In her analysis of 24, Tara looks at technological convergence by situating the role of television—and its supposed dominance—against that of other media. The addition of split screening, or digital ornamentations, constitute “stylistic and visual excesses of melodramatic narrative” which “stitch us back into capitalism’s illusions even while feeling riveting and new” (180). I wonder if we could take these insights and transpose them to understand the technological convergence of more recent shows; how about, for example, the recent-ish implementation of on-screen cellphone texting?
(from You)
In older TV shows, and films too, everyday interruptions would come to us by means of a ringing telephone. With landlines rendered ostensibly obsolete in contemporary worldbuilding practices, everyday interruptions now come to us by cellphone pinging. The sound of this pinging, however, is often situated somewhere in between the text’s diegesis and our own television screens; we don’t hear cellphones as they would sound through a character’s pocket: rather, they are despatialized and foregrounded in the mix, as if the television itself were pinging. Similarly, the text messages are now pasted directly on screen; the information isn’t relayed narratively: we read them as we would our own texts.
Can we also understand this new—forced(?)—incorporation of “special effects” (178) as another manifestation of melodramatic structures, reinforcing a similar status quo while “feeling riveting and new”? How do we understand television not necessarily as the piece of furniture that provides us, faithfully, with Fox news, but as the technology that substitutes the phone in its own ability to ping and inform?
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