One of the
moments that struck me most in Professor McPherson’s extremely timely chapter, “Reload:
Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” was her understanding of the web’s liveness (or,
it’s “feel” of such) associated with a “sense of casuality”
(202). Drawing from Jane Feuer’s influential work, McPherson argues that one of
TV’s most defining factors (especially when comparing the medium to film) is it’s
sense of “liveness,” and, as such, this liveness is touted heavy-handedly by
the television industry (despite the fact that most of this promoted liveness
is, in fact, an illusion). In contrast, the internet is immediately read as exemplifying
liveness, many interpreting liveness “as an essential element of the medium”
(202). This casuality brings with it a feeling of control for the web surfer, a
feeling that their cursor, in real time, is their exclusive guide through the
immense World Wide Web- a feeling that McPherson names “volitional mobility”
(202).
When thinking about
what to write for this post, I pursued MSNBC’s website, curious about the
inevitable change that had occurred on the site since this particular chapter
was published in 2002. Once on the site, to my surprise, a bright red button
announced to me that a COVID-19 update from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was
happening live. Excited and amazed to see such an instantaneous and impossibly well-timed
moment of the ever illusive “liveness,” I immediately clicked on the button. As
I watched Mayor Garcetti answer questions about homelessness relocation and
implementing the new “Slow Streets” program from reporters calling in remotely,
I realized that in this moment, there was no sense of “casuality” associated with
this piece of liveness.
Screenshot of my computer screen during Mayor Garcetti's live COVID-19 update
I realized that I
was so struck by this argument because so many of the moments of liveness on
the internet at this moment- from this update from Mayor Garcetti to my
favorite chef cooking meals with other fun people on Instagram live to donation
based dance classes coming live from closed studios all over the country- are
in response to the global pandemic we are all facing, and the social distancing
practices that are required as a result of it. The virtual closeness replaces physical
closeness, and no longer does “the cursor seem. . . to embody our trajectory,
an expression of our movement and our will,” but it instead becomes a constant reminder
of our inability to physically move in the ways we once did (203). The feeling of control so vital to the concept of volitional mobility has vanished, at least for me, as a result of this pandemic. Perusing the internet now may sometimes "activate [my] very desire for movement and change," but I'm in the midst of understanding how to mobilize that desire elsewhere (207).
I just found out
that Joe Exotic’s life is being made into a scripted TV show starring Nicholas Cage
as Exotic, and this is not even the first scripted series on him announced within
the last year (https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/joe-exotic-nicolas-cage-series-tiger-king-1234574979/). It is fascinating that three serialized
projects are being made about the same person in a year, which makes me wonder
1-What else they are hoping to add to an already spectacularly excessive
entertainment content that is the Tiger King 2-What does this
glorification of a documentary that has so many ethically questionable practices
in it tell us about the contemporary landscape of TV production?
In her article, Lisa Parks rightfully points out how we should think the technological convergence between TV and internet in relation to the politics of gender, race and class. She calls the resulting new industrial model around personalized TV as “ flexible micro casting” (Parks, 134), and argues that this model functions by turning a certain mode of individuality into profit. It commodifies social distinctions and creates a cycle by pushing certain content to the viewers who are assumed to fit into a social group or niche, while keeping the illusion of individual choice at the same time. She analyzes the classical network response to this new convergence era through a case study of the return of quiz show, then looks at two other examples of convergence era TV, the Oxygen Media and Den.
Even though her argument makes sense, I find myself a bit disappointed at her analysis of Oxygen Media. She claims that differences between classical TV and internet are perceived in a gendered way: the former is associated with a passive female audience whereas the latter is directed towards a masculine viewer who is tech savvy enough to take charge and navigate the territories of digital entertainment. According to Parks, we can see Oxygen Media as an attempt to overcome this distinction and emphasize the presence of female audience in the convergence era. She acknowledges how Oxygen Media represents a mainstream feminism that defines empowerment through consumption and encourages women to shop instead of actually creating space for discussing structural problems and encouraging solidarity. It turns feminism into a profitable enterprise, but Parks is willing to accept that in return for the space they provide for female audiences. Do we need to make such compromises? Projects such as Oxygen Media brand themselves as platforms putting women to foreground and emphasizing how women’s media are “ubiquitous as air”, but all they really do is to normalize the idea that female audiences are only a niche, and do the exact opposite of what they claim to be.
