The Future of Live

Karin van Es

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509502646, 9781509502639
• eBook ISBN: 9781509502677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Liveness is a persistent and much-debated concept in media studies. Until recently, it was associated primarily with broadcast media, and television in particular. However, the emergence of social media has brought new forms of liveness into effect. These forms challenge common assumptions about and perspectives on liveness, provoking a revisiting of the concept.

In this book, Karin van Es develops a comprehensive understanding of liveness today, and clarifies the stakes surrounding the category of the ?live?. She argues that liveness is the product of a dynamic interaction between media institutions, technologies and users. In doing so, she challenges earlier conceptions of the notion, which tended to focus on either one of these contributors to its construction.
 
By analyzing the ?live? in four different cases – a live streaming platform, an online music collaboration website, an example of social TV, and a social networking site – van Es explores the operation of the category and pinpoints the conditions under which it comes into being. The analysis is the starting point for a broader reflection on the relation between broadcast and social media.

1
Introduction

It's early January 2016, and, over coffee, my neighbor Ronny tells me that several times a year she takes the ferry to the cinema across the IJ lake in Amsterdam to watch broadcasts of operas and ballets staged at London's Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. These performances are simulcast live to 15,000 cinemas in more than thirty-five countries. Ronny speaks enthusiastically of these occasions. She revels in the camerawork and enjoys the comfort of the cinema. During intermissions, she explains, tweets from viewers are displayed on screen, making visible, as it were, other viewers watching in cinemas across the globe. She has a friend in England who also attends these screenings, and afterward they evaluate the performances over the phone.

Ronny's account draws attention to the continuing reliance on the live in our present-day media landscape and raises several important considerations about it. These screenings, for instance, underscore how live broadcasts—contrary to the idea that liveness provides a natural and direct connection to a given occasion—are heavily produced (Caldwell 2000; Scannell 2001). To avoid transmitting “boring” footage of the operas and ballets taken from a single stationary camera, the broadcasts actively switch between cameras, offering multiple points of view. In overall effect, cinemagoers here are offered an experience unlike that of anyone actually present at the performances. This, of course, has been the case for “live” televised sports for at least a half-century. But these live-streamed events also illustrate that the live is no longer a property of radio or television alone; the “live” media landscape is now multifarious. Not only do services like Twitter make their own claims to be live, but they also intersect with traditional forms of liveness. In the above example, Twitter interacts with the streaming video shown in theaters worldwide, as audience members are actively invited to comment on the performance.

That the descriptor “live” has been used in relation to multiple media forms has magnified the confusion about what it means for a medium to be live. People tend to have a general notion of the term's meaning. But when ideas about the “live” are put to critical scrutiny, the concept proves to be more complex than one might think. Consider these opera and ballet simulcasts: when they're being promoted as live, what is actually being promised? Why does it matter that they are “live”? What do viewers expect from them?

Philip Auslander (2008) has traced the origins of the term “live” to 1934, when broadcast media confused the opposition between live and recorded performances, creating a “crisis.” He explains the crisis in terms of how “radio [unlike the gramophone] does not allow you to see the sources of the sounds you are hearing; therefore, you can never be sure if they are live or recorded” (Auslander 2008, 59). “Live” was introduced as a term so that the distinction could be made in these cases as well (ibid., 60). That radio was a “live” medium to begin with had been a matter of strategic choice. As Robert Vianello explains,

The emergence of “live” radio was not only a mechanism to install centralized production/distribution of “programs” over local production/distribution, it is also the mechanism that installed the broadcast agent as the voice of concentrated capital, centralized production and mass consumption.

(Vianello 1985, 28)

The same was true with the development of television. In fact, in the thirties, there were several experiments in Europe with television prototypes that were dependent on recorded images. However,

television's ability to electronically transmit live images was preferred in the United States, and that ability had a substantial impact on the formation of the networks and dominance of the television industry. Drawing upon their technical and structural experiences in radio, network broadcasters conceived electronic television as a means of transmitting images from point to point.

(Friedman 2002, 3)

The post–World War II years marked the beginning of commercial television broadcasting in the United States. In terms of programming, from the late forties to the sixties, live anthology dramas (e.g., The Philco Television Playhouse [NBC, 1948–1955]) proliferated. These were initially Broadway plays and adaptations of classic theater that made the new medium quite attractive to a mass audience. They became the defining characteristic of what is now known as the Golden Age of Television. Television networks used their live programming to differentiate themselves aesthetically from film (Caldwell 1995, 38) and to deter competition in the distribution space. Transcribed programming, the alternative, would have made independent syndication possible and paved the way for non-network distribution, as indeed later happened (Vianello 1985, 27–31). In short, the electronic transmission of live images was “not television's technological destiny, but rather an identifying characteristic that could be used when strategically necessary, convenient, or profitable” (Friedman 2002, 4).

