Core Response #2 (Petrus)

 I was struck, in reading of Todd Gitlin’s contemplations of the upholding of ideological hegemony in television, especially by the notion that “commercial culture does not manufacture ideology; it relays and reproduces and processes and packages and focuses ideology” (Gitlin, 253). It’s worth considering if, by his claim, the reactionary rather than revolutionary uses of television, and its means to reinforce the status quo, still dominate television today, especially with the blurring lines between film and television in its production, packaging, and reception. I will briefly explore how the means of television reception and content today often reinforce, rather than challenge, ideological hegemony.

 

Gitlin briefly touches on Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s notions that mass culture reinforces the dominant (in their context fascist) hegemony by ways of creating mindless distraction — rather than assembling, debating, unionizing after long days of work in an increasingly industrial and isolating landscape, the working classes would amuse themselves in the cinema, and later within their family units around the television (in increasing isolation as the decades progressed). In an era of “binge watching,” where one sits for an (often unplanned or intended) extended period of time in front of a show, most likely in a state of distraction, and most importantly within the isolation of one’s home, it is easy to see that the act of watching television today could be a frightening precursor to a shift away from assembling to challenge the sources of today’s working-class misery. The Covid-19 pandemic especially incited the entire world to sit at home and binge watch, to distract themselves from the highly political origins of a world in distress.  

 

In the streaming age, the ability to choose from a vast library of programs also leads to a reinforcing of one’s ideology. As Heather Hendershot describes of the fragmented “post-network television,” in the period before streaming overtook television, programs still presented fairly ambiguous messages around ultimately “innocuous” political subjects (Hendershot, 205) from which different viewers could extract their own messages. Today, we may see greater fragmentation as streaming platforms generate immense numbers of programs with their own target audiences. No longer does a program need to cater to the age range of an entire family or the ideological beliefs of an array of citizens. Political subjects become far more overtly thrust into dialogue and plots — yet this trend is still far more reactionary than revolutionary, as it reinforces a divided status quo, catering to the beliefs of those watching, and clearly only rides on already popular ideologies rather than generating beliefs, as Gitlin writes of television in the 1970s. For example, recently there has been a trend of rebooting television series, such as Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. Such shows serve to satisfy curiosities regarding how ideologies have changed in the decades since the prior series aired, how these characters navigate a new era. Carrie Bradshaw and Co, feminist icons of sorts in the late 1990s, now struggle with pronouns, sexual fluidity, and the creeping fear of irrelevance, while a new generation of Manhattan’s elite teenagers — once pushing the envelope of teen programming (which I would argue was a rare form of revolutionary television), obnoxiously perpetuate a caricature of Gen Z lingo, clearly written by an older generation of writers. These two programs, targeted towards both a new generation of program viewers who would be only vaguely familiar with the source material and previous enjoyers of the original shows, preach overtly progressive rhetoric to already progressive viewers. Without the captive audience of prior television programming, shows on streaming platforms perhaps further fragment a now twofold, divided ideological hegemony, with independent spheres of ideological banter that only reinforces, rather than challenges, beliefs. 

But more importantly, Couscous:

Core Response #2 (Devin Glenn)

In “Television as a Cultural Forum,” Newcomb and Hirsch argue that television shows should be seen not as pushing fixed political agendas upon their viewers, but as opening a discussion space, or forum, in which “a multiplicity of meanings rather than a monolithic dominant point of view” can be present (564). This acknowledgement stood out to me in our readings as it emphasizes that both the modes and motivations of production and consumption are essential to consider when reading into the political possibilities of TV programs. Eileen does an excellent job exploring the ways in which “Betty, Girl Engineer” could be read alternatively using queer and feminist frameworks. In this response, I too would like to build upon Newcomb and Hirsch’s fundamental thesis by providing yet another example of an episode from the early 1950s which is commonly viewed as reaffirming conservative values, but also has the potential to contain “a multiplicity of meanings” depending on how it is analyzed (564).

