Core Post 5

For our final grouping of readings, we’re dealing with the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries’ fundamental changes to television ecology, in the complex and interdependent registers of medium specificity, technological advancement, and aesthetic transformation. One can use the heuristic of x, y, and z-axes to understand the nature of these developments. The most significant difficulty mounted by a knowledge of this history is the potential threat that it poses to the notion of ‘television’, as an idea, a medium, or an institution. Is television dead? If so, when should we have called the time of death? And does its death alter how we should view its life and even its birth?

The first axis of transformation—what for my purposes I’m thinking of as the horizontal axis—is that of technological change. The origins of ‘television’ as we are intimately familiar with it lie of course in the form or the electric hearth, the cornerstone of the post-war living room collecting broadcast signals through an antenna connected to a massive picture-box. Arguably the most significant quantitative evolutions came via analogue and then digital cable, which drastically increased the number of channels available to homes and thus served as an infrastructural substrate for a socioeconomic boom in television production. Satellite television then capped the technological development available within the confines of traditional TV viewing.

The second axis—what I think of as the vertical counterpart—involves the increasingly prevalent intersections of medium-based affordances operating under the category of the ‘televisual’. Home video devices, from Betamax to Blu-Ray players, gave viewers a newfound freedom in terms of timeshifting and a pluralization of available programming. Most obviously and importantly, the nature of streaming services has appeared to subsume television viewing within the larger field of web-based connectivity affecting most aspects of our lives, within and without the realms of entertainment or informational consumption.

Finally, we have the aesthetic realm, that of content and its forms, which seems to know few to no bounds. The more regularly discussed shift from sitcoms to prestige dramas the basic unit of popular television is perhaps less interesting than the recent centrality of shorter and shorter short-form content. The launch of Quibi tells us a great deal about what Hollywood expects from contemporary viewing desires. Curiously, the pandemic has also jumpstarted another streaming affordance which might quickly become a part of our new normal—the party view, a way for friends and family to watch together at a distance.