Traversing Modern Television in the Physical and Digital Realm

Tokyo.  A city renowned for its cleanliness, yet polluted with noise and stimulation.  I descend into the subway and board a train.   Handles dangle above me, and advertisements stare back.  The rails screech as overhead screens flicker.  I stand in liminal silence while the train car rocks and cries beneath the city.  Clenched in my left hand is my camera, dials and chrome complemented by leather and lens, through which I view the world.  In my right hand, my smartphone, a tablet of glass encased in white, blasting light into my retinae.  The duality between the analogue and the modern.  I'm on social media, scrolling through videos, catching up on text message responses, and waiting out my hour-long commute.  Tilting up from my device, I am met with other commuters around me within the same distraction.  No matter what format, we gaze our focus and attention into a device that allows us to pass the time faster.  The salaryman next to me grins at a comedy show on Netflix.  A woman closes her eyes as she listens to music.  An old man sits and hides behind the shuffle of a daily newspaper.  A boy in a baseball uniform reads a comic book.  

My eyes float around the train car, recognizing that we're all strangers consuming our medium of preference, swimming amongst the saturation of our contemporary mediascape.  Whether that format is digital or analogue, we're all travelers, whether we know it or not.   Some of my deepest explored destinations haven't been bound within physical space but through the screen.  Cinema, painting, photography, and television are formats that offer us an avenue into the minds of others, a dream manufactured.  The way we engage with the screen is intertwined with how we engage with the moving world around us.  A world that wouldn't exist today without the beginnings of television.  Television is not just entertainment but an archive of how media shapes culture, history, the mind, and human connection.  

What is contemporary television?  In our hypermodern age of individualized media and distraction, what began as television has fractured into a vast mediascape of personal screens and content tailored for the individual user, accessible from the subway, the cinema, or anywhere in between.  By tracing the evolution of television into today’s digital forms, we can better understand how the screen continues to sculpt our attention, our communities, and our sense of identity.  

Post-Modern Community & the Network Era

When my parents grew up in 1980s New England, the Boston-based sitcom Cheers was all the rage.  My mother remembers how everyone would talk about the latest episode the next school morning, as if it were a part of the school's collective consciousness.  Due to the schedules and cultural centrality of network television, simultaneous viewership, and fan base created social connection and unity within my parents' environment.  However, with the beginning of media synergy and company consolidation, along with advancements in video through VHS and the VCR, consumers evolved beyond the bind of TV scheduling, capable of recording their favorite shows to watch later.  The VCR gave American audiences the ability to watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  Videotape "put the means of production into the hands of the people[...]” (Hilmes 328)

This acceleration of access to desired media beyond the theatre and the home through videotape, to DVD, and now streaming, has dominoed into an individualised digital age.  What was once watching Cheers around family in the living room has evolved into watching clips or textually poached fan edits, a post-postmodernist perspective on TV of the past. (Jenkins)  As the scope of television fragmented from the wide audience to the niche individual, consumer attention shifted as more choice and access became available to the consumer by the creator.  

Hypermodernism Culture & the World Wide Web

My first main argument regarding the fragmentation of television comes from the idea of hyperreality: that after postmodernism, comes a hypermodernist social culture, defined by the shows and commercial brands that the media shapes us into.  

“Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us, making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality of our bodies or of the world around us.”  (Felluga 2)

Before the 20th century, culture existed mainly through traditional forms like painting, sculpture, and theatre. The early 20th century introduced celluloid and the photograph, gaining artists access to create realistic images of the world around them, producible at an extraordinary rate.  

By the 21st century and the advent of the internet, we entered a postmodern era, constantly surrounded by culture.  An entire generation has been raised through modernism, where media has become so integrated into our daily life that it has become a part of our collective reality just as much or more than the trees and mountains outside.  We entered the hyperreal, where our consumption is based on cultural copies, taking inspiration, remaking, or parodying former media, a simulation of reality. 

In the first quarter of this century, we've entered a grey area with the advancement of AI in our post-COVID world:  COVID babies who can unlock iPhones before they can speak, a generation raised indoors.  Millennials, Generation Z (my generation), and now Gen Alpha are growing up online.  My parents' generation X grew up in biker posses and drinking garden hose water in the backyard, but now kids grow up on their phones and playing Fortnite in individual rooms.  The world has gotten bigger but the neighborhoods have gotten smaller.  The formats and ways we interact with each other have evolved and devolved simultaneously.

In regards to film format, according to Michael Kolonis, “How to Read a Film (1981) author James Monaco had put forth the argument that economics and technology determine to a great extent the influence on or interrelationship of one art form to another, claiming that cinema had taken over the novel's traditional role as a storytelling art, [...] With the advent of Television in the post-classical period, cinema lost ‘its cultural hegemony as the predominant form of entertainment.’ In the wake of computer and digital technology, cinema has been driven to adopt the aesthetics of TV and move away from traditional narration to the sensationalism of grand spectacle and showbiz enterprising.” (Kolonis 46)

I believe the digital convergence of the internet, and more specifically, the rise of apps like TikTok and Instagram, have been the next step for modern television.  Each individual user has economic value within the society we inhabit, swaying the way entertainment is marketed, even how we market ourselves.  Maybe we've entered deeper within the “vast wasteland” Newton Minow spoke of.