            During an episode of I Love Lucy entitled “Job Switching,” Lucy, Ethel, and their spouses decide to exchange places according to their traditional gender roles—the husbands act as housewives for a day while the wives go out in search of work. This deliberate flip-flop of the social order enforced through western patriarchal ideologies reflects what Bakhtin describes as the carnivalesque; a second life set apart from the rigid rules and strict caste system of everyday life. But because all those involved in this experiment end up failing miserably at their respective tasks and return to their assigned roles at the end of the episode, many (including Bakhtin himself) might argue that the characters in I Love Lucy ultimately remain unchanged. It is hard to deny that this is problematic when viewed as a cautionary tale attempting to reinforce the status quo.

However, the interesting thing to note about this episode is that Lucy and Ethel do not actually take over Ricky and Fred’s jobs. Instead, they work at a candy factory on an assembly line. In a comedic scene which draws inspiration from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Lucy and Ethel cannot keep up with a mechanic conveyor belt which only ever increases in speed. Perhaps, then, when looked at through more of a Marxist lens, this episode could be read as a rejection of capitalistic structures which prioritize consumerism and effectiveness over workers themselves. Had Lucy and Ethel been able to take over from Ricky and Fred as a music leader and landlord, the outcome may very well have been different. And even if it weren’t, shouldn’t the failures of all four characters be attributed less to their gender and more to the fact that it was only their first days on their new jobs? Once again, this could be read more as a critique of the system itself which forces individuals to become “experts” within a small sector of society, denying them access to other forms of labor and knowledge.

And now I’m not quite sure how to wrap up. I suppose I’ll end by saying that this act of analyzing cultural products using alternative contextual modes allows such works to be viewed not necessarily as didactic decrees, but as open forums.

Core Response #1 by SMDI

Gitlin’s text reminds me of other Marxist work of its period that laments how institutions or markets absorb the otherwise revolutionary potential of the avant-garde to suit a liberal agenda. The scholar acknowledges, with a dialectical mode very characteristic of historical materialism, that what marks a hegemonic ideology as defined by Gramsci is conflict and contradiction: a society that encourages hard work promises leisure as a form of satisfaction. This ideology manifests itself practically and empirically, Gitlin argues, in a structured from of television that in its careful manipulation of time, ritual, and routine rekindles for the bourgeoisie a life not dissimilar to that of the factory. In its cultural prominence, television incorporates “alternative material” and overrides “oppositional forms,” institutionalizing ideological critique and forcing it into “compatibility” for its own dominant systems.

On one hand, it is disheartening to think that a 1979 article, written as global capitalism consolidates itself and as neoliberalism gains academic prominence, describes what I feel is the dominant mode of media distribution today. On another, Gitlin’s provocations serve us to understand, for example, such recent shows as Severance, distributed on Apple TV. The question remains: how could a show that blatantly criticizes office work oblige the needs of such corporate giants as Apple? I would argue, tentatively, that Severance’s existence lies in parallel with several other promises of our neoliberal age: the very concept of work-life balance, fulfilled through superficial efforts in the workforce, appeases ideological opposition while reconsolidating the very structures that expunge any semblance of worker satisfaction.

Formally, the distance that Severance maintains from a reproducible present represents the distance it takes from any criticism that could kindle political consciousness. The office we see is not one of 2023: Severance operates in a technological present nonetheless adorned with midcentury aesthetics and late-century media. It excuses ordinary work as we know it because “of course Apple wouldn’t implant chips on its workers, that’s dystopic and absurd”; it forgives exploitation with a cinematic promise of fictional spectacle. Naturally, Severance only exists in a subscription-based platform, tailored and optimized for Apple devices.

Core Response #2 by Eileen DiPofi

        For this week’s response, I am interested in how “Betty, Girl Engineer” sustains hegemony in the way Gitlin describes: “by domesticating opposition, absorbing it into forms compatible with the core ideological structure” (264). This process, as I see it, takes place through the alternative Betty poses to a hetero-patriarchal system of norms. For one, she takes on what the other characters consistently emphasize is a “male job.” As Doyle Hobbes makes clear, her taking on this role is a threat to his own masculinity. He states that it would be a “dirty trick” for her to take a man’s job; her “place is in the home.” By becoming an engineer, Betty usurps the man’s place as breadwinner and as such threatens the traditional order of the family unit. However, beyond just taking a man’s job, she actually begins to take his place entirely: she dresses like a man, even borrowing her brother’s boots, and takes a man’s name (B.J.) Thus, Betty/B.J.’s challenge is not only a usurpation of man’s authority within the family unit; by becoming masculine, she threatens to eliminate him entirely. Within the threat of her feminism lies a threat of queerness/transness, and I was honestly quite shocked at just how far the episode was willing to take her gender-nonconformity. Her mother “feels as though we don’t have a daughter anymore,” a refrain that might be heard from a parent concerned about having a butch daughter or trans son. Whether we read her opposition as a feminist or queer one (and these, of course, are not mutually exclusive), Betty/B.J. clearly threatens a family unit that sustains itself through both male authority and heterosexual reproduction. However, through Gitlin, we can see that Betty’s transgressions ultimately facilitate, rather than undermine, the “cultural reproduction” of this set of relations (251). 

