Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Core Post 5

The readings for this week examine how television (in its industrial, aesthetic, and spectatorial capacities) constitutes itself when untethered from an actual, physical television. This move “Outside the Box,” to borrow Amanda Lotz’s title for this week’s article, disrupted the spatiotemporal predictability previously thought a given of the medium. It is this disruption that Lotz charts in her article. Many of the industrial obstacles Lotz notes involve the emergence of what she calls “convenience technologies,” which include the DVR, VOD, and DVD. Networks previously relied on a certain level of audience passivity, in order to predict that viewers would remain physically planted and attentive to advertisements. Convenience technologies turns the audience from a passive recipient of television’s temporal flow (bringing us back once more to Raymond Williams) to an active craftsperson of that flow. The obstacle for advertisers and networks, then, is to construct predictability within this newly individualized temporality.
Lotz is right to note that these technologies put viewership dictates in the hands of the viewers themselves; at least for a time, because as Debbie Harry assured us, the industry is “gonna getcha one way or another.” Lotz also tracks the dark side of convenience technologies, noting the ways that these conveniences develop dependencies that provide a more acute managerial watchfulness. These convenience technologies double as another manifestation of Bentham’s panopticon, because while they bring the viewer closer to pleasure it is only insofar as they bring the viewer closer to their occupational duties. The employer knows where their employee is located: on the other end of the line.
This is admittedly a rather pessimistic reading of post-TV technological developments. However, I do concede that there are consumer and audience-driven benefits that come from these convenience technologies. The increased connectivity and communizing that results from such convenience allows for a quicker dissemination of news, politics, and grassroots organizing. These spaces within digital media allow for viewers to remain active in spite of the watchfulness. That is, until the next technology arrives.

6 comments:

  1. Great post, Jon. Thanks! You mentioned an aspect of the readings that also caught my attention. These new technologies are so attractive and successful because they are convenient. I do think this tendency to individualized television could drive to some sort of social ignorance. But on the other hand, as you mentioned, we have spaces within digital media that fulfill the function of social connectivity.

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  2. I like your reading of the ambiguities of digital media’s tendency to collapse of work and play, Jon. I have been wondering lately if the impossibility of digital privacy will ever reverse the ever-increasing surveillance of the employers over the employed. There has been a resurgence of analog skills as a means to “stay off the grid” and prevent security breeches. For instance, naval students are learning to navigate by the stars in order to be prepared for a serious hack (The Washington Post). These convenience technologies seem to be unstoppable–for good or bad–but I wonder if their omnipresence and user pliability could be a fatal flaw.


    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/02/17/why-naval-academy-students-are-learning-to-sail-by-the-stars-for-the-first-time-in-a-decade/

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  3. Thanks for bringing us back to the Panopticon, Jon. I think that this particular idea is important when thinking about Lotz, and about Parks as the adoption of this kind of technology is not merely for the ease of access for the viewer, but for the ease of access for the advertiser. We have entered into a space where we are fed particular ideas, brands, and consumable items all merely just a click away, aware to some extent of our watchful guards, but unable (for the most part) to see them. We are aware of data mining, of our omnipresent and for the time being benevolent (sometimes, depending on who you are and what you stand for) lord Google, and we have become, I think, arguably complacent in those ideas. We invite objects like the Kinect, and the Nielsen Box, and Alexa from Amazon into our homes to willingly listen, spy, and inform on us to the people who wish to manipulate us into capitalistic objects.

    I'd be interested in thinking more about the Panopticon and the Internet, but for now, ever wary of whether or not Google, who is responsible for this very blogging is going to block me, I will wait to discuss this further in class.

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    1. Thanks for the post Jon, and thanks to Amalia for bringing up some key examples of the Panopticon at work. I agree that in a post-Snowden America, there's a pervasive sense of how "everyone knows" about data mining (governmental and corporate alike, in a kind of generalized way), but as you both point out, such "convenience technologies" are a double edged sword. The question becomes: at what point is one willing to sacrifice inconvenience for privacy? Surely very few want Lord Google to know their exact location throughout the day, yet who is willing to turn the GPS of their phone off permanently? It seems that the problem is less that convenience technologies are too tempting, but rather the inconvenience of going without them is unthinkable (as anyone who has dared to navigate LA's jammed highways without GPS can surely attest to).

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  4. I totally agree with your point about the disruption of flow with television’s move “outside the box” (into many other kinds of boxes maybe). However, I am a little skeptical about a Benthamite reading of this kind of surveillance. I think the nature of surveillance is a little different here since its not one center of power gazing at the unseeing subject. I think data mining of the kind that enables Amazon and Netflix’s “personalization” of the viewing experience rely centrally on inputs from the user as well. This of course, does not change the fact that we are still being looked at, but I think we participate much more actively in this kind of looking. Danielle’s idea of convenience as a double edged sword foregrounds this fact—we knowingly participate in our own surveillance and tracking as we navigate the grid of the world, unlike in the Benthamite Panopticon where the gaze is unilateral.

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    1. Darshana, I agree with your complication of the Benthamite gaze with regards to the Internet. I think that, at least for me, the most useful lens through which to view the relationship between the Internet and the Panopticon is less to do with "managerial watchfulness" than a kind of performativity, a behavior governed by the presumption of an unauthored and omnipresent gaze. I think social media, more than platforms like Amazon and Netflix, is entirely predicated on the desire, fear, and possibility of 'being seen,' for better or worse (either being seen as the possibility of constructing one's own ideal self-image, or being surveilled, policed or censored) and in that way gives rise to a self-conscious, self-historicizing, constantly reinforced and compartmentalized (think of the separateness and structural sameness of each Facebook or Instagram account) performance of the self.

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