Media Ecology

As Lynn Spigel noted years before the arrival of internet-distributed television, “if TV re-fers to the technologies, formations, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television - a phase that comes after ‘TV.’” (Spigel and Olsson 2004: 2) In the context of non-linear television, it becomes even more necessary to rethink the positioning of television in the contemporary mediascape. In addition to a cultural ecological approach, I will therefore adopt a media ecology approach, to account for changes happened over time in relation

to media, where media are to be understood as technological, social and economic systems or en-vironments where forms act and leave traces. I will however start by taking into consideration system theory in application to media studies, as it poses the premises both for a media ecological perspective and for its connection with forms, where forms are to be intended as in Levine’s defi-nition (see chapter 1). Niklas Luhmann, one of the most prominent sociologists who addressed system theory in relation to complex mechanisms of communication and social behavior, notably discussed the relationship between medium and form by observing forms as actualizations of the medium, which themselves mediate other forms in a recursive process.

In other words, “media can be recognized only by the contingency of the formations that make them possible” (Luhmann 2000: 104) In this mutual relationship between media and forms, media impose non-arbitrary “limits on what one can do with them” (ivi: 105) and yet they don’t actively oppose to the creation of formal variations: “forms are always stronger and more asserti-ve than the medium.” (ibidem) Furthermore,

The difference between medium and form implies a distinctly temporal aspect as well.

The medium is more stable than the form […]. No matter how short-lived or lasting they turn out to be, forms can be created without exhausting the medium or causing it to disappear along with the form. As we noted earlier, the medium receives without resistance the forms that are possible within it, but the form’s resilience is paid for with instability. […] The medium manifests itself only in the relationship between constancy and variety that obtains in individual forms. A form, in other words, can be observed through the schema of constant/variable, because it is always a form-in-a-medium.

(ivi: 106)

This is a fundamental point on which I started building my methodology, by accounting for a temporal perspective on the anthology form as it always evolve within a medium, or better yet, a media system. Chapter 4 deploys this perspective for defining a comparative historical me-thodology able to examine both resilience and instability of the anthology form in U.S. television,

throughout its diachronic evolution. The chapter notably relies on archival research for mapping the evolution of the anthology form, as well as on previous studies on the U.S. media industry (Lotz 2007; Hilmes 2013).

An additional theoretical framework however is needed as I observe television not as a single entity, but as a technological, social, economic system, or else as a technology and cultural form (Williams 1974). No redefinition of a form - being a narrative, media or technological form - is without effect on the evolution of tastes, preferences and social practices. At the same time the proliferation of a particular form is made possible by the existence of cultural conditions that make it spread better than others. Dynamics of emergence, proliferation, convergence, divergence in the evolution of the anthology form are prompted by certain economic and industrial configu-rations in media, in addition to technological landscapes, in a way that is contextual but not de-terministic. If we understand media as social constructions, shaped by human actions (ibidem), technologies allow certain affordances of the anthology form, and yet, they do not determine them. Both media and technologies “operate, and are operated upon in a complex social field”, proving that “a relationship between technology and society cannot be reduced to a simplistic cause-and-effect formula. It is, rather, an ‘intertwining’.” (Murphie and Potts 2003: 21) A media ecological framework can therefore be useful to reason on this intertwining, by focusing on the context of internet-distributed television in the Post-Channel Era and the way the anthology form operates in it, in relation with industrial and social practices.

Media ecology found a comprehensive theorization in the work of Marshall McLuhan, who in 1964, while initially not openly declaring an ecological thinking, outlined a vast media theoretical apparatus that fills the gap of a content-oriented cultural analysis by inserting a dis-course on media properties. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan (1964)

discusses media as diverse as roads and print, clocks and radio or television, showing that the content (message) is shaped by the characteristics of the medium. The ecological perspective on media as environments or ecosystems was first defined in 1968 by Neil Postman, who affirmed that “such information forms as the alphabet, the printed word, and television images are not mere instruments which make things easier for us. They are environments – like language itself, symbolic environments with in which we discover, fashion, and express humanity in particular ways.” (Postman 1979: 186) Over the years, media ecology was expanded into several scholarly theorizations (Nystrom 1975; Strate 2006; Scolari 2012). However, in line with cultural ecology, the core assumption in media ecology is always that “the word ecology implies the study of envi-ronments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” (Postman 1970: 161)

In this dissertation, I consider the interplay between affordances of media (i.e. television channels or platforms), affordances of forms (i.e. the anthology form) and actual uses (i.e. indus-trial practices and modes of consumption). The theoretical and methodological perspective adopt-ed in this dissertation therefore inserts itself in a typology of “soft technological determinism” (Marx and Smith 1994), which observes technologies as potential enhancements and not as necessary constraints. In other words, weak (or soft) technological determinism ob-serves technological changes as entangled in historical contexts and ultimately “claims that the presence of a particular communication technology is an enabling or facilitating factor leading to potential opportunities which may or may not be taken up in particular societies or periods (or that its absence is a constraint)” (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006: 331) As David M. Kaplan puts

it, technology softly determines, it “mediates and steers a society, but it does not quite drive it.” (Kaplan 2009: xvii) Similarly, I argue here, technology mediates forms, without necessarily driving them. As a consequent, I adopt media industry analysis (Holt and Perren 2011) - i.e. me-dia historiography, meme-dia industry research, analysis of practices and business models, as well as modes of production and distribution at large - as the methodological operations needed to identi-fy the contextual forces that influenced the emergence and consequent mutations of the anthology form in the landscape of U.S. television.

Furthermore, to account for the most recent transitions that led to a phase “after TV” (Spigel 2004: 2), elsewhere defined as a post-network (Lotz 2007), post-broadcast (Tay and Turner 2009), post-channel (Lotz 2016) era, I decided to integrate a cultural/media ecological (system-theoretical) perspective with platform studies (Bogost and Montfort 2007; 2009). I no-tably adopted platform theory research to define the specific positioning of anthology form in the context of internet-distributed television and digital platforms. The field of platform technologies engages with a number of interdisciplinary topics (internet infrastructures, digital economies, al-gorithmic indexing) that are particularly relevant to observe the anthology form as a model for content organization, promotion and circulation, and not just as a package for shaping narrative content and genres, as it came to become in linear television. In particular, thanks to platform re-search, which is used here as a complementary analysis to media industry rere-search, I will be able to focus more specifically on the outcomes of digital culture as it creates its own set of infrastruc-tures and economies. Platform analysis will be the core component for chapter 5.