        In his discussion of television’s “format and formula,” Gitlin contends that the “commercial” interests of television are inseparable from its “production” imperatives; both are oriented towards the “week-to-weekness” of the program (254). Gitlin insists that these commercial structures create programs whose production sustains narrative and character stasis—the promise that the show will return at the same time and place next week also demands that the same characters and diegesis return as well. These commercial and production norms demand that characters are “preserved intact” for next week’s episode; on an economic level, “it is far easier for production companies to hire writers to write for standardized, static characters than for characters who develop” (254). This standardization imposes a limit on “Betty, Girl Engineer”—essentially, regardless of what happens during the episode, Betty must end the episode as she began it: a feminine, heterosexual, and domesticated young woman. When Father Knows Best returns next week, “B.J.” cannot return with it. Paradoxically, however, the imperatives of standardization that ensure that B.J. is eradicated are also the condition of his possibility: it is only because of the promise that Betty will be restored by the episode’s end that B.J. is allowed to temporarily take her place. Betty’s gender transgressions operate as what Gitlin calls “legitimated forms of opposition”—transgressions that are not only excused, but are actually required, by liberal capitalism: its hegemonic system routinely “frames” alternative forms, “incorporat[ing]” them and thereby neutralizing their threat (264). By allowing Betty to realize the error of her ways, Father Knows Best both accommodates difference and uses that dissenting voice to promote its dominant ideology: Betty/B.J.’s transgression is “framed” as a temporary exploration that leads her back to her proper role as the feminine counterpart to the re-masculinized Hobbes. This “absor[ption]” of Betty/B.J.’s non-conformity works “to convey images of social steadiness” across a broader timescale as well (263, 254), as Betty’s return to her “proper” domestic role creates an inter-generational continuity. While B.J. raises the specter of pro-feminist social progress— “Did it ever occur to you the world might be changing?”—this possibility is foreclosed when Betty takes up the position modeled by her mother. From Margaret to Betty, hetero-patriarchy is naturalized as a social order that persists despite generational shifts. As Hobbes makes quite explicit, men are looking for “somebody who reminds [them] of [their] mother.” 

        While my analysis of the episode is mostly consistent with Gitlin’s paradigms, I do think it is important to recognize, as Hirsch and Newcomb do, that by raising the question of gender deviance, the show opens room for dissent. I agree with their point that “our emotional sympathy is with Betty throughout this episode”; two minutes of resolution does not entirely diminish that which the other 23 minutes raise (565). The fact that for the majority of the episode we are actually invited to identify with Betty’s feminist, cross-dressing exploits opens a space for female and/or queer viewers. When Betty returns next week, for some viewers the memory of B.J. will come with her, even if the show does not acknowledge it.

Core Response #1 - Josh Martin

What is so incredibly compelling to me about both Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch's "Television as a Cultural Forum" and Heather Hendershot's much later essay on Parks and Recreation as a cultural forum are the ways in which both remain locked into their historical eras, inviting later responses and criticisms within a changing media landscape. Newcomb and Hirsch's essay seems to set forth a brilliant methodology for approaching the contradictions apparent in many texts -- a conceptual approach to media texts that still holds up today. But despite the longevity of that idea, Hendershot's essay serves as such a response to Newcomb and Hirsch's idea of the cultural forum more generally: acknowledging that we are now living in a world "with hundreds of channels on offer... in a niche-viewing environment" (205), Hendershot puts pressure on the broader assertions made by the authors in their notable essay, essentially questioning whether the cultural forum still exists today in any form.