America Online.  Utopia or dystopia? 

Web 2.0 came along with many innovations and marked a paradigm shift as computers and the internet became commonplace in American homes.  E-Mail.  Facebook, iTunes, Blogs.

Now, Gen X can reconnect with their long-lost high school classmates.  For the youth, the internet became a sense of home and community within a virtual world.  Not only can we gain information from the web, but share information as well.  

This spark of interactivity has made everyone the creator and aggregator of their own user generated content, using production tools like GarageBand for music creation, and Adobe or Final Cut Pro for video editing.  Apps and services are used as well, such as Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok, Live streaming, podcasts to distribute that user generated content.  

This digital convergence has had a huge impact on former “old world” media distribution, where disintermediation and aggregation has led old media to move towards digital interfaces. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube have restructured media production, distribution, and exhibition by adapting traditional models and aggregating content through web-based services. (Hilmes 420)

Portable video production and distribution in the hands of the user has created endless content beyond the possibilities of a generation prior: from filming an entire soap opera web series in an IKEA (10) to fans parodying and remixing TV show intros (Detonator212) based off other television. (Jenkins 1)

Despite the creative possibilities of the web and easy access to the cinema within our pockets, there is a darker side to the internet.  Couch potatoes: users passively consuming content, has been a television term prior to the internet. (Hilmes 419)  

Scrolling on the web has made us more susceptible to targeted advertising, algorithms, and addiction.  While we lay horizontal, content has become vertical.  Now with apps like Tiktok, the concept of doomscrolling: “the inclination of constantly scrolling through unpleasant news on a mobile device,” (Shaji 17) and brainrot: “cognitive decline and mental exhaustion experienced by individuals due to excessive exposure to low-quality online materials on social media” (Yousef 1) has increased levels of anxiety and depression among young adults, while decreasing attention spans, desensitizing the user, and has created a loneliness epidemic in Gen Z.  (Yousef 2)  We have become overloaded and overstimulated by digital interfaces, leading to multitasking, inability to focus, and social isolation, compared to the the 1980’s communal experience of watching a television show.  (Hilmes 429)

Knowing More is Knowing Less

Emerging out of a tunnel of darkness, I'm met with my reflection as I look out into the night.  The windows of the train car illuminate a passing glass building like perforations of a film reel.  I look down onto the streets below me.  Not only do I see an ocean of commuters enraveled within their city lives, I see data and a vast ocean of information.  I feel so lonely here in Tokyo.  

We’ve never been more connected, yet never felt more apart.  

In our modern digital world, cameras and screens follow us everywhere, with an increasingly overwhelming amount of data accessible from any supercomputer.  Instead of the household encyclopedia or researching from the library, we can access information on any subject from our pocket, the same way we view the television and the cinema from the comfort of our own bed.  It’s an age of global collective intelligence and big data (Hilmes 418), where there is no need to remember anything if we can just look it up online.  

“The Internet is the fountain of knowledge and Google is the mouth from which it flows” states philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch. (Lynch 23)   Lynch’s concept of Google-Knowing, knowledge acquired online, is in my book, humanity’s biggest shift in the past quarter-decade.  The speed in which we know anything is remarkably too fast.  So fast that the speed  “prohibits deep processing that may allow for long-term retention” (Yousef 11)  We can forget acquired information since we know we are capable of accessing it later.  We’ve become too overdependent on the internet, on television, to shape our thoughts and now our memories.  

Television has globalized into a worldwide culture, inhabited by a paralleled, connected yet separated digital userbase.  A digital copy of ourself is layered below a vast rooted network of data stringed and meshed together.  Not when, but has our digital existence conquered our physical?  What does this mean for our legacy, and how will we be remembered?  

There are no Answers

I step onto the train platform, my camera raised to my eye.  I still have no real answers to the future of the world I see on the other side of the glass.  The internet, while artificial, is alive and always in motion.  Contracts end, subscriptions change, and suddenly the shows we want to watch are no longer accessible.  Sites are taken down and new once replace them, just like buildings in the neighborhoods we inhabit.  Heck, what if all of our data is wiped out?  It’s a possibility, since our photos, journals, stories, and memories are all archived on hard drives.  

Maybe a subconscious reason I shoot film is a protest to the way the world is going, that our new generation wants to revert back to physical media of an older age.  

Overall within the timeline we occupy, the future remains unknowable.  We can’t just hit the right arrow on a remote to see what’s coming up next.  However we can learn, grow, and connect with each other, whether within digital or physical space, through art, poetry, and the rich, chaotic soup that creates modern television.  Its up to us on how to pass the torch to future generations, and we have the magic of the digital age to do so.