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ESSAYS ON THE DAILY LIFE OF POPULAR CULTURE![]()
1
WATCHING TELEVISION
Thomas Conroy
This essay focuses on the one-time popular pastime of video consumption from video/DVD rental stores, which included the always enjoyable experience of browsing shelves and discovering obscure video content. During its heyday, one specific characteristic of the local video store experience, for me, was the expansion of my tastes and preferences, including the cultivation of the kitschy and the obscure as well as the classical and the iconic. Video stores also fed my nostalgia, providing me with old television programs and old movies, the watching of which evoked earlier eras of my childhood and adolescence. Video stores also allowed me the opportunity to seek out critically acclaimed films from around the world, including those recommended by a number of bestselling video guides.
As a child of the 1960s growing up in blue collar New Jersey, television was very much a part of the fabric of my everyday life. With an aunt and uncle who lived upstairs from us and who enjoyed employee discounts from working for an RCA plant in Edison, New Jersey, our house was not lacking for well-functioning TV sets. I am old enough to remember the shift to color programming (âThe following program is brought to you in living color on NBCâ), as well as the mix of network and local stations and their range of programming. I can rememberâreading everything from science, nature, and history books for kids to Classic Comics, Mad magazine, and Famous Monsters of Filmlandâ I watched television on my own, particularly shows geared toward kids and popular 1960s sitcoms, as well as shows in the company of my family. On my own, I tended to like informative science shows, but also the pop-kitsch of shows like The Munsters, F-Troop, Bewitched, Batman, The Flintstones, and Rowan and Martinâs Laugh-In.
My childhood sense of the possible meaning of the protest-filled Vietnam War era of the late 1960s was undoubtedly shaped by such pop culture representations, even their catch phrases and quirky and sometimes random juxtapositions of square and hip. I also tend to associate particular programs with particular family members: my father and uncle watched sporting and outdoor shows like The American Sportsmen, The Wide World of Sports, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, Yankees baseball and Giants football games and shows depicting war or the Wild West. One aunt watched soap operas, movie melodramas from Hollywoodâs golden age, and The Lawrence Welk Show; another aunt watched the talk shows of David Susskind, Mike Douglas, and Joe Franklin. My older siblings watched music or variety shows like Shindig, American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show (particularly when rock bands were featured), and later Don Kirshnerâs Rock Concert and The Midnight Special. To these lists, I will also add game shows, specials, movie programs (e.g., The Million Dollar Movie, The 4:30 Movie, Chiller Theater, etc.), and even the various commercials and station identification moments that I can recall seeing and hearing as evocative signifiers of a TV-watching past. I also retain vivid memories of the adults in our house liking to watch TV news broadcasts, particularly local news broadcasts, and tending to watch the same particular news broadcasts night after night. To this day, I can still rattle off the names of the WABC Eyewitness News crew (Roger Grimsby, Bill Beutel, Tex Antoine, etc.) and I have continued my familyâs habit of watching TV news, including local news, and of connecting, as an audience member, with particular local news personalities.
The television set in our house was a large (for its day) RCA console color TV, built into a wooden cabinet. It was of its time, looking a bit more like a piece of furniture than an electronics gagdet, and it fit right in with the space-age decor of our 1950s and 1960s living room. It sat against a side wall and was thus visibly accessible to anyone who sat in that room (we also had a cabinet-style stereo record player in the same room). On the top floor of my house, where my two aunts and one uncle lived, there were multiple TVs in different rooms, often each tuned to different programs. In fact, my uncleâs lair was the upstairs kitchen where I remember him, on a nightly basis, sitting in his kitchen chair, wearing his white t-shirt and slippers and watching a movie or a ball game. He usually sat there watching television while sipping from a can of Horlacher pilsner or from a glass of Seagramâs whiskey, which he kept within an easy reach of his seat. When I was upstairs visiting my relatives, as I did nearly every day, I could âsampleâ the shows that they might each be watching, getting small impressionistic glimpses of their televisual worlds. I also associated the sound of a TV with both floors of our house and occupied by my family members, a happy and comforting association.