Hendershot's essay works within an unusual structure, often refuting and unpacking the argument that the essay puts forth while still providing the necessary evidence to support its claims. Suggesting initially that the 2010s NBC show "Parks and Recreation offers a liberal-pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment," Hendershot later notes that, for all intents and purposes, nobody was watching, thus putting its status as a cultural forum into question (206). Parks and Rec episodes dealing with gay marriage and other social issues were decidedly uncontroversial -- as Hendershot notes, the show was defined by "consistently poor ratings," even if she was indeed correct that the series would find its audience eventually (210). 

Though fundamentally accepting that the Newcomb/Hirsch cultural forum idea does not function in the same way in the contemporary age, even in a program that fits such a model, Hendershot also contends that Parks and Rec mirrors "the essence of [Newcomb and Hirsch]'s conception of television as a cultural forum" (211) and implicitly argues for the necessity of such a concept. Yet Parks and Rec, for all its pleasures as a television program, also feels profoundly dated at a moment of further political fragmentation -- it is a relic of the Obama era, fully unequipped to handle the reality of the post-Trump moment. Rather than fully disproving Hendershot -- or the continued utility of the Newcomb/Hirsch model -- I'm more interested in something she suggests earlier in the essay, which seems to me a different approach within the deployment of the cultural forum idea. Hendershot notes that in the aforementioned "niche" environment, "viewers tend to gravitate to content that matches their preexisting interests," a gravitation that I would argue is supported by the limited audience for Parks and Rec. In this way, I wonder if we've moved from an era of The Cultural Forum to cultural forums, plural. Nobody watched the Olivier Assayas Irma Vep show on HBO Max last summer in the grand scheme of things; for me and fifteen other cinephile losers (I say this affectionately, should any other of my fellow losers read this), that show was an essential jumping point to negotiate questions of cinema, personal relationships with art, politics of business, etc. These cultural forums still address the essential issues, often in ways that mirror the contradictions of Newcomb and Hirsch, but they are not monocultural in the same sense. The paradigm has shifted too far. However, does the plurality of cultural forums negate the importance of the concept? Is the singularity of a given cultural forum what matters? Like the contradictory and unresolvable texts that Newcomb and Hirsch approach, I leave this question unanswered.

Clips Week 2

McLuhan estate: https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/ 

Woody Allen clip  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E 

 

McLuhan on electric media:  

Marshall McLuhan 1960 popular… https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/films/ 

 

This is Marshall McLuhan: https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/films/ 

 

Raymond Williams: https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/about-raymond-williams/ 

 

Blipvert  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk 

 

SAMPLE OF FLOW TODAY: 

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/howtowatchTV/clips/flow-and-ifcs-onion-news-network 

 

Jane Feuer: 

https://www.ikkm-weimar.de/en/former-fellows/jane-feuer/ 

 

Mark William’s clip of the A-bomb test  https://criticalcommons.org/view?m=CODlOAAAr 

 

Direct address: The Goldbergs: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NItH5P7gd6k    

 

Father Knows Best: Betty Girl Engineer (Season 2, episode 30): FOR NEXT WEEK 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPuGw2jRQro 

http://www.amazon.com/Betty-Girl-Engineer/dp/B001R1HKI6 

Core Response #1 by Mike Goemaat

When referring to the distribution of films through television, Williams and McLuhan both use language of restriction or deficiency. Williams talks about how the technological limitations of television reduce the image quality, specifically when broadcasting a film, so much so that television is a less enjoyable experience: “I found it significant that the least satisfactory experience was that of viewing on the ordinary set” (Williams, 56). McLuhan, too, sees a high-low distinction between film and television. In “Television: The Timid Giant” he says “to contrast it with the film shot, many directors refer to the TV image as one of ‘low definition,’ in the sense that it offers little detail and a low degree of information, much like the cartoon” (McLuhan, 347). According to both scholars, it is television’s inability to render film in its original, theatrical quality that is a current (in their time) weakness of the medium. That being said, Williams and McLuhan could not have anticipated the technological evolutions that have exponentially increased the quality of at-home television presentation. Williams predicts that these “disadvantages are unlikely to be overcome,” and yet supporters of our Golden Age of Television (aka Prestige TV) would beg to differ (Williams, 55). 

