3520 TV Theory

Lecture 6: Seeing Things and Televisuality

Ellis’ key concept: witnessing

Witnessing: “we cannot say that we do not know”

Accessibility of the world through media produces a mixture of knowledge and separation that breeds guilt, disinterest but also feelings of complicity

Key condition: the media-saturated society

TV: maximises witness by making it live

Historical phases of the TV/consumer society relation: scarcity

From the 1920s: modern domestic consumer economy

Premises: (Fordist) mass production, mass middle class affluency

The single-channel society: a common public and private life

Heyday of public service broadcasting

Ellis’ phase II: availability

Scarcity reduced by commercial competition: USA from the outset, Britain from the 1950s, Norway from the 1980s

Technology tendencies: several TVs, the remote, video

Consumer tendencies: further affluence, move toward subcultural/sectional interests, marking difference

Production tendencies: differentiation, flexibilisation

Key concept: working through

Ideal situation: a viewer uses multi-channel television to come to terms with the uncertainties and frustrations of witnessing

Working through “… renders familiar, integrates and provides a place for the difficult material that it brings to our witness. It exhausts an area of concern …” (p. 79)

Borrowed from psychoanalysis: the stage of coming to terms with what the unconscious reveals

Caldwell:Televisuality

Televisuality: a catch-all term for a set of aesthetic, production and organisation tendencies

Wider framework: the crisis of the American networks from the 1980s: Fox, cable

Organisation strategies: audience targeting: 20-40 group, upmarket moves, recycling

Production: Introduction of digital technology in production (e.g video assist) and postproduction (e.g effects suites)

Aesthetics of televisuality

The videographic

The painterly

The plastic

The transparent

Intermedia

The cinematic

Highlighted milieus

Narrative expansion & complexity

Event-status programming

Authorialism

Caldwell’s critiques

Critique of the “glance theory” (Ellis’ “Visible Fictions”)

Critique of the ideology of liveness (e.g Scannell)

Critique of the high theory/low culture divide

(e.g. critical theory)

Ellis’ phase III: Plenty

Digitalisation of distribution does away with the scarcity argument around frequencies and allows for plentiful channel output

Introduces new modes of distribution: digital TV, web TV, TIVO

Introduces new modes of interacting: buying programming and consumer goods, “co-producing” programmes, participating in programmes

The logic of channel and program loyalty is tendentially replaced by brand loyalty

Critique of the interactive choice ideal

Industry discourse involves a promise of viewer empowerment, through choice and through interactive added services that turn the consumer into an active user

Ellis: “Time famine”, “choice fatigue”

Caldwell: demand-led development, ideology of choice, “interactive pizza”