Without a doubt, the strangest phenomena that I've experienced in relation to television was a partly facetious exercise that turned very real: a bracket made by a friend on Twitter to determine the best television show of all time, culled to a bracket of (if I'm not mistaken) 128 from a very long longlist. From the beginning, it was hopelessly divisive and maddening, which gave people such as myself who weren't nearly as invested a good deal of schadenfreude. Too many turning points came as the competition tightened, but the most surreal moment of all came late: in the round of 16, The Good Place, which was given a top 10 seeding by public voting and which overperformed even with that, somehow came from behind to defeat The Sopranos. Fortunately, the number 1 seeded Twin Peaks barely held on to best it, and no other matchup came close to that shock, but it seemed to define the entire proceedings as some odd mix of campaigning, possible bot manipulation, and plain recency bias. The bracket ended as it was almost certainly destined to: on the final matchup between Twin Peaks and Sesame Street, two immensely incongrous final competitors, the bracket runner left Twitter to a mass of confusion and never resolved the bracket. In essence, the bracket summed up all the contradictions that make up television for me, all of the odd patterns of reception and viewership without which television could not survive.
Perhaps the show that has most marked my development, aside from maybe Twin Peaks, was Mythbusters, which I watched up until the last few seasons, though I likely missed some of the early seasons' episodes. Looking back on it now, it's hard to easily encapsulate what made me latch onto it so heavily. The natural charisma and humor of the five hosts' interactions was a key factor, but just as important was the actual process of testing the myths. Though the show dispensed with a dedicated mythologist relatively quickly and just had the hosts and narrator elaborate on the myths, the sense of a constructed narrative remained, and much of it came out of the pleasingly step-by-step nature of the proceedings. While these were all presumably factual depictions of the Mythbusters' process, the documentary element was often subsumed by the simple narrative pleasures, all opportunities for both banter and extremely technical crafts and problem solving. The answer for my love for the show must lie somewhere in the middle, equally indebted both the human and the mechanical.
While it might be unfair to very briefly discuss a show I haven't seen, it's fascinating to think about how different the reception and popularity two incarnations of The Twilight Zone — the original hosted and conceived by Rod Serling, and the 2019 reboot hosted by Jordan Peele — differ. Without trying to make too broad a statement, the latter seemed to slip away from the public perception almost instantly, while the former was generally well-regarded and moderately successful even while it aired. Of course, the main difference is the sheer amount of competition for attention and viewership, only compounded by the latter airing on the relatively little-used CBS All Access. Even the presence of Peele, bringing both his extensive comedy TV experience and his newfound acclaim as a horror film director fresh off the splash of Us, barely seemed to make a dent, though the question of whether it would have been more watched had he had an actual significant hand in crafting episodes is up for debate. But there's a certain sense of diminishing returns to most any reboot, the idea of going back to the well that only fitfully works in the realm of broadcasting, and none of the episodes seem to land with any individual impact, something which the original show rarely lacked. Of course, my perception is skewed by the circles in which I run, but this sense of reception seems to affect all but a handful of shows.
Perhaps the biggest televisual surprise I've had in a long time was with the A Series of Unfortunate Events Netflix series, which unspooled the events of the thirteen books over three seasons. I watched all of them for the purposes of nostalgia, given the series' prominence in my younger self's book reading and the continued purchase it holds in my mind. While the events are largely reproduced faithfully, it's the surrounding material and added wrinkles that gave the show much of its heft. The creators, in essence, fleshed out and clarified the background, introducing the mysterious organization VFD in the first few episodes and putting Lemony Snicket as played by Patrick Warburton front and center. It's very much a series made for fans and those with a moderate to deep knowledge of the books, but at least from my perspective, it never felt like it distracted or hindered understanding of the most important parts, instead enhancing the sense of the strange world.
One of the few shows that I've seen while it aired in recent times was the second season of Big Little Lies; I had seen the first three or so episodes of the first season the fall after it first aired, but didn't come back to the show until just before the second season began airing. Though I didn't watch most of the episodes live, I did strive to watch them relatively unspoiled, and it provided an interesting dynamic in terms of the various narratives/tones that the showrunners tried to juggle. To be clear, the season felt like a mixed bag; on the one hand, the central storylines of fearful regret over the killing that the first centered upon felt like a rehash, with a too-clear antagonist embodied to the hilt by Meryl Streep. On the other, what I loved was the more conventionally pleasing, potentially meme-machine-tooled Laura Dern storyline, which embodied the "campy" pleasures that the show otherwise so studiously attempted to avoid. Was it the creators' intentions for this secondary plotline to take up most of the attention? Probably not, but these intentions felt mostly lost in translation.
