About television

I was recently getting a bit self-indulgent about how blogging used to be a community but now feels like howling into the wind. Which I guess says something about its place in the continuum of massive leaps in communication technology that were identified as a big threat to existing formats, only to die in their own right (see faxes, BlackBerry, MiniDiscs, VHS, smoke signals and more). One of the victims of the social media onrush, or so we are told, was the notion of TV as a collective experience, the whole Morecambe-and-Wise-Christmas-Show meme, watercooler moments even before offices has watercoolers. It was best expressed during my brief, inglorious stint teaching secondary school English, when I asked a bunch of 13-year-olds what TV or movie they liked and one girl declared flatly that the only thing she liked was “stuff on my phone”.

But maybe announcements about the death of TV are premature. After all the basic grammar of the stuff on her phone (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram etc) is as much TV as anything else, albeit truncated and bastardised. As Derek Thompson recently observed: 

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

I guess the only real change we have to countenance is that McLuhan’s characterisation of TV as cool media, in that it required the audience’s active participation to fill in the informational gaps, is now pretty passé. Nowadays it feels as if active participation, beyond an occasional tired swipe, is the last thing anyone – by which I mean the people who put the stuff out there – wants. Howling into the wind again.