Core Response #5 by Yiyan Pan

The authors this week highlight the individualized, personalized, and active choice in the age of post-TV. When reading Lotz’s comments on non-linear watching of the television shows, this reminds me that maybe almost all of my television watching experience can be called a desire of watching it like a film. I download all of episodes after the end of the show, but never have a habit of following the “linear, weekly delivery of content” (Lotz, 73).

When talking about individualized and personalized watching experience, different authors offer different modes. Lisa Parks’s discussion somehow answers my long-rooted question. When we are talking about audience agency and active participation, especially in game studies, there is some scholarship that is interested in whether or not the gamer's choices can change the outcome and lead to triumph. It seems that we are focusing a lot on the agency and control itself. But in addition to control and choice, what is the cultural importance of it? Parks suggests that post-TV, and the convergence of internet and TV is not only about distribution structure, but also about the democratic impulses, activism and feminism, as the example in her article suggest. In this sense, the personalized television does not merely mean that a more personalized content. Rather, it is about the taking in of more marginalized communities, or focusing a more niche community a specialized TV experiencing. In this sense, I think “technological convergence as a set of sociohistorical struggles and economic circumstances” is very convincing for me (Parks, 152).

I want to add some instances I think will relate to this week’s discussion. One is Possibilia https://video.eko.com/v/D3iXb9/ (I will also talk a bit in the presentation). Playing/watching this is a nonlinear experience and I am emotionally immersed into this story but I may not be so clear about what is happening between this couple who is going to break up. The personification is usually about “individual identity, desire, taste, and preference,” but it seems the (nonlinear way of watching/ the order of the plot can also be personalized (Parks, 135).