Amanda Lotz’s article provides highly detailed analyses of emerging technologies that enable viewers to have much more control over their personal television experience in terms of time and space and therefore redefine the medium from its network-era norm. Furthermore, she considers cultural implications of portability and mobility enhanced by this convergence of television and internet, and focuses on how mobile technology reconfigures concepts of home and work in both emancipatory and constraining ways. She contends that, after technology permeated work into all aspects of life, mobile television could be envisioned as a counter-way to tether entertainment to the integrated pattern of work and home.
Likewise, Tara speaks of the intensifying “dissolution between the spatio-temporal borders of work and leisure” towards the end of her article. She astutely points out a new phenomenon in the post-network economy, that is, television fans being more and more exploited for their free labor on the internet, which further structures viewers into the flow of corporate capitals. She contextualizes this experience in relation to the neo-Fordism. One thing I particularly like about this article is a constant vigilance that runs through phenomenological analysis of the experiential modalities of web-surfing, and this is what I find Lotz’s piece lacks when unpacking the ideas of mobility and immediacy without a cautionary note.
It is crucial not to overlook the ways that ideology masquerade as ontology in promoting and even hyping terms such as control and choice as well as discourses around them. Unlike Lotz’s embrace of the possibilities opened up by the post-network technologies, Tara, while deconstructing a distinct kind of liveness specific to the Web, keeps describing it as an illusion both in the fact and the feel of it. This rings true, especially in recent years when television becomes more and more associated with concepts including interactivity and agency, and one of the best examples might be Black Mirror: Bandersnatch that deliberately seeks to enhance participation of viewers and promotes the interactive experience. It is much easier to recognize the limits of agency under the disguise of a series of choices in this case as compared to those experiences of free will in video games, but it is difficult to see how far the medium would go to explore its possibility to establish itself as a pull medium. Anyway, it would be important to always keep in mind the shaping of discourses over what television looks like in the post-network era.
No comments:
Post a Comment