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: