Cinema, Television, and New Media -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 2

CINEMA, TELEVISION, AND NEW MEDIA
Question answered: #2. Are the essential distinctions (if they indeed exist) between media eroded by recent transformations in production and exhibition practice, and do specific media respond to these transformations in particular ways?

The twenty-first century has witnessed profound developments in the production and consumption of media. As Marshall McLuhan (1994), Harold Innis (1951), and Friedrich Kittler (1999) argue, the most profound transformation has been the introduction and development of electrical technologies to communications practices. With electricity came the possibility to reproduce perceptual experiences in order to enable such experiences as new media, distinct from the media associated with the reproduction of speech in written language. The most obvious examples in this regard involve the recording and distribution of sound and motion images. The development of technologies related to these perceptual activities quickly crystallized into media relative to fundamental technological differences; for example, radio and consumer recording formats distributed recorded sound (music, conversation, audio dramas), while film and television distributed recorded motion images along with accompanying sound (films, television shows). A further technological distinction centred upon speed and ease of accessibility can be made between distribution systems and consumption practices relative to such recordings. While this paper will illustrate a few arguments in favour of such essentialist determinations for the differences between media, ultimately a more flexible understanding of the ontology of media will be presented. Indeed, as this paper will demonstrate, it is computer technologies – and specifically home computer technologies – which signal the true transformation in media (and, by extension, mediation), largely due to the new forms of media which have emerged along with the technology.

Cinema demonstrates how definitions of media can be grounded in both essentialist and non-essentialist claims. Critical activity has focused on the manner in which the materiality of film production and reception practices defines the medium. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, outlines an “apparatus” in which the production and reception of film takes place: the photographic process of inscription onto film by means of lenses and photochemistry, the optical projection of film onto a white screen, the spectator in the cinema (1986 288). For Baudry, grounded as he is in historical materialism, such an apparatus is an ideological one at each stage of production and reception. Consequently, any change in the orientation or constitution of this apparatus will alter the ideological effects which can be determined as a result. Christian Metz (1982) argues that the technological configuration of cinema is analogous to the processes of the human unconscious. Metz’s connection of psychoanalysis to a technological apparatus condemns his theory to obsolescence as the technologies which form that apparatus develop and new ones are introduced while old ones are subtracted (Manovich 294), as well as by developments in psychoanalytic theory which may subvert or emphasise the Freudian theoretical apparatus foundational to Metz’s work. The work of other scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1975) and Žižek (2004), who have deployed psychoanalytic readings to define cinema in less essentialist terms, has proven more adaptive to technological change. By means of a reading of Bergson’s conception of durée, and a reflexive negation of psychoanalytic theory (fully expressed in Anti-Oedipus), Deleuze (1989) argues that the gap between static images which enables the illusion of motion for cinema to occur temporalises the spectator, interpellating them into subjectivity by means of an affective involvement with the image (47), and anticipates montage, itself commonly understood (Metz 1985; Bordwell 1986; Elsaesser 2012) to be the grammar of cinema. Scholars such as Schatz (1989) and Elsaesser have extended the definition of this apparatus to include the hegemonic forces at play within the market. Both scholars define Hollywood as the articulation of a material and symbolic hegemony positioned to institutionalise and standardise its narrative forms, production processes, and distribution and consumption practices. Elsaesser argues that by means of their dominant position in the production and consumption of film, Hollywood can be seen to determine and define the medium of film as a whole into an experience between particular types of films and particular types of spectators, going so far as to state that the function of narrative in Hollywood films “lay in the resources and organizational assets which could be accumulated around it” (2012 152) and order audiences accordingly. These institutionalised forms actively displace certain forms and definitions for the medium while enabling others. As Bordwell, Doane (1989), and Adorno (1991) argue, film has come to be defined as a medium primarily by the market forces which affect its production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, the same forces which integrate media companies into multinational conglomerates force the various media created and distributed by the newly integrated subsidiaries to interact, cross-pollinate, and subsume each other (Mattelart 2000). Indeed, Grossberg (1992) argues that popular culture, as the result of such processes of media hegemony, is a significant agent in the dilution of the boundaries between media.

Viewed as a whole, then, many of these definitions for cinema do not maintain their coherence in the wake of new technologies for the production and reception of film. One wonders, for example, how Deleuze’s elevation of the ‘ontological’ gap at the heart of the cinematic process if cameras recorded at much higher speeds than the twenty-four frames per second adopted as the standard for cinema by the 1920s. If Hollywood can be seen to adapt and incorporate elements of the avant garde and international and marginalised cinemas — which may themselves be empowered by being influenced by Hollywood – then what does it mean to define a medium around the dominant forces within it? In a similar manner, notions of spectatorship dependent on the public exhibition of films have been challenged by the private consumption of cinema by means of television and home video.

