of the progression of popular dance styles from the 1950s through the present, had been on YouTube for four months, it had been played at least thirty million times. That figure grew to over 210 million seven years later.26 Site users re-posted the video multiple times, and in at least three different languages, taking advantage of one of YouTube’s technological strengths—the ease with which videos can be linked to other sites—but making it difficult to sum up how many times it had been viewed across these multiple postings and on other sites. As a point of comparison, the most-watched television show of the preceding 2005–2006 television season—American Idol’s Tuesday-night performance episodes—averaged 31.2 million viewers each week. FOX’s blockbuster hit included judges paid roughly $30 million a year, and the network earned $700,000 for a thirty-second advertisement, in addition to the at least $25 million per season paid by each of the three series sponsors.27 In contrast, “The Evolution of Dance” featured the negligible production values of a video camera set up in the audience of a comedy club and was originally posted by the video’s creator and dancer, Judson Laipply. Laipply did not profit directly from the millions of viewers (this was before YouTube enabled profit participation in its advertisements), although stories about the video’s popularity appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Inside Edition and drew attention to his work as a public speaker and “inspirational comedian.” YouTube benefited from the high traffic to the site that may have initially clicked through some of the banner advertisements and later from pre-roll advertisements—the video advertisements that play before selected clips—and the video’s 2006 debut aided growing cultural awareness of the site. When I queried my classes in the fall of 2006 about their familiarity with the video, some had seen it—although fewer than I had expected and by no means as many as had seen various television shows. When I asked coworkers (faculty and staff over the age of thirty), most responded by asking what YouTube was—until a few months later, when Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of the site drew much attention.
By the end of the decade, video sharing and YouTube use had grown considerably: By 2013, YouTube reported one billion unique visitors to the site each month.28 Laipply posted “Evolution of Dance 2” in January 2009, but lacking novelty, drew only twenty million viewers in four years. There have been other so-called viral or spreadable hits such as “David after Dentist” and “Charlie Bit My Finger,” though neither has been viewed nearly as many times as the YouTube topper as of 2013, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video, which had been streamed 1.8 billion times. Most web video circulates through distinct taste communities, and though nearly 2 billion views seems broad, with the possibility of an international audience of 2.5 billion Internet users on computers and 1 billion worldwide smartphone-enabled users, and that these are not unique viewers, even “Gangnam Style” can be seen as a niche phenomenon.29
The changes in how we view, experience, and use television made evident by these anecdotes have massive implications for how we think about television and its role in culture. The increased fractionalization of the audience among shows, channels, and distribution devices has diminished the ability of an individual television network or television show to reinforce a certain set of beliefs to a broad audience in the manner we long believed to occur. Although television can still function as a mass medium, in most cases it does so by aggregating a collection of niche audiences. The narrowcasting that became common to television during the multi-channel transition has thus required adjustments in theories about the mass nature of the medium, while the exponential expansion in viewers’ choice and control since the network era has necessitated an even more substantive reassessment of television. Taking up these issues, this chapter provides an overview of some of the central ideas that have governed the study of television and culture as well as some preliminary tools for making sense of television in the post-network era.
Defining Television
The industrial changes that developed during the multi-channel transition made uncertain the object called “television” as new forms and ways of using the device required us to reconsider how we determine “what is television?” The term “television” has been broadly used to refer to a singular technology—a box with a screen—though it has enabled a range of experiences since the network era. But television is more than just a technology—more than a composite of wires, metal, and glass. It possesses an essence that is bound up in its context, in how the screen is most commonly used, in where it is located, in what streams through it, and in how most use it, despite the possibility for broad variation in all the factors. It is primarily this essence—derived from existing use—that distinguishes a television from a computer monitor, particularly in the context of contemporary technological convergence and the manufacturing of digital “televisions” that have no tuning capability—that is, the ability to receive signals over the air.
Lisa Gitelman argues for a definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols.”30 Protocols include “normative rules and default conditions,” such as the greeting “Hello,” monthly billing cycles, and a system of wires and cable for the U.S. phone service. Understanding that the protocols of television contribute to distinguishing the medium helps us rectify some of the inadequacy of defining the medium only in terms of the piece of equipment and to address how the technology becomes a television when it receives signals via broadcast, cable, or satellite transmission. A television is not just a machine, but also the set of behaviors and practices associated with its use. The media scholar James Bennett has helped in the retheorization of television’s scope through his distinction of “digital television”:
Television as digital media must be understood as a non–site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across multiple platforms as diverse as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and on-line video services such as YouTube, Hulu, Joost, and the BBC’s iPlayer, as well as computer-based mediaplayers such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and Apple TV.31
Like Bennett, I find it useful to allow “television” to expand the narrow confines of its network-era operation. This new stage—what Bennett terms digital television and I distinguish as post-network television—doesn’t mark an end of television, but the beginning of a new era.
I approach television with the presumption that our cultural understanding of this medium does indeed conceive of it as more than a monitor, piece of hardware, or gateway to programming, and that television is less defined by how the content gets to us and what we view it on than by the set of experiences and practices we’ve long associated with the activity of viewing. All of these technical attributes unquestionably contribute to how a culture uses and understands television, yet inherited meanings, expectations, and habits also circumscribe it in particular ways. New technologies and industrial practices have introduced radical changes in technological aspects of television, its use, and its consequent cultural significance, but various aspects of sociocultural experience still define television in our minds in specific and meaningful ways, particularly for those generations who knew television in the network era.
Television may not be dying, but changes in its content and how and where we view have complicated how we think about and understand its role in the culture. The transition of radio in the 1940s provides an illustrative parallel. As television first entered homes, radio had to fundamentally redefine itself—both in its programming and in the ways and places that listeners used it. Before television, radio was primarily a domestic-bound technology that played particular programs on a known schedule; after television usurped the captive home audience, radio became a portable medium and shifted to emphasize ongoing music or talk formats. Nonetheless, after television, the technology remained commonly understood as “radio” despite the substantial difference in the medium and adjustments to its role as a cultural institution. In truth, “video” provides the more accurate term for the cross-platform circulation of “television” content, but as the television experience has encompassed new capabilities and spread to additional screens in recent years, established cultural understandings have shifted accordingly so that we still
