This week's readings look at the transition from older, passive audience studies approach to the participatory cultures approach in television/media studies. While Jennifer Holt and John Caldwell are interested in exploring how shifting regulatory mechanisms and industrial practices have altered television's form, Henry Jenkins explores how media convergence, the process by which media comes to saturate the environment and its many forms blend together in new technological and cultural formations, is a sociocultural phenomenon that is reshaping social structures and cultural attitudes. For Jenkins, convergence "represents a reconfiguration of media power and a reshaping of media aesthetics and economics" (35). Read together, Caldwell and Holt provide the social and economic foundations of convergence while Jenkins' considers convergence from a cultural perspective.
I particularly liked Caldwell's shift from looking at TV's "culture of production" in order to understand TV's "production of culture" (48), allowing us to consider how televisual forms emerge from performance (or what I would call social practice). Far from being a monolithic industry determined solely by political economy, television is "managed by divergent socio-professional rituals, now codified in the industrial culture. Televisual form is very much lived" (61). Though, as Holt reminds us, the industrial economy is still important for understanding a medium like television as sweeping changes in regulation in a post-Fordist economy lead to the formation of conglomerates focused on synergy.
I had trouble with Jenkins' article that I am still attempting to work through. Part of the trouble is that I think many of Jenkins' observations are correct and have come to pass in the 10+ years since the article is written. One way I tried to read the article was to try to answer the questions Jenkins poses around his 9 sites where the changing relationship between producers and consumers is most probable. It's clear that Jenkins is working through what he considers to be a formation in process. I don't think he is trying to make an authoritative claim on what will happen and he observes that the rate and distribution of convergence will be uneven and that cultural studies scholars should take an active and participatory role in influencing the shape of these formations.
But, I still have trouble squaring Jenkins' tone. Throughout the article, I wondered if Jenkins takes the categories of consumers and producers for granted, as if they were natural categories and not the product of the distinction of economics as a separate sphere of human activity. Further, his borrowing of Pierre Levy's concept of "collective intelligence" suggests a utopian vision of convergence pulled from the early imaginings of cyberspace that emphasize communities of voluntary associations free from coercion or relations of power. When Jenkins asks us to consider a world where a media "message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics" (35), he does not ask how or why something is deemed relevant, questions that are deeply important to sociocultural investigations. (Was anyone else thrown off by his reading of The Truman Show!?)
While I think criticizing Jenkins for being utopian is a more of a critique of attitude than content, I think it is fair to ask who benefits from such utopian framings. Read at its most generous, this frame allows us to leave space to consider how new forms of political participation, for example, have opened up due to convergence and how the field is open for us to shift discourse and practices in new and exciting ways. At its most critical, however, this utopian frame could be read as a reification of consumer politics, redefining "struggle" as "participation." It suggests the only power available to us is through consumption and that any previous political struggles and frames (like the Marxist critiques cultural studies dearly loves) are no longer relevant.
As I was reading the articles, I was struck by their age (noted through constant references to our dearly departed UPN and the WB). With Jenkins, as you mentioned, it was eerie how his slightly predictive musings more or less describe our current media environment. (I, too, however found his reference to The Truman Show very random and awkwardly placed.) With Holt and Caldwell, their studies of television, focusing on the industry practices behind televisual culture, show their age, whereas the questions/observations posed by Jenkins through a socio-cultural engagement with televisual culture as the media industry landscape shifts, are still timely in my opinion. I'm not sure exactly where Caldwell necessarily fits in our era of "Quality TV", especially in streaming services and pirating whereby the networks and their messy conglomerates, subchannels, etc. are less apparent when the form/content can be so easily removed from its distributor. Cable TV is a disappearing apparatus for many in our generation with the rise of Apple TV, Roku, etc., so networks are even further removed from emerging media consumers. (Consider: many older generations still have landline "house phones" while the vast majority of younger generations only have cell phones.) I also can't necessarily name a contemporary TV show (outside of maybe Game of Thrones) that has a strong culture of audience participation in its world where websites dedicated to immersing oneself into the world of the show would still be an appropriate marketing strategy.
ReplyDeleteSo, I suppose what your response evokes from me is the questioning of methodologies in studying TV, a media whose form, industry, technology, etc., evolve and change rapidly.
I did not read the Jenkins too much as being optimistic so much as predicting some of the issues in which we are now dealing with currently. Parents are not controlling what their children watch. Viacom bought Vidcon, which is their way of trying to get into the online video space. The space is so fragmented and we are going through "app hell" at the moment with too many choices on what services to use to stream content. Companies are trying differentiate themselves enough to justify you spending money on their service every month. We are living in a time with more choice than ever before for what kind of content we consume, but is that really better?
ReplyDeleteSarah, one thing your comment about the multiplicity of consumer choices makes me question is: does this proliferation of outlets actually represent a proliferation of choice? While it is true that there is so much content in the entertainment sphere that, to paraphrase Marc Maron, people tell me about a new show and not only have I never heard of it, I have never even heard of the channel that it is on, but my overall impression of the types of content shows very little variation or innovation in form or narrative. There is very little, if any, content on these outlets that radically challenges the prevailing norms.
DeleteNot only that but if you consider YouTube an extension of television (as its name so explicitly connotes) there is a seemingly endless array of professional and quasi-professional media organizations of high technical sophistication, so much that it feels impossible to meaningfully engage with it all. It is exhausting. I think this makes political conversations much more difficult and polarized, and it seems to have paralyzed our ability to have meaningful civil debates because the most sensationalist voices rise to the top.
Personally, I see Jenkins' project as trying hard to do justice to two opposing forces: the top-down forces of economic consolidation and the more emergent forces of consumer choice, which in other works of Jenkins goes beyond consumers to include the choices and struggles of cultural groups of all stripes that organize themselves digitally. I see Jenkins as struggling to chart a largely positivist view of the near future that also includes its principle challenges, however I tend to agree with Dan that his earlier work is too utopian in tone.