I won’t fully define Prestige TV for I believe that, by now, many of us know it when we see it. Rather, I am interested in exploring the technological improvements that may have contributed to its rise. Television imagery in McLuhan’s time was “of low intensity or definition” but screens have gotten larger, sleeker, and capable of projecting images in Ultra High Definition and with improved sound (McLuhan, 350). As the technical limitations of the medium that Williams and McLuhan point out permanently disappear, have the medium’s mechanical improvements given rise to a more cinematic version of television? 

Obviously it is more complicated than simply saying that better television tech has improved television program quality, but I think there is a connection that is worth exploring. For instance, I’ve decided to rewatch Severance this week, a show that I adored last winter. Formally, it is full of “cinematic” signifiers. From its wide establishing shots of the Lumon Headquarters, to its high-angle tracking shots displaying the complexity of the office, and its variety of shot types to enhance the characters’ emotions, the show feels filmic. When McLuhan writes that “the TV image…does not afford detailed information about objects” and “the close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, quite a casual thing,” I think about how Severance deploys close-ups, most notably in its elevator scenes. Severance focuses on the elevator rides to depict not only a character’s physical transition from the outside world to the work world, but also a psychological transition from their true self to their severed self. To visualize this difference, the directors use a dolly zoom effect to widen or narrow their facial features and the background depending on which state they are entering and exiting. This technique has been in use for decades, most notably by Hitchcock in Vertigo. This makes it, by definition, a cinematic technique. This example blurs the distinction between film and television in ways that Williams and McLuhan could not have anticipated in the 60’s and 70’s, but it was their observations about the quality of television and its re-developed and newly invented forms that got me thinking in this way. 

Core Response #1 by Anushka Kartha

 Jane Feuer’s exploration into Good Morning America as a case of “liveness overcoming fragmentation” provides a ripe space for analysis; particularly, in looking at the relationship between flow and segmentation, and their larger implications during live programming. Raymond Williams’ definition of flow focuses on immediacy and the experience of television which is combined with another set of sequences (advertising, previews) to create one never-ending flow of television. To this, Feuer introduces the diction of fragmentation and segmentation to holistically describe the TV experience. 

When speaking of the Olympics, Feuer notes that “Only the ideological connotations of live television are exploited in order to overcome the contradiction between flow and fragmentation in television practice” (Feuer, 16) - a much changed practice today. Focusing notably here on the sport of cricket and one of its most successful tournaments, the Indian Premier League (IPL) which runs for approximately 3 months during which one has little to no room to escape its presence.

With the shortest format of the game lasting about 3.5-4 hours, cricket is tasked with the unique obstacle of viewer retention, not often seen in other sports. To accommodate for dull moments of play or simply boring games, the tournament depends on layers of liveness. This is not only seen through methods briefly mentioned by Feuer of instant replays, and technology guiding moments of ‘embedded liveness’ to encourage remote, televised interactivity with the audience. From taking the viewer into the privacy of the commentary box (where they can submit questions to be answered by the experts), to the studios with the pundits (for debates with fans who can tweet out their opinions to them), to the streets outside the stadium, there is a distinctive urgency with their use of ‘live’ interactivity. At home enthusiasts are offered a far more comfortable - and arguably more immersive - experience when consuming “The Big Game” from their homes, while being given exclusive access into areas impossible in person. 

This persistence of liveness combined with the need for interactivity offers an almost all encompassing milieu which prioritizes programming (and trickles into moments of fragmentation). During IPL season, broadcasters and advertisers turn regularly scheduled programming into an extension of the cricket field. Previews point to the tournament, L Bands pop up during games with advertisers cleverly (?) marketing their products along with a cheesy cricket reference, and cricketers traipse onto sets of talk shows on sister channels. The discussion of liveness, then, turns to how to retain attention and offer relevant interactivity despite the layers of (live) noise crowding onto our screens. 

