Television remains a blind spot for media theory. From postwar newspaper reviewers to cultural studies academics, the impossibility of isolating the scope of the televisual “text” to a single unit of analysis has posed a great challenge for many critics. In coming to terms with the fact of television, a great amount of time is spent on the effort of wrapping some sort of intelligible model around the sheer pervasiveness of the medium.
A common fallback position is to simply say that television has no attributes of its own. It is not a medium––let alone an art form––with any distinctive features. TV reviewer Richard Burgheim, in the August 1969 issue of Harpers: “Television … is not one of the arts but a mere transmitter of them. How do you love a 19-inch Motorola or a network vice-president?”
Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content. When the question of content was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically. (18)
Content was merely an afterthought to the primary economic incentive to develop and construct a television infrastructure. “The general social definition of ‘content’ was already there” (22), providing a store of earlier social forms and events in order to serve the expansion of the broadcast apparatus: news, sporting events, debates, and techniques stolen from theatrical and motion picture language.
And yet there always seems something wrong with this tried and true fallback position. Burgheim at once poses and shies away from the exact question we should be asking: how do we love a 19-inch Motorola?
Inventor of the iconoscope Vladimir Zworykin counts the ways in the less excitingly subtitled Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940). Co-authored with his colleague at RCA G.A. Morton, this book is an important and overlooked primer for attuning narrative analysis to the specificities of a given medium. After six hundred pages detailing the physics of electrons and fluorescence, the principles of UHF transmission and reception, and several working prototypes of complete tv systems, Zworykin devotes the concluding section of the book to what is no less than a poetics of television programming––programming which did not yet exist. Read the rest of this entry »
The other day, one of my students pointed me toward the Chinese manhua series ”Old Master Q.” Created by Alfonso Wong in the early 1960s, the comic parodied aspects of modern Chinese culture such as consumerism, pop music, technology, and the increasing prevalence of the English language.
One of the most frequent themes taken up by the series is television. What strikes me about Wong’s work is the way in which the grammar of these jokes relies on an idea of the tv screen as a kind of permeable boundary. Like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot trying to figure out the “conveniences” of modern technology, Old Master Q bashes his set, flips it upside down, takes it with him to soccer matches, and tries to track the movement of images beyond their frame. The humor stems from the fact that each time, Q either assumes that the images transcend the glass plane of the CRT screen, or they actually do. Beginning with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914), there has been an established tradition of comics whose humor relies on play with panel boundaries, size and scale. Here, Alfonso Wong uses the tv set to embed this aesthetic within square, even panels.
“Old Master Q” injects absurdity into the way people understood tv sets to work, and in the process leaves an archive of potential and everyday television use in 1960s China. Most often, these jokes revolve around the gullibility of the Master Q (click through for larger images)…
…or the physicality of the images themselves, as if the tv’s content could literally bounce around inside the set:
But there are other panels whose humor reimagines modes of television spectatorship…
Most analysts have connected Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, a startup music streaming company, to their $1 billion North Carolina data center in development since this summer. The server farms will perhaps appear here, as various sources have reported, in sites along route 321 and the town of Maiden in particular, where Apple’s presence already appears in a quick Google maps search. Putting Lala and Maiden together, all signs point toward the possibility of cloud storage for iTunes–perhaps along with some subscription-based model–which would stream all your music from this future location. If Apple is at the forefront of a sea change here, as they usually are, this move prefigures some massive realignments not only to habits of listening but–more drastically–to collecting.
One could perhaps find signs of this some time ago. I remember a conversation I had with my undergraduate advisor about five years back, sitting in his office surrounded by painstakingly organized–never alphabetized–media of every sort, and comparing our respective listening habits. At that point I had a 120GB iPod, and he ventured that surely I couldn’t have listened to every single song stored on there–and of course I hadn’t. This was the case for the majority of my classmates, and it was pretty clear that our modalities of collecting music, our means and reasons for it, had been fundamentally altered during the movement away from physical media.
But this was also a time when I was listening to more than I ever had before, thanks to a campus wide Direct Connect (DC++ to be exact) hub. Networks were small and slow enough to preclude absolute totalization–one certainly couldn’t find everything, and users took pride in the organization and scope of their personal archives, with the tree file structure of each individual user preserved as a part of the interface. On the other hand, we had enough speed to download the entire back catalog of Beethoven, for instance, which I did over the course of a few days.
[Students gathering at Rutgers New Brunswick to protest the administration's shutdown of a campus-wide Direct Connect hub. People revealed their usernames and boasted how many gigs they had shared. The address and pass for a new hub was already circulating through the crowd. 4/29/04]
While we were downloading faster than we could ever possibly listen, we were storing these files in a manner that expressed something of the collector. The user leaves traces on these obscene amounts of data if only through the act of collecting the fact ofaccess to a particular spectrum of material, rather than collecting the fact of the songs themselves. Because none of us can actually own or intellectually encompass such a collection (>250MB of audio), the curation, the interface, the display of this collection becomes all important, as Susan Stewart recognizes: “Any collection promises totality. The appearance of that totality is made possible by the face-to-face experience of display, the all-at-onceness under which the collection might be apprehended by an observer. This display of course marks the defeat of time, the triumph over the particularity of contexts in which the collected objects first appeared” (“Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Wilson Peale” 185).
Enter this new dispositif–collecting in the cloud–and we must rethink what kind of work a collection of access points does in the (local) absence of the data itself. Without material ownership over the data, what do we display our access to? This complete dissociation of the interface from the archive will certainly open up the potential for new modalities of self-fashioning so important to the practice of collecting. But streaming music at something like the $1 billion scope Apple appears to have in mind, personal collections would stand as little more than permutations at 10¢ a piece of the totalizing mega-archive housed at Maiden, NC. If for Benjamin “the collector is the true resident of the interior,” she now inhabits a steady dissolution and condensation of this cloud whose absolute ubiquity is predicated on a mere 183 acres pulsing with 20 megawatts annual power consumption and thousands of feet of water line to maintain an operating temperature of 68ºF. An economy of scale must be retained between the imprint of the collector and the “appearance of [a] totality” that is not reducible to Maiden, NC.
In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us to speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function? Read the rest of this entry »
![[Students gathering at Rutgers New Brunswick to protest the shutdown of the campus-wide Direct Connect network. The address and pass for a new network was already circulating in the crowd.]](http://wythoff.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/DSC00565.JPG "DSC00565")
