Abstract

In a time where both the types of media we consume and the ways we consume it are rapidly converging, the once-passive viewer becomes an active user. The apotheosis of this emergent phenomenon are the do-it-yourself video and music movements. These movements have been spawned by individuals that have transformed their viewing experience into a using experience by using non-original material in “original” ways. Yet how original are these creations with our culture? Is this phenomenon new or merely an extension of the remote control, an inevitable development? Why do we do this?

Full Proposal

The Viewer as User: Consumption in the Era of Media Convergence

As consumers in a time where expectation rises to meet technology, our experience of television consumption within the larger context of digital media must be examined. The television set is no longer the proprietary format of media reception. In its place have come a number of formats which mediate the tele-vision to us. The iPod, the personal computer, the cell phone, and the myriad of electronic devices that flood our lives each present media through a central exclusive tool: the screen. In this perspective, these devices and the uniformity of their screens work retroactively to counter the perception of the TV screen in a way which transposes their attributes upon it. Technology developed for the personal computer is aptly being applied to regular TV viewing: the digital video recorder (DVR) liquefies the crystallized state of linear television viewing and allows the viewer to treat “live” television programs like any recorded media. Even the concept of “live” in television has crossed the last threshold into total representation. Borrowing from Anne Friedburg’s concept, the ability for the viewer to “time shift” a “live” performance converts once and for all the normally passive viewer into an active user (915). And while we can do this already with VCRs and DVDs, the DVR translates a terminal flow of information—data traveling from the source ending at the viewer—into a malleable artifact unbounded for the user. The transcendence of the viewer into the user is an evolution in consumption that presents itself as natural in American culture: the individual seemingly wrests power from the group. In this case, s/he uses a remote control.

Through technological development, what we view and how we view it are becoming increasingly homogeneous. Before this time of multimedia convergence, however, the images one would see on the television screen and the theater screen were very different. Television dramatically affected film production in the late 40s through the 60s in terms of both quality and quantity. Film producers regarded the emerging media as a low-brow stunt, yet it was still stealing from the box office. As television was produced faster and cheaper, cinema became slower, more grandiose, and expensive in response. The only “way to beat a gimmick,” cinema producers realized, “was with a better gimmick” (Sklar 283). From this move to recapture a highjacked audience, 3D cinema, widescreen Cinemascope, and surround sound were developed. Today, however, “the movie screen, the home television screen, and the computer screen retain their separate locations…the types of images [one] sees on each of them are losing their medium-based specificity” (Friedberg 914). The trinity of electronic mass media becomes linked with crisscrossing points of reference, and all seem to simultaneously reaffirm the cultural power of the other. In the center of this cultural structure emerges the viewer as user, consumer, and producer.

Even though the DVR can ultimately turn an episode of I Love Lucy into a more active experience, it is important to note how much the digital video revolution has altered the media that the DVR mediates. Writer Michael Hirschorn comments on the “grittiness, lack of polish, and occasionally shocking intimacy” of the do-it-yourself video of such media-Meccas as YouTube and Google Video (146). His observation that this style “constitute[s] a new aesthetic of realness” gets to the heart of contemporary-converged media. Because the ability to “time shift,” to fast-forward and reverse, is built into the using experience (there are few other ways to even view/use internet video), the “newness” of the “aesthetic of realness” is an artifice borne in direct lineage with the DVR. “Live” and “real” are now words used to describe an aesthetic rather than an experience. Hirshorn’s article focuses on the lonleygirl15 series, which is “shot on a $150 Web camera,” and “shows that digital video can be made by anyone, go anywhere, and pose as anything.” This “live” series was discovered to be, in fact, starring an actress, not a “real” person, and its creators were hoping it would be picked up by a network and turned into a legitimate television series. The indignation of viewers who discovered the “truth” about lonleygirl15 exposes our insistence in continuing to believe that the images we see on TV and the computer are inherently different. The show even spawned its own parody, Hope is Emo. The technologies of viewing as well as the images themselves have become a single element of the form, existing for and by each other. The relationship between lonleygirl15, Hope is Emo, and television media itself is that of the viewer as user: those who viewed lonleygirl15 did so as users with the privilege of using the media to create a parody.