Indeed, as a medium for the reception of broadcasting as well as the device enabling other media such as home video and videogames, television considerably problematises essentialist boundaries between media.  Arguing in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1990) that the serial and segmented nature of television programming is shaped to a considerable extent by television’s existence as a commercial entity, Raymond Williams identifies the concept of “flow” to define the medium (86). It is precisely this ephemeral and amorphous conception of television which has allowed the medium to adapt to technological change and the development of competing media such as film and the internet. Television, according to Williams, has the “technological capacity to absorb and circulate every kind of cultural energy” (Dienst 13). Furthermore, broadcast media such as television and radio, unlike other media, exist within what may be described as the perpetual present of their exhibition. While there is no technological reason for any broadcast medium to broadcast perpetually (twenty-four hours per day), an extension of Innis’s (1951) notion of the space bias of ephemeral media such as radio and television may explain the reasons behind this perpetual present, as the ease by which broadcast signals are ‘transported’ into the homes of consumers, as well as the fact that such media are consumed for ‘free’ in exchange for advertising (Browne 175), destines broadcast media to an existence of continuity. Furthermore, while film, ostensibly the closest analogue to television, can be understood as having incorporated aspects of theatrical and musical performance, painting, photography, dance, and literature, Williams argues that television can be understood as having further incorporated aspects of radio, journalism, advertising, and live spectatorship (1990 44ff). Television incorporates the many discreet aspects of itself – advertisements, announcements, news, “introductory and interstitial materials” – into what Nick Browne (1984) describes as a “supertext” whose essence is “one of flow, banality, distraction, and transience” (176), as spectators order their own viewing experience among a multiplicity of constitutive elements.

It is this multiplicity of function and form which differentiates broadcast media from non-broadcast media. According to Williams, unlike a book, a play, a song, or even a film, which constitute discreet objects and experiences, in broadcast media “the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences” (1990 87). It should not then be surprising that as new technologies related to the distribution of television have developed, the notion of flow as foundational to television has been challenged. William Uricchio (2004) argues that “the present day’s convergent technologies, economies, and textual networks have ... subverted ... the logics of television [and] have also transformed the medium’s content and cultural place” (165). If, as Lynn Spigel suggests in Make Room for TV (1992), the introduction of television served to order spaces within the household and define television spectatorship along lines contingent with the consumption of consumer products, then it is possible to extend this interpretation to contemporary changes in forms and patterns of television spectatorship as contingent with changes to the home inaugurated by home computer technologies which are in the process of subsuming television into the internet. Disrupted first by technologies of home video recording and storage, the capacity for broadcasting to order the reception practices of spectators has been undermined by the digital distribution of television. Home video, on-demand and time-shifted video services, and internet streaming (as well as ‘illegal’ downloading) of television programming has further altered spectator relations to the television “supertext”. A recent example of a television show broadcast under two different configurations of television serves to illustrate this point. The British show House of Cards, broadcast as a mini-series in 1990, used a ‘cliff-hanger’ ending centred upon the murder of a prominent character by the show’s protagonist. The narrative significance of dramatic events such as this often provoked their deployment as ‘cliff-hangers’ at the end of television shows or seasons to provoke viewer anticipation of the next episode and encourage them to schedule future instances of viewership.[i] For the 2013 American remake, distributed (‘broadcast’) as an entire season without delay between episodes on the digital streaming subscription service Netflix, a similarly dramatic killing by the show’s protagonist is located in the middle of the first episode of the season, indicating that the event is structured in a manner suggesting the ‘binge watching’ habits typical of Netflix (and, by extension, digital streaming and home video) viewers.

Spigel argues that television served to “reassemble the splintered lives of families [and] .... reinforce the new suburban family unit” (1992 39) centred upon the new postwar consumer society. Ultimately, such changes were inaugurated by technologies of mobility and communication which extended ideations of inclusion and privacy from the home to a virtual space bounded by the reach of transportation and communications technology, which in turn orders the real space in which patterns of mobility and communication occur. Williams subsumes the social relations inaugurated by such technologies and living conditions under the concept of mobile privatisation, the social product of which is “[b]roadcasting in its applied form” (1990 20). Spigel thus traces the incorporation of the machine elements of industrial activity (dishwashers, sewing machines, etc.) into the home as contingent with “the spatial condensation of work and viewing” (1992 89), while Anna McCarthy (2001) outlines the incorporation of television into public spaces such as workplaces, transportation hubs, and shopping centres. By means of the surveillance and production of consumer activity, broadcast media such as television realise what Mark Andrejevic (2002) names “consumer labor” (230). Jhally and Livant (1986, quoted in Andrejevic) characterise the value exchange between viewers who watch ‘free’ programs and advertisers who pay for television programming as the “work of watching” (235). Such labor relations form the initial gesture of spectatorial participation which, as outlined below, will come to define the ontology of media.

