Television on Demand

Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV

MJ Robinson

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781441111333
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Étude des média

Since 2010 "curation" has become a marketing buzzword. Wrenched from its traditional home in the world of high art, everything from food to bed linens to dog toys now finds itself subject to this formerly rarified activity. Most of the time the term curation is being inaccurately used to refer to the democratization of choice – an inevitable development and side effect of the economics of long tail distribution. However, as any true curator will tell you – curation is so much more than choosing – it relies upon human intelligence, agency, evaluation and carefully considered criteria – an accurate, if utopian definition of the much-abused and overused term. Television on Demand examines what happens when curation becomes the primary way in which media users or viewers engage with mass media such as journalism, music, cinema, and, most specifically, television. Mass media's economic model is based on mass audiences – not a cornucopia of endless options from which individuals can customize their intake. The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the post-network television industry – one whose ultimate effects and outcomes remain unknown. Curatorial culture is a revolutionary new consumption ecology – one that the post-network television producers and distributors have not yet figured out how to monetize, as they remain in what anthropologists call a "liminal" state of a rite of passage – no longer what they used to be, but not yet what they will become. How does an advertiser-supported medium find leave alone quantify viewers who DVR This is Us but fast-forward through the commercials; have a season pass to The Walking Dead via iTunes to watch on their daily commutes; are a season behind on Grey's Anatomy via Amazon Prime but record the current season to watch after they're caught up; binge watched Orange is the New Black the day it dropped on Netflix; are watching new-to-them episodes of Downton Abbey on pbs.org; never miss PewDiePie's latest video on YouTube, graze on Law & Order: SVU on Hulu and/or TNT and religiously watch Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show via digital rabbit ears? While audiences clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their transformed viewing habits undermine the dominant economic structures that fund quality episodic series. Legacy broadcasters are producing more scripted content than ever before and experimenting with new models of distribution – CBS will premiere its new Star Trek series on broadcast television but require fans to subscribe to its AllAccess app to continue their viewing. NBC's original Will & Grace is experiencing a syndication renaissance as a limited-run season of new episodes are scheduled for fall 2017. At the same time, new producing entities such as Amazon Studios, Netflix and soon Apple TV compete with high-budget "television" programs that stream around traditional distribution models, industrial structures and international licensing agreements. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV explains and theorizes curatorial culture; examines the response of the "industry, " its regulators, its traditional audience quantifiers, and new digital entrants to the ecosystem of the empowered viewer; and considers the viable future(s) of this crucial culture industry.

1

Rites and Rituals of Transformation and the Television Industry/ies

It is Wednesday night and I am going to watch television. For the first third of my life, I would turn on the box in the corner of the room and then either “surf” a collection of about seven channels with my remote control or tune in to a specific show at a specific time on a specific day, knowing from the newspaper listings or the TV Guide magazine that from September until May, a new episode would be broadcast each week. For the second third of my life, I would review the program guide channel on my basic cable system. This was a perpetual scroll of the viewing options on about fifty channels. Admittedly, this channel sometimes wound up being my favorite “show” since I would often watch the entire scroll through more than once (wishing it would move faster, but being powerless to speed it up). I did this to ensure that I was not missing anything “better” on another channel, driven by what we now know as FOMO (fear of missing out). This was followed by a period of almost Talmudic review of the interactive program guide (also provided by my cable company). While keeping me within their channel offerings (and of course my tier of service), this allowed me to plan an entire evening if not a week’s worth of entertainment. It ensured that I kept current with “my” shows and allowed me to prioritize my “favorite” channels. At the same time, it left open the possibility of a serendipitous discovery of something on a channel I rarely watched, but whose offerings I could review as I moved up and down through the listings.

Now, however, television viewing requires considerably more mental and physical engagement and energy. Network? Cable? Network or cable live or on digital video recorder (DVR) or video on demand (VOD)? VOD through my cable company? Free or pay VOD through my cable box? Per episode subscription video on demand (SVOD)? Or Sons of Anarchy (an original F/X cable series) on Netflix? Modern Family (a current ABC network series) on Hulu? Orange Is the New Black (a current Netflix series) on Netflix? iTunes season pass to the last season of Mad Men (AMC) which I can start now but continue watching tomorrow on my iPad during my commute? Past seasons of The Good Wife (a current CBS show) on the CBS All Access app so that I can finally get caught up and begin watching the new episodes from the current season on CBS that are clogging my DVR? Transparent (an original Amazon Studios series that all my friends have been after me to watch so that I will stop shushing them and chanting “spoiler alert” when they want to talk about it at brunch) on Amazon Instant Video which is included in the Amazon Prime membership I purchased to get free shipping on books and digital video disc (DVD) box sets of old TV shows? Just watching “what is on” to have some company requires choices to be made: the back catalog of Law & Order Special Victims Unit on a TNT marathon or Hulu, The Big Bang Theory in off-network syndication on MyNetwork9 or TBS or The IT Crowd (a British sitcom from the mid-2000s never distributed to US broadcast or cable networks, but available on Netflix)?