By the fifties and sixties the networks had secured their position and programming was increasingly filmed or taped (Bourdon 2000, 183). This approach gained prominence because it was more profitable for the industry. Regularly scheduled live programming eventually became limited to newscasts, presidential debates, and sports (Friedman 2002, 4), and the occasional outlier such as NBC's long-running Saturday Night Live comedy series. Subsequently, the eighties to the 2000s brought the VCR, remote control, and analog cable, providing audiences with more control over when and how they watched television. During this period occasional references were made to the Golden Age through special live programming (e.g., the live season premiere of NBC's ER in 1997). According to Elana Levine, these instances can be seen as “struggles over distinction and cultural worth that have long been part of television history, but that take on new dimensions in an altered media environment” (2008, 395).

The competition for viewer eyeballs became fiercer in the “post-network era,” when the digital video recorder (DVR) and video on demand (VOD) gave viewers more choice over when, where, and how to watch television (Lotz 2014, 8). This period witnessed the popularity of reality-singing competitions, beginning in the 2000s, with shows like American Idol (Fox, 2002–2016) and extending to the present with shows like The Voice (NBC, 2011–). These programs enabled viewers to participate in live episodes through other “live” media. Despite the changing place of live programming in broadcast television, it retains an important function—one that is explored in depth in this book. Similar to the live experiments discussed by Levine, nowadays live television is used to compete with new viewing platforms and business models such as those represented by Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Both event TV (e.g., important sporting events and awards shows) and social TV (i.e., the combination of social media and television) can be understood as popular industry strategies to draw audiences back to watching television live. Promising sociable experiences that depend on watching programming when it first airs, these strategies encourage live viewing—a form of viewership that can be monetized through Nielsen ratings.

Like the account of my neighbor watching her simulcasts, this brief historical reflection on the live in relation to American television highlights the concept's complexity. It problematizes the idea that liveness is simply a property of a particular technology because, as I have noted, it's part of a business strategy as well. We see, moreover, that the live can have multiple reference points; it operates at the level not only of transmission (live broadcast) but also of content (live programming). Yet the issue of the live gets even thornier. Consider the conclusion of Nick Couldry's Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), where the author deliberated whether, due to the pervasive influence of the internet and networked technologies, the category live would someday become “less necessary, even redundant” (138). I address at length how he came to speculate about this sort of future scenario in chapter 2. For now, though, it is important to realize that over a decade after Couldry gave voice to this possibility, the live is still being claimed in several media formats, and even seems to be claimed more actively than before. Why is this? Here in this book I develop the argument that liveness can be understood as a construction, a product of the interaction among institutions, technologies, and users/viewers. By analyzing several instances of the live, I hope to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon and to offer insights into the likelihood of its future survival.

Liveness as a Concept in Media Studies

Although liveness was at first a professional notion, it has been an academic concept central to television studies since the fifties and sixties (Bourdon 2000, 183), even if over time far fewer television programs were broadcast “live.” John T. Caldwell (1995) has criticized the concept's centrality in television studies and the discipline's “theoretical obsession” (27) with live TV. Yet despite this critique, the concept has persisted and been picked up in academic writing on “new media” (McPherson 2002; Couldry 2004; Michele White 2006; Ytreberg 2009; Auslander 2012). As I explore in the following pages, liveness in media studies—the perspectives on it and the scholarly assumptions behind it—fail to capture the complexity and multiplicity of the live.

In media studies to date, the concept of the live/liveness has been considered from three main perspectives: as ontology, as phenomenology (located in the audience), and as rhetoric. The distinctions that would differentiate the three perspectives are rather artificial, and thus some accounts fit with more than one perspective. However, by considering, through selected examples, the merits and shortcomings of those three main strands, I wish to lay the foundation for a discussion, at a later stage, of the alternative I propose: one that combines elements of all three perspectives, and in so doing outlines a conception understood as constellations of liveness. Liveness, I propose, is best understood as a construction informed by technologies, institutions, and users.

Ontology

In relation to television, it is possible to distinguish two types of ontological claims with regard to liveness, centered, respectively, on the technology of the scanning beam and the possibility for simultaneity among television's production, distribution, and reception. I consider these two forms of reasoning first, then home in on liveness that is seen as the ontology of “new media.”

The first type of argument is exemplified by the work of Herbert Zettl (1978), who claimed that television's technological basis is precisely what makes it a “live” process. He writes:

While in film each frame is actually a static image, the television image is continually moving, very much in the manner of the Bergsonian durée. The scanning beam is constantly trying to complete an always incomplete image. Even if the image on the screen seems at rest, it is structurally in motion.

(Zettl 1978, 5)

Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow (1977) have discussed liveness as a mode of the televisual in similar terms. They claim:

In one sense, the television image itself is effectively ‘live,’ very different in this to that of film. Where the latter depends on the immobility of the frame, the former, electronic and not photographic, is an image in perpetual motion, the movement of a continually scanning beam; whatever the statu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Constellations of Liveness
• 3: Liveness and Institutionalization
• 4: “Live” as an Evaluative Category
• 5: Social TV and the Multiplicity of the Live
• 6: Social Media's New Relation to the Live
• Conclusions
• Resources
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement