Core Response #5 -- Alexandra Lavin

 Lisa Park's paper on flexible microcasting and the unsteady convergence of television and the internet got my thinking a lot about the relationship between television and the internet today, and to what degree the two cultures are compatible. 

In Park's article, she described the very early versions of television trying to appeal to teens by appealing to digital youth culture. Despite the internet expanding rapidly beyond what is described in this article, it is still very clear that television does not quite understand how to include the presence of the internet into their character's lives. This is especially clear on many teen television shows. The writers know that teenagers spend half their lives online, but often can't help but betray their age and inexperience with the internet every time they bring it up -- they use impact-font memes from over a decade ago, everything goes "viral" at the drop of a hat, and internet slang is thrown clumsily into every other line of dialogue. The immediacy of the internet and the delay of television creates an inherent incompatibility between the two mediums, as any attempt television makes to include the internet in the universe of the show will inevitably be seen as out of date. Certain teen TV shows ignore the internet altogether for this very reason. This is also clear in the many, many different ways televisions shows try to include texting into their format. Do they just show the phone screen, with the words way bigger than they should be so we can read it? Do text bubbles pop up on screen, disrupting the aesthetics and distracting from the performances?

I was also very interested in reading about DEN, and their hope that they would revolutionize television by introducing the edginess of the "web" and rebelling against network television. This also got me thinking of the modern day, and what a true embrace of the internet by television would look like today. I think it's clear that the internet has created very different expectations in media in today's youth. Gen Z spends a great deal of time ingesting traditionally formatted episodic television, but they also spend a great deal of time watching vlogs of twenty-somethings getting coffee and doing their skin care routine. They watch Tik Toks of people speaking casually to the camera as if they were talking to a friend, they listen to podcasts of friends chatting for hours on end about nothing in particular. Gen Z is no longer looking to media simply to be entertained or transported, they are looking to their media for company and friendship. So what would a merge of these two purposes look like? A loosening of traditional act structures, an emphasis on natural dialogue that isn't always in support of the story, an indulgence in what we would usually consider "filler episodes" where characters simply hang out, go on weird adventures, etc. I'm not saying this would be a good thing, but I do find it curious that content on the internet and social media and content on television live so close to each other yet remain so wildly different.