As suggested by Spigel’s illustration of the extent to which daytime programming was informed by the daily chores performed by the women who were the primary audience, television was itself ordered by spectators as much as it ordered their patterns of viewership and stimulated the consumption of consumer goods. In other words, as television presented and ordered itself as a consumer product, audiences responded by altering television to meet their needs as consumers. As Matt Carlson (2006) illustrates, consumer products related to the consumption of television have altered not only patterns of viewership, but also the content of television programs. In this capacity, television can be seen to order time as well as space. First, home video recording freed television audiences from the broadcast schedule and, by means of the archival nature of video cassettes, allowed television programming to be reified as an object of secondary relation to television as a broadcast medium. The digitisation of television broadcasting as well as the development of digital video recorders capable of time-shifting and altering programming nearly in real-time has further transformed viewer interactions with television from a process of scheduling (viewers watching shows at specific times not under their control) to one of surveillance. For Carlson, surveillance indicates the manner in which digital broadcast technologies allow broadcasters to precisely monitor viewer activity and accordingly alter the products offered for viewing (102-103). In this capacity, it is possible to extend conceptions of ‘liveness’ related to the television “supertext” to the real-time surveillance of the audience itself. Arguably, the surveillance of digital television media merely extends to television producers the feedback processes between audience and performer which informed not only live studio television but also the live forms of performance (theatre, Vaudeville) which provided the content for television in its earliest years (Williams 64-65).

In a somewhat abstract manner, it is possible to locate ‘liveness’ as both reifying and enabling the structures of life described by mobile privatisation. In addition to Williams, other critics have also focused upon television’s ‘liveness’ as a distinguishing element of the medium. Jerome Bourdon (2000) argues that while ‘liveness’ was inherent to television before the advent of video storage technologies, live broadcasting has since been institutionalised as a means of affirming the hegemonic position of television broadcasters by providing a closure of space and time between event and spectator (534) and as a means to confer a degree of “‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’” (533) to the programs being broadcasted. Indeed, ‘liveness’, which incorporates the viewer into media exhibition, can be understood as the precursor to spectator participation. As Bourdon notes, “liveness should be interpreted as a development within media history as a whole” (551). He likens viewers switching to the news from other programs – multitasking between shows and other media – as a new form of liveness (553). Indeed, ultimately the ostensibly minimal amount of spectator participation demonstrated by television viewers using their remote control to order the sequence of television programming belongs on a continuum of interactivity and media control which leads to computational technologies which demand ‘spectatorial’ participation. In this context, Richard Dienst (1994) notes that the apparatus of television as constructed by Williams ignores “the possibility that the very notions of transmission and reception ... belong to the apparatus itself” (16). Accordingly, Williams’s conception of ‘flow’ in Television, whose publication predates the development of home video and home computer technologies, does not account for the capacity for audiences to construct and modify the programs they are watching. Notably, the capacity for commercial television to structure the ideological responses of viewers is undermined by the ability of viewers to ignore or remove advertising from shows and structure patterns of viewing around their personal schedules due to home recording and digital distribution, and ultimately use consumer digital video technologies to produce their own televisual content and distribute it on the internet. Indeed, the digitization of media undermines the ‘integrity of the medium’ not only for television and for television studies, but also for all media which undergo processes of digitization.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), Friedrich Kittler notes that the digitization of optical, acoustic, and writing media allows their “distinct data flows” to be reunited (170), and concludes his examination by identifying the computer as the logical conflagration of other media technologies and real-time computation, in the guise of “machine subjects”, as the contemporary terminus of the development of technologies of inscription (259). He rather boldly states his lack of respect for the distinction between media, noting that the traditional differentiations of media based on recording technology and human perceptual apparatus (seeing and hearing, for example) are fundamentally undermined by electric communications and recording technology. With the advent of digitisation, the variety of information forms “are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface” (1). Indeed, it is by means of interface that consumers come to understand and differentiate digital media. Under the aegis of digitization, digital video, for example, is not an experience of ‘television’ or ‘cinema’; rather, it is enabled by the interface which exhibits it. The use of computers to consume audio, visual, and textual materials indicates that the screen-as-interface is more informative to understanding a mediated process than are traditional conceptions of media distinction grounded in differences in perceptual or recording technology. Television programming is easily adapted to distribution and ‘exhibition’ on the internet due to the fact that, in reductive terms, high-resolution computer screens make great high-resolution digital televisions.