On this night, I check the two PBS stations I receive—WNET/13 and WLIW/21—not because I know their schedules, but because my time may be limited due to a possible late dinner engagement. I turn to the PBS “brand” as one I trust for the delivery of content I reliably enjoy. Later, upon returning from dinner with a colleague, I view televisual content it had not even occurred to me to check out earlier: the second of a three-part Australian documentary on the golden age of dirigible airships, posted by a YouTuber who I know only by his or her YouTube channel name, but who has uploaded all three of the documentaries in their entirety. In so doing this amateur programmer is sharing this content with the international viewing community of YouTube and probably violating a variety of intellectual property/copyright laws in the process (although they’ve been on YouTube since 2014). I found the documentaries because YouTube recommended them to me, guessing (correctly) that based on my previous searches and viewing that I am fascinated by dirigibles, partial to content about the history of technology and also a bit of a steampunk.

All of this viewing takes place on my living room television, and I control and access this content through a simple stick remote that looks very much like the one I used when I began to channel surf so many years ago.

This anecdote describes both the banality and the complexity of the viewer/user’s (sometimes, called the “viewser”) experience of television in the current moment. And yet, it is not merely the viewer whose practices have been transformed—there is more “television” being produced by more “entities” than ever before—no longer do legacy production companies have the monopoly on television production nor do broadcast and cable networks control the venues through which viewers view. National advertisers promoting those products, companies, and services that had previously bankrolled television production no longer provide the majority of funding to create television. Finally, Nielsen, the quantifier that began, quite literally, by assessing the sales patterns of soup in the 1930s, now finds itself figuratively “going nuts” as it attempts to capture myriad ways and locations in which television is consumed and to create reliable and monetizeable “ratings products” for an industry in flux. Its efforts to stay relevant are further complicated by the existence of subscription-only venues (Netflix, Amazon Instant Video) that have no need for “ratings products” as well as hybrid endeavors (Hulu) that stream content from broadcast and cable “brands” in the same window as the broadcast or cable premieres and also carry advertising from the same companies that make network ad buys. Complicating this further, broadcast and cable television networks, free and pay-per-view “on demand” content, subscription “television” networks and internet streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, and YouTube are all delivered to the home by cable and/or satellite operators who are also the United States’ largest providers of internet services.

In March 2012, political economist and media scholar Janet Wasko hosted a four-day conference at the University of Oregon devoted to answering the question: “What is television?” The 150 participants, industry executives, producers, writers, archivists, and academics proffered about 150 answers. The different definitions of “television,” of course, reflect not only the different academic perspectives and stakeholding positions, but also the multifarious and mutable aspects of “television” as a technology, an industry, a cultural form, and a federally regulated mass medium. Horace Newcomb, arguably one of the founders of the academic field of television studies, has used the term “prismatic” when discussing the medium—as a way of acknowledging that perceptions of it change depending on the perspective through which one approaches it.¹

In short, the television industry has never faced such tectonic shifts. The changes in production, distribution, and reception cut across all televisual industry practices, companies, technologies, narrative structures, and usages and affect the very definition of “television” in an era when the production and consumption of “television shows” may never have been greater. We are in a crucial moment of change for arguably the most influential mass medium and culture industry of the twentieth century. While it remains to be seen what will be the most influential of the twenty-first (although at this point “the web” would seem to be the obvious leader), television’s “marriage” with web technology and streaming distribution ensures that it will remain an influential, popular, and ubiquitous media form. What is not clear is how the technological, industrial, cultural, and economic attributes of television will change—as television moves from mass medium to niche media. TV has become, irretrievably, an “on demand” media form. As such, it demands new ways of thinking and considerations of the transformations it has and continues to experience. As TV gets bigger (more series, more creators, more channels, more streaming options) it is simultaneously becoming more niche. It is massive, but no longer mass.

This book investigates transformations in viewer behavior and program discovery; audience quantification; program development; regulation and the international market for televisual content that combine, collaborate, and collude to redefine and re-create “television” in the twenty-first century. Like the wavelengths of light revealed by a prism, these five facets can be examined individually. They must also be considered in relation to each other and in combination for their effects on the transformation of the medium as a whole. The challenge this poses to the theorist should not be underestimated. None of these areas has completed its transformation. All are in flux and change on an almost daily basis—sometimes imperceptibly (the announcement of a new series on Hulu, a YouTube “influencer” landing a network development deal), sometimes with great fanfare (the first Emmy win by an internet streaming entertainment company, net neutrality rulings by the FCC). A great deal of current scholarship and commentary is descriptive or proscriptive, but in terms of analysis it can be slippery and it is hard to push beyond conclusions such as “we shall see.” Articulating a perspective and analysis that will not be obsolete by the time of publication is a constant challenge.

