Just a quick post rantlet about my latest experience with “new media.”

The first class meeting of the semester for my American Television History class was today at 11 am, CST, or, as it is more widely known, the exact moment of the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. Knowing this, I planned on showing the events in my classroom live. This room does not have, nor has ever had, a standard television set or feed. Lots of other options (including a brand new, simple, Ikea-like multimedia port), but no over-the-air or cable TV. No problem, I surmised: it’s all over the web, covered by many news organizations. Piece of cake.

As it turned out, not so much. The event was live, and plentiful online, of course. It was just that the network traffic completely clogged it up, rendering every source I tried as four minutes of waiting fitfully followed by 18 seconds of choppy, distorted audio and a wash of live-streamed rendering artifacts, followed by more waiting. Frustrated, I sent the class out at what I think was the beginning of Obama’s address to watch the event down in the atrium in the Owens Art Center, where apparently a portable jumbotron was set up for just that event. (I say “apparently” because I knew nothing of this, save what a few students told me this morning).

So, while they went to watch, I waited for stragglers and missed the whole inauguration. Now granted, this is 2009, and this event will be available universally online and on cable and broadcast TV (already, not quite one hour later, there are about a dozen videos available of it on YouTube). But the liveness of the moment is gone. And I blame the internet.

In our rush to go all “smart” in our media technology, we may be forgetting the sheer elegance and simplicity of terrestrial broadcasting. Cheap devices, many of them iPod-sized, have been available for decades that do one thing very, very well: receive live broadcast radio and television. You know all those stock film images of people crowding around TV sets and radios? My Macbook can’t do that, and neither can my iPod. Even in ideal situations, live broadcasting online is hit-or-miss, with everyone’s favorite word, “BUFFERING,” attempting to mollify our frustrations. Still. Now. Almost 20 years into this whole cyber- internet- phenomenon thingy. We would never have put up with such interruptions back in the analog age; now we expect them.

Anyway, this will be a great talking point for situating television history on Thursday and down the line in my class. Television, as a social institution, is greater than whatever electronic components make it up. But when those components fail us, it does challenge the idea of the institution of television.

On a related note, I’m also cooking up a rant on the Failure of the Digital Transition, or, as it is known Chez Kompare, “why the hell is Tina Fey missing half of her face”?

This panel was interesting in how roughly the same idea (online video sharing) was approached very differently by the three presenters, indicating to me how important various practices and sites are, and how very little we’ve come to terms with what’s going on (relatively speaking)

Robert Gehl gave the only paper that was explicitly about YouTube, using the metaphor of the archive to ponder how YT functions as such. Its curation is (with few exceptions) done by its users; i.e., they’re the ones who tag, vote, and otherwise categorize its entries, collectively building (say) its front page. Its display is quite different than a traditional archive, in that its contents can be posted virtually anywhere (with a handy drop-in link). This has demarcated its uses by bloggers (who further categorize its contents through their selection and description on their own sites) and traditional media (like al-Jazeera, the BBC, and CBS), who utilize the site and its abilities as paid promotional vehicles. Through all of this, the actual labor of the YT uploader and tagger is unpaid, of course. Indeed, given CBS CEO Les Moonves’ comments in this month’s Wired, this looks to be a big strategy for TPTB. That is, it’s promotion if they like it; it’s copyright violation if they don’t. Either way, they won’t pay for it, and are extracting (or punishing) your labor. Lots of this going on in our ever-evolving convergent media circus.

Next up, Jonathan Gray, in a preview (ha!) of his upcoming book, discussed movie trailers as key paratexts in the production of textual meaning (link to full paper (PDF)). Using the examples of two radically different trailers for the 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter (one for the Canadian market, the other for the US market), he analyzed how Canadians were presented with a more open-ended paratext than Americans, with different textual markers (for, among other things, filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s authorship). It’s amazing that trailers have scarcely been acknowledged in the many decades of Film Studies, but perhaps it took the blurring of text and promotion in the current era to prompt this analysis. Regardless, In A World of convergent media…I look forward to Jonathan’s book. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

The always-energetic Joshua Green completed the panel with the big question: is it still “TV” if it’s online? He admitted right off that he didn’t have an answer for that, and indeed that it was impossible to place all of the various online video practices in discrete categories. He identified some big meta-issues about what “television” means any more, and showed how CBS’ Innertube, the Democracy Player, and good ol’ BitTorrent trackers all “dis-embed” and “re-embed” TV content in different ways, but none of them is “television” as a cultural technology. Cracking stuff, with a bit of John Hartley and Raymond Williams about it. He chimed in with some great comments along those lines at the Lost panel on Sunday as well.
Next up in the MIT5 retrospective: Fans and Producers (whereupon I present, and moderate, and some stuff kind of hit the fan).