As I read John Caldwell's "Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration," I could not help but ruminate on Hollywood's latest impending crisis: the upcoming Writers Guild of America strike. Full disclosure: despite having friends in the guild and doing my best to keep up with what's happening in the trade journals on social media, I do not claim to have a comprehensive knowledge about the factors contributing to the new strike. However, with an understanding both of our late capitalist moment and the particular challenges of the streaming era, one begins to notice patterns and a recurring economy of phrases and keywords: residuals, backend, budgets, artificial intelligence, syndication, streaming, Caldwell's opening quote from Larry Kramer on profiting from content, etc. ad infinitum.
Of course, the WGA strike is one of many symptoms emerging from this transformative post-digital moment. One can see similar currents at work in debates over streaming budgets (with upfront payments for stars inflating budgets in the absence of box office-gross defined backend payments), digital residuals, pandemic direct-to-streaming shifts (the Scarlett Johansson lawsuit, for example), and the Zaslav tax write-offs. Caldwell's article focuses on the question of syndication, noting that "digital technologies have threatened the very centrality of TV's historic cash cow" (42); writing well before syndication became subsumed within the logic of streaming sites and corporate control, Caldwell's piece anticipates a major growing concern without even ascertaining the exact specifics of how said concern would manifest. Like many academic essays on the early digital moment (Caldwell's piece was published in 2004), I find that it works best if I approach it as both a prescient document and a time capsule piece. In the latter regard, it is amusing the degree to which outmoded piracy sites factor into the early stages of the argument -- I have legitimately never heard of octopus.com. However, Caldwell's emphasis on the loss of "control of revenue streams, user tracking, headlines, and ad impressions" within the new moment of "convergence" strikes me as a defining sensation of the digital age. Everyone is steadily losing control, grasping to gain some semblance of stability in a situation defined by an absence of information.
Caldwell's digital era context informs both the aesthetic argument at work throughout his essay and the industry studies approach, summed up best by one statement early in the piece: "Televisual form in the age of digital simply cannot be accounted for without talking about the institutional forces that spur and manage those forms" (46). Caldwell's essay seems informed by several of the ideas that formed the foundation of last week's readings and some of my subsequent blog posts thoughts: that of an aesthetic collapse between television and cinema (and the internet here), as well as the market forces that shape said collapse. The prescience of Caldwell's essay comes in its delineation of "five fundamental changes" that have defined the post-digital televisual aesthetic: ancillary, conglomerating, marketing, ritual, and programming textualities. Television now exists within an endlessly intermedial, intertextual aesthetic, and it is impossible to do the kind of analysis that Caldwell alludes to in his previous paragraphs (I'm thinking especially of his essay, which some of us examined in TV History last semester, on Miami Vice and auteurist style) without that in mind.
Two more observations from Caldwell's dense, layered text. In Caldwell's section on "Forms of Convergence Television," he quotes a UPN owner who does not wish to be a "dumping ground" for Viacom and CBS shows (47). I'm interested in what might be considered a "dumping ground" today -- and whether these dumping grounds exist outside the five modes of textuality that Caldwell describes. Is Tubi a dumping ground? Is that where we sift through the wreckage of television and cinema, moving away from the discursive forms of HBO and Netflix? Can a dumping ground be virtuous? Moreover, there is an affinity with my second observation: Caldwell's identification of the "rhetorical shift from talking about productions as 'programs' to talking about them as 'content'," which, in his assessment, "underscores the centrality of repurposing in industrial practice" -- a mode of cultural recycling (49). Does content turn everything into a dumping ground? Is the dumping ground actually virtuous -- a mode that is now a model to follow, rather than something to be avoided?
I share your amusement in seeing Caldwell's piece as a time capsule; scholarship on digital media seems to age as quickly as the technology to which it refers. On one hand, perhaps this near immediate obsolescence serves us well to think about how slowly the humanities publishes (why paper?). On another, tenure-track requirements are already a bit absurd in terms of productivity; scholars are scrambling to write for professional survival. Perhaps we should look instead to Kittler who argues for expunging the barrier that exists between humanities and STEM and, in so doing, borrow some of their practices or infrastructures, such as co-authoring and group research. The Radio Research Project of the 1930s was fraught in many ways but Adorno's presence as a humanities scholar alongside social scientists catalyzed some truly prescient debates.
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