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."