Core Response #1 Petrus

 In reading Raymond Williams’ seminal writing on the role of television in a developing culture — and culture’s role in such a developing medium — in Television: Technology + Cultural Form (1974), paired with Marshall McLuhan’s work on the great changes that television is bringing to the consumption and spread of information in contemporary society in the comically titled The Medium is the Massage (1967), I immediately began contemplating, from a 21^st century perspective, how befitting certain theories are in today’s television. I am specifically interested here in the way US — and subsequently global — news presentation styles would be altered by the First Gulf War, especially the broadcasting of Operation Desert Storm (1990–91). Contrary to McLuhan’s notion that, “Whenever hot wars are necessary these days, we conduct them in the backyards of the world with the old technologies,” (138) the First Gulf War has been nicknamed the “video game war” for the US military’s advanced drone technology, which would come to resemble the alienated view of contemporary early digital war games and foreshadowed the near future of the war game genre’s aesthetics. Williams claims that American bulletins lack visualization (Williams, 41), though in the decades since, technological developments have paved way for live, on-the-ground reporting, and with it, expectations around (and pleasure in) disaster imagery. Continuously televised from the comfort of living rooms, in the wake of Kuwait’s invasion and the decimation of an entire generation of Iraqi men, American celebrity emerged. While O.J. Simpson’s trial is often credited for CNN’s entrance into TV staple status with its 24-hour news cycle, it was four years prior that CNN International created a standard for dramatic live disaster coverage with on-the-ground reporting, elevating the role of news anchors from those of trustworthy information-providers reporting from studios (Williams, 39) to the status of the celebrity. 

 

Anderson Cooper, as an example of one of today’s most celebrated journalists, began his career independently (presumably bankrolled by mama Vanderbilt) traversing through war-torn countries in the early 90s, photographing atrocities from the ground. This perceived merit earned through such grueling labor conditions, one seemingly in pursuit of a superior form of one’s craft, paved the way for the popularization of this form of reporting in major American news outlets, a standardization that would elevate reporters to the mythological status of an artist. Such journalists’ popularity rises evermore due to their charisma and relatability, with the arms of their coverage extending into comedy-news (e.g. Cooper’s CNN comedy segment The RidicuList and CNN’s comedic and formerly drunken New Year’s Eve coverage of anchor-celebrity duos), delivering them incomes comparable to Hollywood actors. On occasion, journalists transcend from the byline to the headline. A news presenter’s name being a household name is no 21st-century concept — these presenters were at the very least a nightly visitor to one's living room, after all. CBS journalist Walter Cronkite, for example, had a similar career trajectory to Cooper and exhibited a popular persona. As Williams refers to contemporary anchors, a certain informality in American broadcast lends trustworthiness (Williams, 39). Supporting this theory would require research beyond the scope of this response, but it appears that in the age of social media bringing the private lives of celebrities to the public, so too celebrity journalists are expected to share intimate details of their lives and appeal to emotion in ways perhaps unimaginable in Cronkite’s — and Williams’ — time. As technology enabling the live coverage of global events progressed far beyond the scope of broadcast that Raymond Williams wrote of in Technology + Cultural Form in 1974, expectations that global crises should be covered by beloved journalists have become standard in American news. Perhaps the rise of the celebrity journalist and the demand for disaster imagery is a symbiotic development in TV history.  

But more importantly, Couscous:

Core Response #1 (Devin Glenn)

One element I found particularly interesting in our reading was McLuhan’s characterization of TV as “a cool medium” which “rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of processes rather than of products” (341). As Understanding Media was published in 1964, the question has to be asked, does this description still hold true? Perhaps in some contexts it does, but in others, I personally feel it does not. The amount of people I have met who have told me they consciously do not watch or read the news anymore because “it would only upset them” (or some similar sentiment) is alarming. This directly contradicts Robert Stam’s claim that, “No matter how ‘bad’ the new might be. . . watching the new is pleasurable” (23). Could this, in part, be viewed as the result of TV—or at least televised news in the US—becoming less of a cool medium through systems which increasingly promote polarized partisan politics? Or has this always been the case?

Perhaps some feel that turning the news on in their homes, especially when violence or contention could be featured at any moment, constitutes an invasive intrusion into their domestic safe haven, but is not wanting one’s living room to be turned into a voting booth (to borrow McLuhan and Fiore’s metaphor) an adequate reason for remaining blissfully unaware (22)? The overwhelming majority of the people I am describing would self-identify as conservative, and their behavior seems to correspond with what they might describe as “traditional conservative values” which favor “the self-sufficient family home” over the “mobility” offered through being up-to-date on current issues (Williams 18). Such a phenomenon calls into question whether or not conservative individuals see a need at all for mobile privatization in the form of televised news broadcasts. While this outright rejection may be preferable to those same individuals actively seeking out right-wing networks which would only encourage them to be more extreme in their views, the idea that someone would deliberately cut themselves off from a major source of knowledge-based mobility remains an object of great concern.

