Core Post - Just Different Enough

Throughout the class, there’s been a tendency to bring TV to the “now” moment. In most cases, that moment is one of “streaming” and how this moment of TV as such necessarily demands a kind of approach that draws on various methodologies and conceptual approaches, not just any one approach. We’ve all illuminated some of the ways in which today’s TV simply feels different, or different enough, such that definitions around TV and approaches to studying TV become more sophisticated. McPherson’s chapter revolves around exploring precisely that feeling or feeling of just-different-enough.

Focusing on the “specificity of the experience of using the Web, of the Web as mediator between human and machine, of the Web as a technology of experience”, the chapter describes how discourses around the Web, the structures of Web, and the interactions with the Web generate a kind of liveness (200). Such liveness is constituted by, what McPherson calls, volitional mobility, the scan-and-search, and transformation. (201) I find this approach extremely generative towards thinking of TV “now” or post-TV, which for me, inevitably lead to streaming. If American TV in the 70s meant certain kinds of content, facilitated by a specific kind of infrastructure, then those kinds of content and infrastructures become more complicated throughout the 80s and 90s with deregulation—a kind of convergence before the more familiar discourses around “Convergence.” Throughout these changes, how might content or corporate infrastructures imagine the audiences of TV as such? How does that imagined audience generate different modes of interaction and experience?

We’re all privy towards the ways in which personalization seems to be the way in which streaming imagines “us” / ”you” compared to how linear TV imagined a broader demographic or “public.” Volitional mobility/scan-and-search/transformation, then, certainly seems to describe that kind of relationship imagined by streaming platforms through the experiences of using these platforms. Whether it’s because these platforms constructed their interface in order to generate that “sense of causality,” “mobility,” or a “liveness on demand”, or if it’s the “Web” that already sets the conditions for such sensations, there’s something different-enough about streaming that entice us to think of how these sensations have shifted definitions around and approaches to TV, yet still remain fixed around TV as such. But most importantly, as McPherson notes, “this much touted liveness is actually the illusion of liveness” that is very much part of both the discourses of personalization around streaming as well as the corporate strategy of these platforms. (202) Thus, while “liveness” seems to be constant throughout the history of TV, the chapter sharply distinguishes the specificity around the experiences of using the Web that is meaningfully different, or just-different-enough, in all the ways (e.g. corporate producer, the empowered consumer/fan) that we’ve talked about TV’s contemporary moment.