It is for this reason that one of the foci of this book examines ways of talking about these transformations, using metaphor and comparison to hive out intricate shifts in perception and understanding of traditional practices, drawing upon other frameworks (such as the fine art industry and museological practices) to illuminate the players, structures, and processes of the transitions. In her contribution to Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette’s anthology of scholarship on the then-new genre cycle, Murray quotes anthropologist Margaret Mead speaking in 1972 to TV Guide Magazine about the PBS show An American Family: “I do not think that An American Family should be called a documentary. I think we need a new name for it, a name that would contrast it not only with fiction, but with what we have been exposed to up until now on TV.”² Murray discusses how discourse around shows and genre distinctions affects decisions about programming, distribution, and marketing as well as audience reception and engagement. What we call things creates meanings that affect how they are perceived and chosen, or, placed in an environment from which they could be chosen.

The way that we call or name things is a function of meaning creation which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue is ultimately and inextricably metaphorical. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson free the study of metaphor and meaning from the boundaries of epistemological philosophy and structural linguistics, arguing that “metaphor is a matter of central concern, perhaps the key to giving an adequate account of understanding.”³ What Lakoff and Johnson discovered is that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”⁴

As a result, we often engage in the communication of meaning via metaphor without really investigating the totality of what we have communicated, so metaphors can also mask hidden meanings, perceptions, or concepts since “a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept.”⁵ An example of this would be the metaphor of “binge watching” which borrows its conceptual framework from the discourse of food pathologies (bulimia). One would note that the metaphorical connection ends there since we do not talk about “purge watching” (which would be conceptually illogical since we perceive watching to be an act of bringing a text “into” our experience rather than “expelling” something from ourselves).

More to the point, Lakoff and Johnson’s discovery that: “the concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.”⁶ How we use metaphor to express our experiences of the cultural texts, technologies, activities, processes, and procedures of our environment structures our understanding of our world and our experience of it. When we adopt new metaphors for activities (curation for the act of program selection—either by a viewer or a network), these metaphors bring with them hidden and unintended meanings as well as opportunities. This book interrogates the old and new metaphors that viewers, creators, critics, and regulators use to codify “television” and our experience of it.

The very term “television” has become a very particular type of metaphor—it is a synecdoche. Synecdoche is the use of any part of a larger concept or entity to refer to the whole or by naming a much larger conceptual existence of which the part is a contributing component.⁷ In short, the part stands for the whole or an overarching whole stands for the/a part of that whole. The process by which synecdoche occurs is metonymy, which differs from metaphor: “metaphor is principally a way of conceiving one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding,” write Lakoff and Johnson.⁸ “Metonymy, on the other hand, has primarily a referential function, that is, it allows us to use one entity to stand for another.”⁹ In this case, the consumer good—the “television set”—has come to stand for the cultural texts originally watched on it, the industry that produces these texts, the distribution methods through which one receives these texts, and the alternative cultural forms developed for distribution to the screens that occupy our homes. And yet the actual artifacts—while still referred to as televisions—would be much more accurately defined and described as “computer monitors.” As a result our understanding of “television” tends toward the monolithic and presents the challenge of having to define (often through the invocation of other metaphors) which “activity,” “sector,” “experience,” or “aspect” of television one is naming by use of the term.

The process, possibilities, and power of the liminal

The range of experiences that currently inhere, affect, and pertain to all of the facets of the televisual whole can be characterized as “rites of passage,” a concept first codified in Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage; a groundbreaking, yet underappreciated work of anthropology published in French (Les rites de passage) in 1909 but not translated into English until 1960. This term is used to name a variety of ritualistic transformations that are employed by societies in response to either expected cyclical changes (adolescence, death, a transfer of cultural power) or externally enforced or introduced interventions (extreme weather, the encountering of strangers in a previously familiar territory). These rites have very distinct phases, the middle one of which is highly fluid and transformative and is known as “the liminal.” Television, its industrial practices, its texts, its technologies, and its viewers are, I would suggest, experiencing a prolonged “liminal” state.

The anthropological conception of “the liminal” is part of Van Gennep’s original project—to make sense of the rituals and rites he observed in the ceremonies of preliterate and literate peoples by creating a taxonomy based on the characteristics and functions of events that ordered their societies. His schema resulted in the identification of three distinct but interrelated phases that are present in all rites of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. Individuals passed through these states on their way from fetus to infant, child to adult, injury or illness to health, unattached to married, live to dead—in other words they marked, organized, and aided in all stages of the life cycle of the people within these societies and were relied upon to codify and structure society. These rites were, according to Van Gennep, crucial for the continued viability and existence of these societies since “rites of passage, with their symbolic representation of death and rebirth, illustrate in a more general w...