Yet another example of how TV or society has evolved since Understanding Media’s original publication can be seen in the way some of McLuhan’s words do not hold up particularly well today. One of the most obvious instances is when he writes, “TV will not work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it” (344). In a day when people often watch shows on their phones as they work, clean, cook, get ready for bed, or do any number of tasks, TV can (to a certain extent) work very well as background noise, or at least can help transform a task itself into background noise. But I suppose determining the contemporary applicability of McLuhan’s claims depends on how one classifies what is and is not TV, a topic Feuer explores at length in her chapter.

Core Response #1 by Eileen DiPofi

            While I was somewhat familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous line, “the medium is the message,” before this week, Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology + Cultural Form, in addition to McLuhan’s writings and lecture, offered me a greater understanding of how the televisual medium constructs ideological meaning. Williams’s outline of a “social history of television” reveals that what made television unique from previous communication technologies like the press or the cinema was an early investment in the medium rather than its content (7). He contends that “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… the means of communication preceded their content” (17, emphasis original). It was the distribution of the medium that took precedence in terms of capital investment and development. Thus, from its very production as an institution, “the effect of T.V.” was, as McLuhan asserts in his 1977 lecture, “quite independent of the program” ("The Medium is the Message" Part 1).  

            I found Williams’s analysis of the form of news broadcasts to be particularly informative of how ideological messages transmitted through television. Williams emphasizes that television serves as an intermediary for our participation in “a public process” (44). This ideology of televisual representation “reinforces tendencies within the orthodox process of political representation, where representatives, between elections, acquire and claim a certain absolute character; if we do not like them, and through them their policies, we can change them at the appointed times” (45). Television rehearses our acceptance of a political participation that takes place through intermediaries and institutions. This legitimation of power, Williams demonstrates, operates by de-legitimizing those who threaten the status quo. In the case of news coverage of political dissent, the broadcast constructs a formal contrast “between the apparently reasoned responses of the arranged studio discussion and the apparently unreasoned, merely demonstrative, responses of the arranged and marginal visual event” (45). Reading this analysis, I was reminded of the similarities between coverage of protests following the killing of George Floyd and the insurrection at the U.S. capital. On the level of “content,” these two news events couldn’t be further apart; the former movement is a critique of white supremacy, and the latter is an example of its increasing power. However, the news coverage I saw of these two events, particularly during the earliest days of the protests for Black lives, was remarkably similar, even on supposedly left-leaning programs like CNN. The “rational” broadcaster in the studio looks out upon the uncontrolled masses. Field correspondents, while in proximity to the protestors, are observers, separated by the “authority” bestowed on them through the medium. Whether the reporters are decrying the assault on democracy posed by the insurrection or Black Lives Matter supporters’ destruction of “private property” (I vividly remember sensationalized coverage of Rodeo Drive) is less important than the contrast between the authoritative broadcaster and the unorganized, emotional protestors. The broadcaster is our proxy for proper political involvement. 

            Williams’s claim that broadcasting’s emphasis on distribution has historically distinguished it from other communication technologies makes me wonder how we might re-consider the medium at a time when the lines between broadcasting, cinema, and digital technologies cannot be so easily drawn. As we view films on streaming platforms, and as such their distribution patterns converge with those of television, can we say that cinema is becoming a broadcast medium? If that is the case, can we also say that for cinema, the “medium is the message,” and that its mode distribution takes precedence over the production of its content? I am wary of arguments that take this point to its extreme, but I think there is something to be said about the ways in which streaming platforms have made what we're watching less important than where. Is there really a substantial difference between watching Wednesday  or Ozark or Glass Onion when we're often more likely to say we're watching "Netflix"? As Williams, Jane Feuer, and McLuhan all demonstrate, an analysis of content that ignores the effects of its medium risks missing crucial ideological messages.