With the above notions in mind, I seek here to reflect on some of my own particular experiences of TV and video viewing and, in particular, to reflect on them within the shifting contexts of TV watching as this practice has evolved from the era of large living room TVs receiving signals from broadcast towers to the era of Google TV and of Netflix and Amazon streaming services. In considering such changes, largely through a discussion of some of my own experiences as a TV-viewing child of the 1960s who grew up to become a cultural sociologist who continues to be interested in watching TV, I narratively reflect on the possibilities and potentialities of viewing TV as it now is experienced in the still-evolving digital age. In various ways, watching TV today is not unlike the past practice of video store shopping and browsingânamely, a potentially consciousness-expanding activity grounded in multiple aesthetics, multiple and diverse mass audiences, and the principle of expanded consumer choice.
As I reached adulthood, I watched a bit less TV than I did as a younger person, but this is probably very typical. I found sociology and philosophy while an undergraduate and also came to political awareness at the time of Ronald Reaganâs first termâthus in an era of growing conservatism, from which I felt a particular alienation. I also found myself immersed in the art, music, and literary worlds of nearby New York City, and I took advantage of my proximity to the city to explore alternative culture. This included listening to punk, new wave, and experimental music and seeing my share of art and indie films. The 1980s were also proving to be a decade of rapidly changing technological shifts, particularly in the area of personal computing. But with television, it also meant shifts to better quality television sets, the rapid expansion of cable broadcasting, audience size, and to the growing use of home recording and playback systems, such as Betamax and, in particular, Video Home Systems (VHS).
One truly transformative effect of videotaping is that it allowed for recording a show and watching it at some later time after it was broadcast, thus freeing one from having to be home at a particular time for a particular show. I had a 13-inch Sony Trinitron TV in the early 1980s and it was a prized possession, with its rich colors and improved sound system. This made it perfect for watching such stylized content as Miami Vice or music video shows. Of course, a mention of the latter suggests MTV, and while I would not become a regular cable TV subscriber until the tail end of the 1980s, I was very much aware of cable from the beginning of the decade and enjoyed the novelty whenever I was visiting someone who had it. My own experiences reflect the general pattern in the United States, in which only around 6% of households were wired for cable by the end of the 1970s, with that number then climbing to 23% in the early 1980s, and 60% by the late 1980s (Thompson, 2014).
The growth in the use of VCRs was rapid over the span of the 1980s, going from merely 1% of all households to nearly 70% (Thompson, 2014). Over this period of time, and into the 1990s, the cost of owning both a VCR and of a prerecorded video tape dropped rapidly. In fact, when I scour used markets and notice that videotapes tend to sell for perhaps one dollar or 50 cents, I am reminded of how expensive they once were. So, the 1980s era of hypercapitalism and the explosion of information and entertainment technologies was very much in keeping with many of the claims which had been made by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) in his massively influential book, The Postmodern Condition, in which Lyotard reflects upon such themes as the disintegration of metanarratives, that is, the rapid decline of a shared public consensus about meaning brought on, in part, by technology and novel systems of mass communication. His thinking thus parallels the reality that the once-standard system of mass communications, largely shaped by media companies and directed toward relatively passive receivers, had started to give way to a newer understanding of a media consumer who, aided by technology, constructed his or her own meanings for what was being consumed. In fact, I can recall as a grad student reading and discussing Lyotard with fellow students by day and going home with a videotape for some evening entertainment, thus experiencing my own form of postmodernism as I went about juxtaposing various and disparate forms of media content on one another.
Videos, video rental stores, and regular access to cable TV, along with later immersion in the world of the Internet in the mid-1990s, transformed my viewing habits in a profound and long-lasting way. They allowed, for example, for the possibility of watching videotaped programs in small, fragmentary bites or all the way through. They allowed for freeze framing, so as to more carefully examine the details of a scene. And eventually, after purchasing a second-hand VCR, that allowed for source material examine for building up a private collection of dubbed videos.
As I experienced the 1990s and began researching an eventual doctoral dissertation, I was also introduced by both peers and by circumstances to Usenet and to the World Wide Web. This, for me, along with the continued consumption of both cable and of video, ignited a desire to go deeper into particular genres or auteurs (such as obscure 1970s and 1980s Euro horror films or films by particular, acclaimed directors like Luis Buñuel or Wim Wenders), as well as to connect with a (mostly cyber-) community of like-minded aesthetes (or, perhaps as some analysts might put it, with various âtaste culturesâ). The 1990sâa decade with both a Baby Boomer in the White House and the revival of a variety of 1960s signifiers, from tie-dye to Woodstock to hippy jam bandsâfor me also was an irony-oriented decade. For example, network shows like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Married with Children, MTVâs Beavis and Butthead, Comedy Centralâs South Park, and the retro-filled rebroadcasts of Nickelodeonâs Nick at Night programming, all played off irony, with their witty, sarcastic, and largely youth-oriented observational humor reigning supreme. For me, personally, the best expression of 1990s TV-watching irony was probably the series of âbad movieâ gatherings that I would host for my grad student friends in my Boston apartment. Our definition of fun was watching movies like Dr. Butcher, MD, or Glen or Glenda? and riffing on the scenes as the movie played. It helped to have a good trash aesthetic, and there were certainly lots of available resources for developing one. And this example of video-watching parties also reminds me of the one-time phenomenon of going to the video rental store as a social activity, done in groups or by couples, where the ultimate goal was nearly always trying to negotiate what everyone would like to watch.
