My Theory (my senior thesis)

This Blog is an attempt to keep my senior thesis ideas afloat and expand on what I put on paper years ago.

Julien Berndt

194A Senior Seminar

Amelie Hastie

Finale

12/9/08

Shift this!

Today we sit alone together. As I sit on my couch, in my personal space at home, I look through several different incarnations of “windows” in front of me, the glass window in my living room wall, the television screen that lies directly above and in front of the computer screen on my lap. The computer is running a program named “Windows,” which has been named to exploit its relationship to the actual window in the living room; both of which expose to me part of the world that is outside of my personal space. Communication devices that are coming to dominate our lives allow us to enter a personal space that gives the illusion of at the same time being public space, what Lynn Spigel calls “hyper-realism.” Spigel’s analysis of what we are accustomed to calling personal space subsumes the medium of television and the enlarged personal space that it creates. However, the original conceivers of television could never have imagined the television of today because of the impact of communication technology, specifically the personal computer creating a “personal space.” The computer and additive technology, such as the remote control, Betamax/VHS recorders, and the flat screen television display have altered the interaction between the television and consumer. Vivian Sobchack’s essay looks at the electronic ‘presence’, asks, and attempts to answer, the question, “what happens when our expressive technology becomes our perceptive technologies”? (135) Sobchack alludes that in this shift, the technology will allow “expressing and extending (of) us in ways we never thought possible”(135). The relationship that I developed with “my” personal computer (Apple played with this idea in naming the iMac) has shifted the expectation of my interaction in terms of control over time and space with the “expressive technology,” television. The shift is both in time and space coordinates and in advances towards developing a more personal relationship between television and the consumer. The shift purposefully allows the Consumers to believe they are gaining a sense of control over the television medium. The sense of control started with the remote control and advanced when it became possible to control time with the Betamax and subsequent video recorders and continued with the growing sense of control implicit in the development of the personal computer, coupled with the widespread implementation of broadband Internet connections. Television programming is now available at any time for consumers, and has caused the classic temporal dynamic of network and cable television distribution to be beginning the process of rapidly disappearing. (The dynamic of classic “family” television is disappearing but still up holding commercial principals that allow for growth.) Nick Browne’s essay “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text,” gives insight into the form and genealogy of the television as a macro device of communication and business. Television first spoke to the masses helping create strong notions of American family and identity. The computer age has advanced social and economical communication by shifting the paradigm in which it operates to a more personal relationship.

“Between the years 1948 and 1955 more than half of all American homes installed a television set and the basic mechanisms of the network oligopoly were set in motion” (Spigel, 11). The television medium quickly became the standard of entertainment for the American families of the post WWII period. Classic Television, and what Spigel calls “hyper-realism”, fit into the model of the direction in which American society was heading. A larger, younger, middle class with more disposable income, who have moved into newly developed “suburbias” have also moved away from the large scale entertainments of the cities and have become open to being entertained in their private space, in their homes. The theory of the hyper-realism of television is a look at the paradoxical state that we enter when experience the television medium. “Hyper-realism” is a term from the Spigel essay “A World Within a World: The Home Theater” describing the paradoxical state which we participate in when viewing television. Spigel noticed that families, in the privacy of their own home could watch “television turn the home into a public meeting in which residents could imagine that they were involved in a social occasion” (Spigel, 22). Television brought “not merely an illusion of reality as in cinema, but a sense of “being there’, a kind of hyper-realism” (22). Achieving the “being there” feeling television adopted an “ideology of liveness” (24). The ideology came with the natural progression of early television wanting familiar live entertainments such as vaudeville acts, stand up, theater, music, etc. The medium then developed techniques that include a sense of liveness such as “camera zooms into narrative space,” “theatrical narratives,” references to the medium, and laugh tracks. All the tricks developed add to the sense of “being there,” but “liveness” is achieved through interaction that is developed by the technological evolution of television.

Certain technological developments for television purposefully created the illusion of control over the medium. Sobchack articulates this notion with regard to different technologies, “Each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them. That is, each offers our lived bodies radically different ways of ‘being-in-the-world’” (Sobchack 136). Technologies such as the remote control, the video recorder, and the computer allow the viewer to interact with the medium of television, and thereby delving deeper into “hyper-realism” of television. Each technology achieves an additive way to interact with or control television. The basic remote control allows the viewer to achieve simple task of changing the channel, turning on and off the television, and controlling the volume. Channel changing gives the viewer choice and a feeling of ownership over what he watches. The remote control advances the feeling control because the technology is adapting to our needs, with the remote, I do not have to leave my seat, and I can control my TV with ease. The video recorder gives the consumer control over the temporality of the medium, now able to enjoy specifically chosen programs when he chooses. The personal computer, which more commonly is now a laptop, is a medium that makes possible an even greater sense of interaction with the outside world, and an even greater sense of the hyper-realism that television and the personal computer share. “The enormous impact these technologies have had on the historically particular significance of ‘sense’ we have and make of those temporal and spatial coordinates that radically in-form and orient our social, personal, and bodily existence” (Sobchack 135-6). The different technologies developed with television or along with television create a shift in our perception of television in relation to both time and space.

