3520 TV Theory Lecture 6: Seeing Things and Televisuality

1. 3520 TV Theory Lecture 6: Seeing Things and Televisuality

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. Aesthetics of televisuality • The videographic • The painterly • The plastic • The transparent • Intermedia • The cinematic • Highlighted milieus • Narrative expansion & complexity • Event-status programming • Authorialism

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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”