Today, as I reflect on the even more hypercapitalist and more advanced tech-driven world of the twenty-first century and on what it means to watch TV nowadays, I am struck by a few things. One is the bewildering array of choices that the typical consumer now faces. HD (High Definition) televisions have now given way to UHD (Ultra High Definition) sets, with even clearer resolution and detail. Television sets are nowadays larger, flatter, and âsmarterâ than ever before, but also increasingly more affordable to the average consumer, and in many ways the lines between a television set and a personal computer are becoming ever more blurred. The notion of a home space for TV viewing being transformed into a âhome theaterâ is not all that far-fetched. TV sets today also often have such features as 3D viewing, built-in WIFI, smart TV Internet platforms, and webcams. The array of technical offerings now available are such that many are predicting the eventual end of the widespread subscription to ever-more expensive cable or dish TV packages, as consumers seek out alternative content sources such as Google/YouTube, Hulu Plus, and on-demand pay services such as Amazon and Netflix. Various cellular phone service providers like Sprint, Verizon, and Virgin Mobile want to get in on the act by offering apps and data plans that allow their customers to consume media content in ways that they might have once done through a membership in (now defunct) Blockbuster Videos. And interestingly, just as some consumers of recorded music have returned to collecting and listening to records on vinyl, some TV users are returning to using TV antennas to receive broadcast signals on their sets. The choices are truly wide-ranging.
Experientially, watching TV nowadays means that one is likely multitasking and partaking in a more decentralized activity than were the TV audiences of the twentieth century. Watching a marathon of selected showsâeverything from Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead to Top Chef or Curb Your Enthusiasmâ on a video streaming service, means that one can spend a day or a weekend diving headfirst into an entire season of a show. The notion of a âTV seasonâ or a standardized 30-minute-based time frame for shows is coming to seem increasingly quaint, or less orderly and predictable than it once was. Providing a less centralized set of choices to consumers may also mean that consumers are able to increasingly pursue a much wider range of content options; while many will likely choose the more familiar options, others will likely peruse a wide range of options and some will probably pursue the most obscurely quirky. We see this already in the large number of examples of YouTube videos that have gone viral, much to just about everyoneâs surprise.
As was the case in the mid-1980s, I may be somewhat behind the curve at the moment, but I remain very interested in future possibilities. I still own a nonâflat screen TV, a 27-inch Sharp television that I purchased in early 2001âand it seemed rather state of the art at the time. It seems anything but, nowadays, and while I am still in the window-shopping phase of determining its best possible replacement, it is soon to be replaced by something newer. I am looking toward soon cutting my cable and setting up a different and hopefully better way of receiving audiovisual content. And if anything, I find myself even more immersed in the Internet than I was when I began with it some 20 years ago. So while I certainly do not think of myself as an early adopter of technology, I do believe in staying open to new ideas, including the idea of technology. In short, I am like millions of others my age or close to me in age; we were not born into a digital world, but having immigrated into it, we are more or less assimilating into it to the best of our abilities.
As I reflect on the progression of styles of watching TV and how it has changed over time, there are many features of this change that stand out. Some of these are technical and others more content-related. Technological changes have given modern televisions greater capacities those of the past. High-definition broadcasting is now a norm and goes hand in hand with the demand for LCD and plasma TVs. Some TVs allow for 3D imagery; others for âpicture-in-picture,â which allows the viewer to watch two channels at once. Some TVs allow for Internet or Wi-Fi connectivity. In fact, how TVs connect with the worldâthat is, the number and types of inputs for connecting to other devicesâis now a variable. And along with this, TV watchers increasingly want to replicate the movie theater experience at home, hooking their TV sets up to enhanced, external sound systems and arranging their large flat-screens in front of carefully arranged specialty furniture created for maxim...
