Week Three Reflections

Broadcast and the Everyday
The other day, I found half a dozen or so friends of mine gathered around a laptop, watching and discussing an event being replayed online just hours after it had been watched live by many around the world. I’m talking about the London Olympics Opening Ceremony.
Not only did such a sight evoke questions of new age media use investigated last week, it also raised notions of the day-to-day presence of certain television broadcasts. Watching the broadcast of the Opening Ceremony (live or delayed within the period of global Olympic Games hype) affords the viewer access to a worldwide festival and, by extension, “cultural citizenship” (Morley, p. 109). To watch the Opening Ceremony is to be a member of the public sphere; a global citizen who can contribute to local, national or worldwide debate. Since its inception, broadcast television has increasingly acted as a mechanism that pulls down the geographical barriers that prevent a globally shared experience of calendical events. The broadcasts of both the Beijing and London Opening Ceremonies recognise this effect of television yet have approached them in different ways.

Beijing and the Mediated Spectacle
2008 men each pound a different screen. Many of the screens are struck simultaneously and become briefly illuminated when hit, creating visual tapestries. This is truly a visceral experience for those in the stadium watching the ceremony, but why should the rest of us miss out?
Enter broadcast television. Citizens from all over the world can now watch and engage in the events unfolding at the Beijing Opening Ceremony. Such unrestricted access to the ceremony gives weight to the idealistic vision of Jurgen Habermas’ open bourgeois public sphere, disrupting the notion of a private sphere and consequently allowing for an almost-universally shared space where “unconstrained debate” occurs (Finlayson, 2005).

London and the New Age Nation
Watching the ‘Internet revolution’ sequence during the lecture, I couldn’t help but feel the London Opening Ceremony was catered for me – the television viewer. Film director Danny Boyle was at the helm of the ceremony production and while the Beijing ceremony was also directed by a fellow filmmaker in Zhang Yimou, the overall presentation of the ceremonies were vastly different.

One of several moments during the broadcast of the London Opening Ceremony where Danny Boyle concedes that the digital age is an ever-present lens through which we view the world’s biggest events.

Graphic superimpositions of text messages and mobile applications, cutaways to pre-recorded material and particular shot constructions of live footage were integral to Boyle’s coverage of the London ceremony. The privilege of attending a live event is in some way stripped from the ceremony-goer, who must turn their attention to stadium screens to experience the Olympic journey as intended by Boyle.

Yimou acknowledged both the appeal of the live spectacle for the ceremony-goer and broadcast television’s capacity to mediate such a spectacle so that those unable to attend the ceremony can experience a sense of what it would have been like inside the Beijing National Stadium. It is this latter aspect that Boyle extends on: the hypermediacy of his ceremony reflexive of a global “imagined community” (Anderson) who have embraced new age media.

Resources:
Turner, G: ‘Television and the Nation’ in Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television Studies In the Post-Broadcast Era. Ed. Turner, G and Tay, J. 2009: Routledge. Pp 54-56
Finlayson, G: ‘The public sphere as idea and ideology’ in Habermas: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Week Two Reflections

Television and Post-Broadcast Era:
Jinna Tay and Graeme Turner’s argument in the chapter chosen from Not the Apacolypse: Television Futures in the Digital Age presents the didactic perceptions of a post-broadcast era:
1) Digital Optimism: sees “unprecedented degree of consumer access and content customization is set to dramatically change the nature of television content, as well as the manner in which it is consumed or produced”. Proposed changes include “increased popular participation at the production end, and some form of democratization at the consumption end” with the goal of “a viable market for those who have invested in these new developments”.
2) Broadcast Pessimism: sees “the declining share of… the US market now watching broadcast television as an incontrovertible sign of the imminent collapse of the broadcast platform altogether”. Broadcast pessimists make a case for the end of television.

The end of television debate is globally relevant. Tay and Turner claim that India, for instance, “is only now entering its ‘age of television’, and its markets are dominated by broadcasting”. One could take the perspective that America is an anomaly for having switched from analogue to digital.

Tay and Turner claim that being overwhelmed by “the pace of technological change”, we depend on the information from media industries who, being the voice-of-God, produce “industry ‘spin'” which provides a commercial service rather than one of informational value to the audience. A fascination with technological change means we are, more often than not, complicit with the ‘spin’ and are deceived by critical statistics “which do not exist or have yet to take place”. Historic examples indicate that we need not “abandon our scepticism about the validity and motivations of industry-sourced figures”.

The argument made here by Tay and Turner really encapsulates what was written on one of the first slides from last week’s lecture which, incidentally, came from the mouths of Tay and Turner themselves:

Rumours of the death of television may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the head-in-the-sand option has long passed.

When I first read this quote, I thought Tay and Turner were emphasising the need to scrutinise what defines television and how its traditions may be under threat. This could be the intended meaning of the quote but having read this article I see now that the authors might be referring to the implications of a post-broadcast era, where media industries develop an authoritative position over consumers who are uncritically yearning for knowledge. The “head-in-the-sand option” is to turn a blind eye to the idea that, amidst the information being supplied by media industries, we are being deceived by false figures and statistics.

News as a Genre:
To define one’s conventions is to define its genre. Television news programs have a series of similarities with one another that I think are organic to their genre.

That the news can usually be broadcast at any hour and has its lengthier programs scheduled during prime time slots suggests that it is catered to appeal to many demographics. Bigger news broadcasts presented at family-friendly hours present material suitable to be watched by all ages. With the exception of current affairs programs such as 60 Minutes, most television news shows scarcely display adult themes.

A television station’s identity (particularly its political stance) is formed through the news it broadcasts. In choosing to feature sensationalist articles or coverage of more culturally important events, a TV station is respectively appealing to a larger demographic or to an audience with a specific interest in national and international current affairs. Put simply, I generally think of tabloid newspapers as free-to-air channels 7, 9 and 10 while the ABC reminds me of a broadsheet newspaper like The Age.

News depicts itself as a gratifying device for its audience. Through discussion generated during the lecture, the idea of the news anchor as authoritarian was touched on. The reports are channelled through the anchor – he/she appears to control where we “cross live” to, is addressed verbally by field reporters and becomes the key figure we communicate with (the field reporters seem to look at the anchor and the anchor at us). Charlie Brooker grasps this dynamic between anchor and viewer during this parody.

The Death of Television?
Former President of the Independent Film Channel (IFC), Evan Shapiro, identified the “INTERWEBS” as the biggest perceived threat to the concept of ‘television’. Before reading Shapiro’s article, I thought it worthwhile to reach a (set of) conclusion(s) about the definition of ‘television’. Brian recognised during the week one lecture that television can be identified as “a social experience associated with producing, viewing, listening, talking about, reading about, being captured by, appearing on, and being influenced and affected by television”. The implications of this is that even the viewers who engage with television programs in ways that TV producers do not intend (I’m talking specifically of piracy) feed the longevity of television through the social culture that arises from having an interaction with a show.

Sure enough, when I then found Shapiro’s article, I discovered that the former IFC President reached the same conclusion regarding the malleable state of the definition of television. As Shapiro so concisely puts it: “No matter when or where or how someone watches television, it is still TV”.

So in its loosest definition, the concept of television’s lifeline is secure. But what of how most people would come to understand television – in its broadcast form? For Brian, the “coverage of ritualistic, nation-building ‘live’ events” and “social rituals that broadcast television affords” remain the reasons why broadcast television remains vital to audiences and will thus continue to survive. A topical example of this is the Olympics, where broadcast television is ritualistically viewed on broadcast television worldwide and is preferably watched live by many.

Resources:
Tay, J; Turner, G, 2010. “Digital optimism, broadcast pessimism and the end of television” Not the Apocalypse: Television Futures in the Digital Age. International Journal of Digital Television Volume 1 Number 1, University of Queensland, Australia

Week One Reflections

Lecture Key Concepts:
Our first lecture on Television Cultures was fairly introductory and outlined what kind of capabilities we can assume to possess by the end of this semester. Some key things that were said:
– We will be approaching our analysis of television shows much like films were analysed in Introduction to Cinema Studies. This is good news as I’ve already got a lot of lingo under my belt from said course.
– We broke down the definitions of ‘television’ and ‘culture’ and, as can be expected, there is no single definition for either.
– Brian offered a variety of suggestions for blog posts. Some of these included:
: straight-up analysis of scenes from TV shows.
: personal reflection on theories and opinions discussed in lectures, tutes and blogs.

Screening/s from the Lecture:
Hollywood: The Rise Of TV:
I was honestly enthralled by the documentary shown in the first lecture. It was interesting to get an insight into the television medium directly via the commentary of producers, writers, directors and other media professionals.
This is not to say I agreed with all points made in the film. Early on, NYPD Blue co-creator Steve Bochco suggested that television allows for a “tapestry of story and character… inconceivable in any other medium”. Are novels not a medium? My attention instantly turned to my current TV obsession and fantasy epic  inspired by the George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire novels: Game of Thrones. Having both watched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones and read halfway through the first of Martin’s novels, I can say that the former is a superbly abridged version of the latter. If anything, then, novels allow for Bochco’s TV “tapestries” to be expanded upon given the production constraints a TV series possesses that a novel does not.

Readings Assigned:
The past is another country – Graeme Blundell:
“… the idea of film – small sheets of plastic that recorded images when exposed to light – became obsolete… Somewhere towards the end of the decade we passed that defining moment when the public was unable to tell the difference between a movie or TV show originating on digital video or 35mm film.”
The death of the book in relation to Internet’s emergence seems applicable here. With the Internet came e-books, blogs and more readily accessible and practical means of obtaining knowledge. In the shadow of the Internet’s emergence, some media commentators believe that books are appealing less and less to audiences world wide. Similarly, the affordances of shooting digitally are eclipsing those of shooting on 35mm film and, consequently, we could see the disappearance of 35mm film more rapidly than the book. This is alarming for people that hold to traditions of cinema – those who fear we will come to forget our film ancestors such as the Lumiere brothers. As long as we’ve got the likes of Quentin Tarantino around though, it looks like we’ll be constantly reminded of our filmic origins.

“I also liked Big Brother for the way the show blurred the conventional boundaries between fact and fiction, drama and documentary.”
In a way, the “conventional boundaries between fact and fiction” were experimented with in a far more sophisticated manner at the start of the millenium. Davids Simon and Mills’ 2000 HBO miniseries The Corner, a precursor to The Wire, used seemingly authentic interview material during the prologues to each episode. These interviews were in fact scripted and the interviewees were actors who had roles beyond the prologues.

Why Do I Love Television So Very Much? – Alan McKee:
I find that, in general, McKee undermines what he is saying through his hypocrisy: he attacks the attitude of superiority associated with art in a tone so overt that I feel he is advocating a similar mentality be attached to television. That being said, McKee does touch on some points I agree with but unfortunately doesn’t go into too much depth anywhere.

Television truly is “cross-demographic” for its episodic nature. Each episode sees an opportunity for a niche audience to be appealed to, particularly in the sitcom.

Why Study Television?
According to Drake Bennett’s article, studying television can support a great range of subjects studied at university. Film studies, media studies and “social science disciplines” have become involved with studies of The Wire for its multi-faceted realism. From a television studies perspective, it seems important to study this form of media for its impact on culture inside and outside of academia.

Resources:
Blundell, G: ‘The Past Is Another Country’ in The Australian, January 19, 2011. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/the-past-is-another-country/story-e6frg8qo-1225991177193. Viewed July 21, 2012
McKee, S: ‘Why Do I Love Television So Very Much? ’ in Flow Journal, March 9, 2007. http://flowtv.org/2007/03/why-do-i-love-television-so-very-much/. Viewed July 21, 2012
Bennett, D: ‘This Will Be on the Midterm. You Feel Me?’ in Slate, March 24, 2010. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/03/this_will_be_on_the_midterm_you_feel_me.html. Viewed July 21, 2012.