Ray Kyooyung Ra - Core Response #1 (Week 2)

Television, to me at least, is still a ‘negotiable’ medium in its essence. While being categorized as traditional media form, television’s definition and ontology have been susceptible to constant re-examination, even until now in the present day. Reading Raymond Williams’ reading with this in mind reminded of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin commented in Remediation: Understanding New Media—that emerging new media is nothing unfamiliar to the modern media consumer; it is the result of the process of “remediation” that refashions existing media, the amalgamation of what we have already been exposed to.

Raymond Williams’ approach to defining television as communication form is somewhat echoed in Bolter and Grusin’s argument. In this vein, an idea that stood out to me while reading Williams’ take on the television medium was the idea of “established social forms” that broadcasting lacks. Broadcasting technology was created with a purpose and through accumulative history of technological advances, but those factors do not ultimately decide its reception or use. In response to the alarmingly generalizing and simplistic take on television by Marshall McLuhan, Williams isolated the technology by the intentions behind its creation and successfully places the medium in broader social, cultural, and political context.

It would not be so far-fetched to claim that television does not have an immotile established form seven in the year 2020. I would dare say that television even retains a character of new media, as Bolter and Grusin’s statement suggests, and that is what makes the medium and its contents so exciting to examine. Even when Williams was writing Television: Technology and Cultural Form, he made the observation that television not only as a amalgamative technological format but also as remediated content brought existing forms and innovative forms unique to television together. This perspective also gives McLuhan’s statement on hot and cool media a redeeming quality as well: television as a constantly negotiated medium has grown hotter with more contemporary developments in auteur television aesthetics in certain genres or contents—the measurement for hot and cool media can exist as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, especially for individual television content. In this lens, we can also see how new forms of ‘television’ for present-day audience like streaming platforms can still be viewed as television. Viewers have the capacity to isolate the television content (the actual series that they might be watching) from its receptive platform (the streaming platform, a laptop, their phones) as well as its production studios. The idea of “mobile privatization” that Williams presented still prevails in this bastard form of content distribution and consumption, and that is perhaps why the modern audience identifies Netflix or Hulu as alternative forms of television entertainment. Even the idea of “flow” that was disrupted from Williams’ initial definition (with subscription services, constant flow of programming and inserted ads are no longer relevant) is retained in these new platforms, such as with skip options to retain the audience’s attention and catered algorithms for recommended contents to hook viewership.