From Fleabag (Amazon) to Mrs America (Hulu) to Insecure (HBO) to Shrill (Hulu) to My Brilliant Friend (HBO), it's been a treat to watch high
quality programing, across genres, centered on complex and compelling female
characters with cares and realities that reflect various angles on women's
experiences. I find the limited series format really is a great bridge
between film and TV (from someone who doesn’t watch much TV at all). I also think we needed to reach the
era of narrowcasting for these stories to come out in our patriarchal society.
My take-away from this class might be that when it comes to the
ontology of TV, "Because conditions such as choosing among predetermined
options came first, they appear natural, and many theories of television
unreflectively assumed them to be inherently characteristic of the medium"
(Lotz 77). With the advent of interactivity and the slow death of broadcast TV,
TV reinvents itself, channeling the new opportunities and managing to stay more
than revelant. TV is on the web, TV is on streaming platforms, TV is at the gas
station, TV is online, TV is a bundle you pay for to animate the large
monitor(s) in your home with liveness. The stakes of the circulation of ideas are
too high and the concept of “TV” is embedded in people’s personal
information flow, so TV morphs through time and along with our technologies. I
am convinced it will never become an obsolete medium, but will rather chameleon
itself into the media needs of the era, both top down and bottom up.
Thank you for a thought-provoking semester of TV Theory!
Thank you for a thought-provoking semester of TV Theory!
I totally agree that TV might someday become an obsolete medium as it chameleons to other mediums/audience needs. I think shortform streaming platforms are evidence of this. Platforms like Quibli for short content, youtube TV series, and other web series are restating the boundaries of digital storytelling. This will only feel natural to the increasingly distracted and multitasking viewer.
ReplyDeleteYeah what I love about Lotz's writing is how deceptively knowledgeable it is. She has so closely tracked so much of the growth, fluctuations, and evolutions of television that when she confronts what (at first) feels like too drastic a change (that of streaming, and the shift to "online TV"), she is able to competently make the argument that TV has always been like a duck of a medium, paddling wildly beneath what seems like a tranquil service. I think your final note about how it will never become an obsolete medium is exactly right, and exactly the mood that Lotz's writing leaves me with.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with this concept that TV will morph and change to fit other media in ways maybe less accessible to media like film (we still kind of label a film a film online, but when it comes to TV, it often gets mentioned alongside web series and channel structures and live streaming, as if the line between TV and these new forms of storytelling is thinner). And yet, I wonder what the value of cultural conceptions of TV will be. I mentioned that on YouTube, there are a lot of creators that are dismissing TV production methods/models entirely. Accordingly, the creators that AJ Christian cover in Open TV (those who harness success online to re-enter more traditional media productions) seem more intentional in their championing of traditional TV infrastructures and aesthetics, even if they do represent a wave of change. TV seems to live on in these people, the ones who appraise their own projects as TV, even if they are digitally distributed online. What is the value of this appraisal then? Are we calling things TV because creators and cultural outlets call them TV? If that is the case, then are media labels devoid of technological base and only based on economic and cultural production models? Is perception the central mechanism for the definition of TV?
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