One of the more fulfilling experiences I've had with a TV series in the past few years came from a rewatch of Arrested Development's unfairly maligned fourth season. As someone who loved the first two seasons of the show but felt a certain weariness for most of the third, I had initially approached the fourth with some trepidation. From my dim recollection, I remember liking it the first time, with the notable caveat that I found the show drastically increasing in quality as it went along. This time around, I loved it from the beginning, and indeed much of the greatness of the fourth season comes from its inherent rewatchability. The structure only becomes funnier when the viewer is already aware of it, the constant recursiveness of each main character experiencing their mishaps mirroring the essential sense of farcical doom that the series could capture at its best. I haven't seen the chronological, conventional recut, but I'd doubt that any configuration could be as funny as the gradual revelation of every single main character in Lucille's apartment through the course of the series.
I spent a few hours a week back or so experiencing the 2010 Tonight Show conflict between Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno, and it was in many ways revealing about the ways in which TV history can be told, especially considering I had little to no awareness of what was happening at the time. The first method was via an edited compilation of TV shows that explicitly dealt with the conflict, combining various sources, while the second was the extensive Wikipedia article, itself sourced mostly from Bill Carter's The War for Late Night. As might be expected, the latter was more in depth, carrying all the behind-the-scenes meetings that the former necessarily couldn't capture. And yet, there was still a good deal of merit to the former: not only were there moments that the latter didn't include for one reason or another, but there was also an engaging aspect to simply watching it unfold visually. Moreover, despite the video's jumbled chronology, there was a sense of watching the events as they happened — aside from a few clips used throughout, all were broadcast live, and thus gave the opportunity to experience these events as they were at the time. If television is inherently transient, we have the ability nowadays through YouTube, Internet Archive, and other formats to experience that transience in a retrospective fashion.
I hope you are all hanging in there! I am in the TV Studies scholarly Interest Group at SCMS, and they are currently holding virtual events since SCMS was cancelled. On Thursday, May 7th at 2pm CST/12pm PST, Eric Hoyt will be talking to Elana Levine about her new book Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History. I can forward the email with the details to anyone interested. Relatedly, Duke University Press, who published Levine's book, is having a 50% off sale until May 1st!!!!
I know the next couple of weeks are busy for people, but I figured I'd share!
Zoom Meeting ID: 985-7149-2863
Password: television
Has anyone else noticed that YouTube videos re-presenting or re-purposing TV content is interestingly material? Take Binging with Babish, for example, a cooking channel dedicated to making iconic dishes from film and TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzd0mLf366I. It is as if the Internet fulfills the desire for yummy 2D food to materialize into reality, even though it is itself a digital simulation. It also adds to the iconicity of the dish, sometimes in ways that the show itself had not anticipated. While the Krabby Patty is likely an intentional symbol for Spongebob, it's harder to argue that Carmella's ziti from the Sopranos had the same function in mind. And yet, when these shows go through the meat-grinder that is the Internet, they come out the other end with material symbols extrapolated. There are other channels that make miniatures of iconic TV sets, for example. I don't really have a conclusion or answer to this, just thought it was interesting and ironic that the Internet is material-driven in its remediation of TV.
I've been giving some thought to Tara's question at the end of class. After a semester of surveying the history of television criticism, how do I define television? The scope of "Television" makes this question nearly impossible to answer. We've seen how technological definitions of television are susceptible to deterministic assumptions. We've discussed how "flow," once so apt to describe the televisual experience of broadcast and cable, falls short of explaining modern phenomena like platforms and binge watching. We've tried to categorize Television based on form, content, and audience, all of which fail maintain their distinctions in the face of full-season releases and hybridity. It seems that "Television" has come to describe such a broad spectrum of contemporary media experiences that it loses most of its utility as an analytical term. I do, however, have a definition to push forward:
"Television" describes any electronic apparatus capable of receiving signals and decoding them in such a way as to present the intended audio-visual programming on a screen, or the programmed content itself.
Readings this week deal with results of increasing convergence between internet and TV, and there seems to be this assumption both in some of those and the industry marketing practices they narrate that convergence leads to more interactivity. This interactivity, in turn, opens up space for audience agency and tastes to assert itself. Even though there is a lot of truth to that, this focus on internet and new forms of interactivity actually prompted me to think about the opportunities for interactivity classical TV provided the audiences with. New TV has more technological means for sure, but it seems to me that its content is highly monitored compared to the older TV’s moments of interactivity. Here I will provide a brief glance into two crucial moments of classical TV interactivity from Turkey within the last decade, and explore how we can understand TV interactivity less in terms of technological improvement and internet and more in relation to the power dynamics within the public sphere they take place in.
