, the development of television is not a single event, but the result of a series of separate developments in electricity, radio, cinema, and telegraphy. This resembles the development of film technologies, which also relied upon a series of technological developments in the 19th century, like intermittent mechanisms and slide projections. Williams is interested in the interplay between technological needs and desires and existing social formations, where he seems to understand technological developments like television as a "response to the development of an extended social, economic, and political system and a response to crisis within that system" (14).

Feuer is also interested in this interplay between technology and culture, where television's own self-referential discourse of liveness is used to obfuscate the medium's ideological functions. For Feuer, Williams notion of flow ("series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organization is something other than the declared organization" (Williams 93)) reveals not the essential qualities of television, but its set of historically situated practices that are shaped by various institutional, commercial, and cultural factors. Here, flow becomes not an essential quality of television, but a part of a "dialectic of segmentation and flow" where television constructs an image of itself as a unified whole (16).

Two words that kept popping up in the readings are privatization and family. In Feuer's article, we see how Good Morning America constructs an ideal notion of the nuclear family and filters its discursive elements through the figure of the host (father). It seems that television is intensely imbricated in the codification of the "self-sufficient family home" (Williams 19). Indeed, the proliferation of television sets into American homes maps onto the proliferation of all sorts of labor saving devices that (were supposed to) reduce the amount of housework done by women. It would be interesting to explore further this relationship between the proliferation of TV and notions of social mobility and gendered labor in the household, a connection that Soledad also noted in her post.

I think this notion of flow is still relevant today, even among cord-cutters and streamers. We can see this, as Megan notes in her post, in how episodes flow into one another on Netflix (has anyone else noticed that Netflix now often lets you skip opening credits?). In addition, ads no longer flow only in linear segments. Now, flow can be measured in "impressions" as the eye jumps around the visual space and contemporary viewing practices are oriented around capturing fleeting attention. Perhaps contemporary flow is modular instead of linear? I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.