The placement of the television has always be a key part of the medium’s identity. The “home theater” was a promotional scheme developed to transform the home into a simulation of a theater. Early on, the television networks promoted television in two ways; while it is being used (consumed) the set up of the “living room” is meant to imitate a cinema theater, transforming the living room to a “home theater.” When not being consumed, (or while not being looked at) the television meant to be another decorative piece in the natural surroundings of the living room. Television sets were sold in antique styles to compliment antiques, in modern styles to complement those styles of furniture, so that they would effectively “blend in.” Technology’s growing consumption of our daily time, has evolved with the placement of the television today. Spigel examines the development of “modern” houses, emphasizing the way that modern houses made use of windows. Windows were used to expand space, uniquely frame existing surroundings, and allow access the outside world with out leaving the safety of the home. In the 21^st century home, the newer technology of the flat screen television along with the screen of the personal computer act as additional windows. Modern homes are built with the idea of the television window in mind. Most modern homes are perfectly designed to accommodate the placement of a television. The flat-screen television is often placed on the wall is where a window might reside, or may take the place of a picture in a frame. A new trend is to now put your most impressive television above the fireplace, famously the place where the family portrait once resided. This shift in approach to design aims to make many windows able to be experienced at once. When simultaneously using both a television and a personal computer, the consumer experiences a cross referencing of texts, layering several windows on top of each other. Similar to our experience of the Internet, our reading practices are fragmentary because we jump from one window to the next through various links that we choose to follow. This multi window hyper-realism is typically what we experience routinely today. Except, we ultimately get to decide what is placed into these windows. This practice makes this space a personal, or more precisely, private, space. This “privatization has largely been conceived as an economic and political term,” (Morse 201) but Morse points out that it is connected to profound psychological changes that influence the viewer’s perception of place and time. Moreover, perhaps it has lead to the growth of the consumer’s need to control his experience of television time.

The control of the temporality of television created a problem for the television networks because that control itself was an economic tool that they depended on and were less willing to give up. The creation of the Betamax video recorder and its successors, especially Tivo and other Personal Video Recorders, profoundly changes the nature of the television medium. The consumer now can watch a program whenever he chooses. The control of time was both revolutionary and problematic. Capturing of television, can only draw the viewer to the medium because of access now available to her/his favorite program. Recording programs eventually leads to fast-forwarding through commercial messages, a problem for the industry, which relies after all on the sale of eyeballs to the corporate “sponsors” of the programming, which, of course, is the reason that the programming exists in the first place. The personal computer may have the potential to become the solution to the problem of temporal control of the television medium. By making their programming content available as well on television network controlled web sites, the networks cede the power to the consumer to control when he watches the textual content, without the sacrifice of earned advertising revenue, as that revenue is supplanted by the web ad revenue in the Google model. The computer relationship demands our interaction, allowing the user to remain in control of the television, which attempts to imitate the computer’s intimate relationship with the viewer. The computer has now become an additive technology that interacts and overlaps with the television medium.

Television’s historic purpose was to “capture” the viewer, according to Nick Browne’s concept of television flow. Flow is a term that Brown borrows from the media scholar Raymond Williams that describes the collective fragments that make up television, the network context, the commercial messages, and perhaps most importantly, at least from the point of view of the consumer, the dramatic or theatrical program, television’s ostensible content. The flow is intelligently constructed to “capture” the viewer by seamlessly leading the viewer through dramatic (historically theatrical) content, interweaving the advertisements that allow television to exist within the concept of “free television.” “Television is a discourse conducted in the name of the audience but – through the medium of money.” (Browne, 592). “The program and ad are linked formally as a question and answer”(596) - the question is posed by the unresolved conflict in the dramatic program, whatever it may be, but in Browne’s reading of the supertext of the television viewing experience the concrete question is actually, what product would the consumer watching this program want? The interpolated ad gives the answer by proposing a consumable product that provides "a kind of narrative pleasure" that "confers on the represented object the status of the good object."(596). The television industry has satisfied its obligation to its commercial sponsors by satisfying, on a symbolic level, its inferred obligation to its viewers.

The creation of specialized channels is one way the television medium headed towards personalization of the medium. Pay cable, a technology that developed out of the advent of affordable satellite distribution, made possible an almost infinite number of channels, creating a situation in which each channel can try to attract a specific slice of the audience pie. That technology created a multi screen [multi window] environment in which the computer has advanced the content distribution networks’ purpose of flow, what I call tunneling.

The personal computer is personal in an exact way, an extension of oneself. The metaphorical computer “space” is a place developed by each person, personalizing the machine by making it hold connections to each one’s personal interests, likes and even dislikes, and allowing for personal expression and exploration. The hyper-realism of the computer allows for a more personal experience through the programs and applications of the computer speaking more directly as if speaking to one person. Classic television’s hyper-realism addressed the public as the collective public. Classic television as “the new form of social cohesion which allowed people to be alone and together at the same time.” (Spigel 14) The personal computer expands on this sense of belonging to a community while being alone. The privatization of the consumer’s space allows people to spend more time with their electronic media, potentially ultimately allowing even greater ad revenue to flow to the corporations who create and distribute content. The idea behind the shift to a “tunneling” model is that instead of needing to “capture” the attention of the viewer/consumer, the content distribution networks are now able to satisfy the consumer by allowing him to fill his information needs through many channels or windows from which he is given the power to choose. The consumer creates his own individually designed “tunnel” to find and acquire the products he desires to consume. Browne's "set of manufactured objects" (592) has now been enlarged to include a multitude of "information products" that is available through the hugely expanded web of commerce in which the television networks are able to operate.