Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato
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internet television services—while introducing all manner of new innovations—are likely to succeed only to the extent that they offer television-like experiences and a corresponding value proposition. In this sense, television is fated to live on both as a resilient industry sector and as an experiential gold standard that will shape audience expectations regarding content, no matter what transformations take place at the point of distribution.
For industry analysts, there is much at stake in predictions of industry change. For media scholars, the key issues are somewhat different and also require consideration of the agency of particular arguments about what television was, is, and might become. If we follow Uricchio in thinking that television has never been ontologically or technologically stable but can only be stabilized to a greater or lesser degree, then the critical question for media scholarship becomes identifying the ways in which particular discourses of change and continuity operate to lend a “conceptual coherence” to a medium or technology at particular points in time (Uricchio, forthcoming, 7–8; Uricchio 2004). In other words, while we cannot predict the future of television in the internet age, we can try to understand how particular ways of thinking about that future might help to shape the way such a future—or range of futures—will play out.
For this reason, it is necessary for certain branches of media scholarship to become more self-reflexive about their own investment in the object of television as a discrete medium and in television studies as a discrete field of inquiry. As Lotz writes in The Television Will Be Revolutionized, “In many ways, HBO and Netflix are more alike because they are non-advertiser-supported subscription services than different because one comes in through cable and the other over broadband—a distinction I suspect will be technologically nebulous the next time I revisit this book” (Lotz 2014, xii). From the point of view of media studies, this raises questions about whether a platform such as Netflix should be studied as television and what is gained or lost in doing so. After all, most users of streaming services are still likely to think of professionally produced scripted content as television content, but they do not always watch it on the TV and perhaps do not care about whether it comes over the top, via cable, or over the airwaves. Nor may they be concerned about whether the analytical integrity of television-as-industry or television-as-medium has been compromised.
In a much-cited essay published more than a decade ago, Lynn Spigel asked, “What is to be gained from studying TV under the rubric of new media?” (Spigel 2005, 84). This question is still important, and largely unresolved, because it prompts us to think about what is revealed and obscured as one moves between ontological frameworks. One of the questions we need to think about is not whether the future of television is going to look more like the internet or more like cable but rather whether emergent media forms should be understood in terms of their similarities to past media or through entirely new paradigms. The trick may be to build productively on past knowledge without letting existing frames of reference overdetermine objects of analysis. Academic disciplines are slow; they rely on the incremental accumulation of knowledge. In the case of television studies, it is neither useful nor desirable to throw out all this knowledge and deep thinking behind it every time a new distribution technology appears on the horizon (as has already happened with video, Tivo, mobile devices, and so on). But, at the same time, there are some risks in trying to assimilate a wide array of convergent and new phenomena into an existing paradigm, just as there are risks in taking the reflex position that we have seen it all before and that it is all still television. Even though we can trace many paths between past and present, we also need to acknowledge the differences and find ways to come to terms with them analytically. This need is especially acute when the everyday terminology may remain unchanged (“watching TV”) but might refer to quite a different set of practices that are ontologically distinct from what that terminology referred to in the past.
In grappling with the conceptual problem of internet television, then, we need to be alert to diverse and sometimes contradictory effects. On the one hand, it is quite possible that nonlinear internet distribution will come to function primarily as simply another distribution channel for existing content or new content that still looks and feels like TV as we know it. Seen from this perspective, internet distribution can reasonably be understood as something that is easily assimilated into existing business models. But there are longer-range effects at work here, too, and not all of them can be predicted in advance. Over time, the nonlinear affordance of internet distribution is likely to lead to further specialization and expansion in content production, such that new texts may increasingly be designed for the experiential specificities of internet rather than broadcast or cable distribution. We can already start to see this with the kinds of quality dramas made explicitly for binge viewing, and in the proliferation of short-form web comedies that would not fit well into a traditional schedule, not to mention the vast pool of amateur content on YouTube. This suggests that changes in distribution can have longer-term effects in other areas of the system, including production and reception. While we may still watch TV in familiar ways, in familiar spaces and formats, transformations are taking place that slowly recalibrate the whole system.
The question “is it still TV?” is problematic precisely because its framing invites a reductive “yes” or “no” answer that works to solidify a category (television) that may instead be better deconstructed, or at least reformulated. Cunningham and Silver (2013) argue that instead of asking whether new media has changed old media, and thus lapsing into familiar binaries of technological crisis versus continuity, we should focus instead on how to account for the rate of change, and the particular combinations of change and stasis that exist at any one time in the history of a medium. They reject both the “everything has changed” and “nothing has changed” positions as inadequate responses to the question of media industry transformation. Following this lead, we could also ask what other intellectual resources are available to us for thinking about the relationship between, rather than merely the “impact of,” internet distribution vis-à-vis television.
An excellent model is provided by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, who have worked through this problem in a different context. In their chapter “Digital Cinema and Film Theory—The Body Digital,” they extrapolate Lev Manovich’s idea of the inside-out to advance the argument that digitization can create simultaneous stasis and change, leading to their apparently paradoxical conclusion that, “With digital cinema everything remains the same and everything has changed” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015, 202). What Elsaesser and Hagener mean by this is that there has been great change within the boundaries of an existing category such that the referent of the category itself is transformed and we are no longer talking about the same thing we thought we were talking about. Hence it is not so much a matter of tracing lines of continuity and change around a fixed axis but rather grappling with the “inside-out” ontological transformation of a medium.
Consider how Elsaesser and Hagener work through this paradox in relation to cinema. Their account insists that the social experience of cinema-going remains popular, durable, and powerful (“stars and genres are still the bait, concessions and merchandise provide additional or even core revenue for the exhibitor, and the audience is still offered a social experience along with a consumerist fantasy,” 202). However, they also claim that the textual form of digitally shot cinema has been reorganized through digital production, such that the relationship between image and representation is now completely recast. Digital cinema now produces the effect of cinematic representation as just one of its potential applications. Hence there is not only a combination of stasis and change but also a series of internal changes that produce the same external appearance. This is change from the “inside out,” such as when a parasite takes over its host, “leaving outer appearances intact but, in the meantime, hollowing out the foundations—technological as well as ontological—on which a certain medium or mode of representation was based” (204–205).
This is a compelling theory of technological change, a reminder that change and stasis not only coexist but can also envelop each other. Elsaesser and Hagener are referring to production techniques in the main. However, there is some parallel to distribution. The inside-out transformation of internet television allows the TV experience (the reception technology, domestic space, textual formats, and so on) to remain consistent with established norms while unfurling a substantive change on the inside—specifically, the inherent nonlinearity and interactivity of the digital video platform.