Esra Erol’da (which can be translated as With Esra Erol, the name of the host) is a marriage show that had aired under a few different TV channels in the same format for a decade until it was cancelled a few years ago. It is a live broadcast show that airs five days a week, recorded in front of a studio audience. Every episode features a group of ten to fifteen contestants, and these contestants change gradually as they get married and leave the show instead of being structured around the seasons. One significant difference of the show is that the participants literally can be anyone, they are not young and pretty as one normally expects them to be in a show like this. The contestants are both male and female, come in all kinds of looks and body sizes, and even more interestingly, from all ages. Contestants in their 60s are quite prevalent and accepted as a normal part of the show.
Another key aspect of this show that makes it truly interactive is the fact that the progression of the story is entirely dependent on the phone calls they receive on live TV. The show starts with the contestants, audience and the host in the studio, waiting for the phone calls from potential suitors (can be either men or women) who call to express their interest in marrying a certain contestant. Both the contestant and the host ask a bunch of questions to the suitor, and if the contestant is interested in the end, the suitor is invited to come to the studio to meet the contestant next day, which also happens as a part of the show. Basically, everything that happens in the show is brought by people, and the host is simply there to moderate the conversations.
One can’t deny the fact that this show, and the other shows in similar formats, not only do provide a widely acknowledged public space for meaningful participation, but also rely on that participation to exist in the first place. In that sense, the viewers’ agency is essential. However, this public space is embedded in a political context which is significantly defined by public opinion, but heavily sanctions it at the same time. Polls are the most crucial piece of information when the government is making decisions in Turkey right now, and it is a well-known fact that Erdoğan conducts his business based on polls. With the constitutional change, the necessity to get the 50 percent plus one of the electoral body narrows down politics (at least for Erdoğan) into a struggle over the margins, which creates a situation where the participation in the public space is encouraged, but at one’s own risk.
There are times people take the risk for the sake of meaningful participation and exerting agency. One example that immediately sparked a nationwide conversation took place in this marriage show. A Turkish woman from Amsterdam (the show was aired live in several European countries that have significant population of Turkish immigrants) called the show, stated that she is a lesbian, and expressed her interest in marrying a female contestant. Considering this was a conservative show that claims to encourage marriages within the traditional values of Turkish society, the host was caught in shock, and chose to scold and insult the woman on the phone, and disconnected the call. The shaming continued afterwards, this time with the participation of the studio audience and contestants as well. This woman most probably already knew what she was doing, decided to take advantage of the interactivity of this show to make a point (which she managed to do, this incident was discussed widely in the media afterwards) but also risked being publicly humiliated in front of millions of viewers in various countries, and potentially gaining enemies.
Sometimes the risk of participation is higher than the viewer would assume. In 2015, five years after the incident described above and in a much more politically tense Turkey, another viewer called another show on live TV. A teacher from an Eastern city, where the civil war between the Turkish government and the Kurdish minorities has been going on for decades, wanted to use this very popular show as a platform where she could tell something to Turkish society: “Are you aware of what is going on in the East? The media tells it very differently. Please don’t remain silent. Be more sensitive about it. Don’t let people die, don’t let children die”. This was the entirety of what she said, and the host responded in solidarity, saying that they would do their best to make it known. However, immediately afterwards, a formal investigation was started for both of them, even though she did not openly state any solidarity with any ethnicity or sides in the conflict. The host was cleared when he apologized for his words, claiming that he thought “she was referring to our martyrs” whereas the teacher is sentenced to prison after two years of investigation, due to making terrorist propaganda.
So why does the government allow this level of interactivity (they have no problems with heavily censoring everything else on TV) and why do people continue to call? What happened to Esra Erol’s show can provide some clues. It wasn’t cancelled because the network decided to do so. As a part of the state of emergency the country had been living in for two years after the coup d’état attempt in 2016, executive orders have been issued one after another, and the marriage shows were cancelled with an executive order of their own.
However, to a lot of people’s surprise, this particular show was announced to come back this fall, hosted by the same person, but “with a new format”, which the network did not elaborate on until the day it was aired. It turned out to be equally interactive and based on audience participation, but with a difference: now the “contestants” with the saddest life stories are chosen to attend and tell their stories in front of the audience, promising to make everyone cry. The show develops by building upon the potential other characters in the stories that can be found and traced, or organizing some sort of response to a tense situation they are asking help for. Basically, the government decided that marriage isn’t a suitable conversation to be held on public anymore, because it creates “negative influences” What is interesting is that the public affect once created by this show was immediately replaced by another, “more appropriate” one. The strategy of producing preapproved emotion through interactivity as the widespread participation of the public on TV remained as a consistent formula, encouraged by the government, as a supervised public space.