Formally, lonelygirl15 exists through the limitations of the Webcam, from which this “new aesthetic of realness” is created. Yet this form also creates its content. The fixed position of the camera atop the unseen but assumed computer monitor creates a sense of sanctioned voyeurism; the viewer looks into his screen out of hers, the staged confessions take on the air of a personal performance, an emotional striptease. While this sort of amateur production has yet to be completely replicated in mass media television (who’s to say what “mass media” means anymore; lonleygirl15 has over 15 million views), the aesthetic of the DIY digital video revolution has had its effect on television. Hirschorn argues that “current dramas like 24, Lost, and Prison Break (and pretty much everything on HBO) are so good because of the challenge from digital media: they are faster, more complex, and smarter than the shows we grew up on” (146). Indeed, shows like Lost and 24 construct their plots around increasingly complex chronological narratives. In 24 each episode is an hour in a day, forging a feeling of immediacy in the action; Lost jumps back and forth between the past and present of the protagonists with a succinct subtlety that would have been lost on the viewers of The Andy Griffith Show. This shift in storytelling is related to the influence of digital media. Yet Hirschorn’s comment envisions a sort of televisistic Darwinism when in fact the trinity of electronic visual media—the television, movie theater, and PC screen—are each creating each other in a system designed for consumption by consumers. Here the DVR device seamlessly connects the user experience of the PC to the viewing experience of the TV and the two become one and the same.

In a society based on production, there is no goal other than production, if only to further production (Debord). Our very conception of progress, then, must be examined if we are to examine the consumption and production of a lucrative commodity like television. Gianni Vattimo “concludes that progress today is just the routine production of consumer society that requires a constant and unchanging version of the ‘new’ to ensure the system’s survival” (Horrocks 29). Our obsession with what is “‘new’ is, instead, what allows the world to stay the same.” The quasi-evolutionary developments of the DVR and the do-it-yourself video phenomena are no more innovative than the remote control or the concept of the television itself. Technology and the media it produces become inseparable from each other, and the innovative quality of these commodities is, historically, unoriginal. Yet our sense of power and freedom of choice in the consumption of television and tele-vision products is a relatively new phenomenon.

On a radical level the entire conception of “choice” in television can be nullified. Even the denotative quality of “consumption” falls under critical fire because the exchange of money for something of indeterminate value—a mass-produced image—defies quantitative logic. On the other hand, what the DVR and the digital video revolution (or do-it-yourself revolution) has allowed the consumer to become is an ersatz producer of commodities—this is the ultimate goal of the user. The personal computer allows the individual to recreate an entire soundstage in their own home; they can create films, music, games, art. No longer is the control over production limited to the anonymity of the group. But inherent to this system of unique, but non-original, production is a deconstructive quality. The realism aesthetic found in the home movie—when broadcast through television or the tele-vision of the internet— is made to be just another outcome of the quick and dirty production of early television, except this time aestheticized as part of a commodity for mass consumption. The spectacle of mass media utterly transforms any art that reaches the event horizon of its popular proximity.

Perhaps there is no escaping the endlessly reciprocating system of the production of visual images. No other medium was ever created that was so inclusive to other media in its inception and finally so narrow and self-referencing near its maturity. On examination of Jean Baudrillard’s theories Christopher Horrocks writes: “There is, however, a perfectionism to virtual technology that casts us in the role of an extinct species” (34). The time when visual media needed to rely upon identifiable cultural history to be created is long since past; now it needs only the ephemeral culture of the tele-lived to be created. It is by its own choice a Ouroboros realized, and under examination a reflection of our culture ruminating on its own demise.

Our insistence on reproducing reality, on creating a spectacle out of the spectacle, must surely have some end in mind. The fantastical potential of television does, on the other hand, help salve concern over the long-term prospects of our civilization and our culture. Baudrillard wrote “‘If you take one-thousandth of what you see on the TV news to heart, you’re done for. But television protects us from this. Its immunizing, prophylactic use protects us from an unbearable responsibility’” (quoted in Horrocks 33). The power we have given ourselves as users in this era of a media convergence so intricate that, on a close level of examination, it is difficult to perceive where one medium ends and another begins, helps us participate in the grand illusion of reality without guilt or shame. Integral to the sense of living is the experience of creation, and as users instead of viewers our active participation in the consumption of commodity feels natural. Let us ignore that we wrest the creative power from the group as a group of individuals; let us continue the illusion for it is all that redeems us.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.
Friedburg, Anne. “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Coen. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. (914-926).
Hirschorn, Michael. “Thank You, YouTube.” The Atlantic Monthly. November, 2006.
Horrocks, Christopher. Baudrillard and the Millennium. Duxford: Icon Books, 2000.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America. New York: Vintage, 1994.

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