More importantly than simply providing another platform for the distribution and consumption of audio-visual material incorporated from other media distribution apparatuses, home computer technologies signal the extent to which spectator participation has been incorporated into systems of media production and consumption. As Lev Manovich (2001) argues, the “meta-medium of the digital computer” (6) instantiates new media not dependent on perceptual or aesthetic characteristics but rather as “subject to algorithmic manipulation” (27). The algorithmic nature of digital media has two effects, the first of which serves to explain the transformational nature of digitisation. Manovich argues that digital media are modular, variable, and iterative, and in this capacity recent transformations in television broadcasting can be rationalised. The second effect of digital media is more philosophical in nature. In addition to signalling the increasing involvement of audiences into the ‘text’ of media on account of developments in the technologies of broadcasting, the above examination of television demonstrates McLuhan’s principle that all media contain within them previous forms of media. Of course, the incorporation of one medium within another is not a one-directional process of ‘new’ media incorporating ‘old’ media, as demonstrated by the incorporation of photography into newsprint. Rather, the response of cinema and television to the advent of computing technologies illustrates that media often deploy whichever other popular or useful media can be reasonably incorporated into them. From such a position, it is possible to extrapolate from Rick Altman’s suggestion regarding film that “[g]enres must be understood discursively” (1999 121) and conclude that media themselves function similarly as discursive practices.

One vector of such a discursive practice is indicated by the notable sense of determination present in McLuhan’s thought. The incorporation of media into new forms enabled by the development of technology implies what Walter Benjamin (1968) describes within history as the “weak Messianic power” (254) in which the past involves the present. Indeed, it is thus possible to read McLuhan’s belief that media subsume within them previous forms of media through a Heideggerian lens, as such a process describes what for Heidegger was the essence of all technology to gather into itself all forms of potential energies as “standing-reserve” (1977 24). In such terms, the destining of all media is toward a totalising sense perception and recording which reveals all possible information to the user. In order to fully understand the implications of computerisation on the media examined in this essay, we must turn to Dienst’s rather Platonic suggestion that “all actually existing television systems are in some sense a failed totalization of an ideal visuality” (1994 11). If the contemporary configuration of television has incorporated (or is being incorporated into) forms of digital content and distribution (i.e., the internet), then it is possible to position television, as Meyrowitz (1995) does, as a “widening of sensory experience” (40-41). Accordingly, contemporary forms of television incorporate aspects of visuality and ‘liveness’ from other media: news programming which, like the internet, structures textual information as visual elements; social media (message boards, Facebook, Twitter) interaction between viewers and show producers or fictional characters of dramatic programs, such as The Hills and General Hospital; and webcasts and podcasts which supplement or augment the broadcasting of shows. However, the digitization of media has had a more profound transformative effect on media than is represented by the increasing interaction between audiences and media content. It is possible to further extend Dienst’s notion of “ideal visuality” by means of Paul Virilio’s equation of processes and technologies of visibility with calculation, as elaborated in War and Cinema (1989) and The Information Bomb (2000). Arguing that technologies of visibility emerged as tools for war and the colonial organization of space, Virilio describes modes of visibility aided by computation as active optics (2000 14). Such optics exponentially increase the capacity for individuals to generate and process information, with the consequence that individuals will experience “a speed change in the order of time as it is lived” (1989 45), and thus “leave intact neither the old aesthetics ... nor the ethics” which came to define traditional media and the societies in which they circulate (2000 121).

As outlined above, the polyvalent nature of digital media, as algorithmic processes, fulfils the Heideggerian ‘gathering’ of the possibilities for vision into a singular technical apparatus enabling the successful realisation of “ideal visuality”. Home computer technologies involve media in a computational process which interpellates spectators as users. While videogames, software, and the internet represent the most obvious insertion of interaction and participation as an essential component defining the medium, these forms of media are merely the most contemporary articulations of long-extant trends in media. Consequently, it is difficult to determine contemporary communications media with the essentialist formulations which often served to inaugurate the critical apparatuses which arose in response to them.

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[i] It should be here noted that the ‘cliff-hanger’ serves a slightly modified purpose for the British House of Cards. By using such a narrative device at the end of a four-episode mini-series which was not intended for development into a broadcast series, the cliff-hanger ending serves (much like its use as a genre convention in horror films) to confer a mark of reality to the show by invoking in viewers a projection of the character from the temporality of the show ‘offscreen’ into the imagined temporal space ‘after’ the show ends.  

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