I apologize for the delay in posting; Blackboard was being resistant.
Here we are! At the climax: post-tv. I'm glad that one of today's presentations will be about Tik Tok, because I can't help but think about Tik Tok and its creators in relation to the texts we read today. The 'top creators' of TT collect several million followers within a couple months. Many seem to be about sixteen, eighteen at the oldest. There is an unfortunate and much commented on prevalence of white faces among the most popular names--but as our presenter points out, there are important exceptions.
How does the explosion of TT revise the articles we read for today? Or does it represent an unrelated stream of post-television video content? Raphael's presentation takes an excellent first stab at this question, by drawing on the Parks & Christian pieces. One of the major points of comparison does seem to be the extant feature of the "archive" versus an experience of "liveness". When thinking about the turn to Netflix, Hulu etc as TV providers, the observation of a move to archive seems very accurate. Tik Tok does seem to recuperate "live" experience, however, with an algorithm that can freshly update you on trends and conversations that you're interested in. I don't regularly feel as if I'm reviewing work from a long time ago, it's rather that I'm rocketed into the middle of a party that doesn't really stop.
Which brings me to Professor Mcpherson's article, which I think points the way for TT's development much more accurately. It's about the "lure" of the illusion of "volition", in which a relatively pre-determined path would confer an experience of soft interactivity. Could anything describe TT's interface better? The ultra sensitive AI watches me watch the videos, and in doing suggests new content for me: I am interacting with a live-ish event mainly through the passive activity of scrolling. No 'likes' or 'cursor' necessary, and the breadth of content covers the tracks of this algorithmic guidance.
Speaking of 'post-TV' this week, has anyone seen 'Murder House Flip'? I am this close to getting into Quibi and was recommended this show, apparently a mind-blowing intersection of true crime, home renovation, and all the crazies imaginable... which is exactly what I need right now. I also heard one episode involves psychics that feng-shui the angry spirits out of the house, and despite losing all respect for this show after hearing this, I am still curious and intrigued.
Has anyone tried Quibi? What is it like?
In your small group, answer the following two questions. At least one group member should be prepared to discuss your answer to number 1 when we reconvene. We'll discuss number 2 in a more freeform way.
1. Pick a key concept or argument from one of the essays by Parks, Lotz or Christian. Summarize the concept/argument and find an example that illustrates the argument/concept in some way. Your example can confirm and reinforce the argument, or, alternately, it might function as a counterargument.
2. We've now spent 14 weeks collectively thinking through the history of U.S. television studies and about TV itself. Has your thinking about television and TV studies shifted at all and, if so, how? How would you define television as the semester draws to a close?
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.
FromFleabag(Amazon) toMrs America(Hulu) to Insecure (HBO) toShrill(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!
Professor McPherson notes that "emergent modes of experience are neither innocent nor neutral" (207). This reminded me of the promises held by so many technological advances and that inevitably have been absorbed into human-consumer lifestyles and turned into constraints and subjugation. The freedom of having a car turned into people having to commute for hours everyday to make it to their jobs. The internet allowing one to be connected at all times blurred the lines between work and leisure time, entrusting workers to be prompt and effective around the clock. Amanda Lots writes about the evolution of TV and its paraphernalia: "convenience, mobility, and theatricality redefined the medium" (50). As "Viewers gained greater control over their entertainment experience" they also become "attached to an increasing range of devices that demanded their attention and financial support" (51). Emergent modes of experience, Prof McPherson says, "model particular modes of subjectivity which can work all too neatly in the service of the shifting patterns of global capitalism" (207). Bottom line, "We might see out web-enhanced experiences of volitional mobility, scan-and-search, and transformation as training us for a new neo-Fordist existence" (McPherson 207). At the end of the day, the new devices and experiences that shape our lives are embedded in our capitalist economic model. Behind the convenience and ideals that may motivate us to create and adopt them lurk the new lifestyles that they shape for us, for good and bad, and always for capital's efficacious outcomes. There are empowering aspects to these changes, and our challenge is to not lose sight of them: as the freedom ideation of innovation becomes disorted by capital, we must remember the core ideal and not lose track of the freedom/empowerment at its root. Or as Professor McPherson writes, in conclusion of her analysis of the web's volition offerings, "While the 'click and buy' logic of DEN certainly overrides the ontology of volition mobility with an illusory ideology of volition, that these modalities are also part of the forms of the Web suggests a redemptive possibility, if only in the ways they activate our very desire for movement and change, a desire that might be mobilized elsewhere" (207).
