I still haven’t had a chance to watch any of Netflix’s House of Cards, which was released in its entirety for our viewing amusment last week. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. And one thing that’s been bugging me is this:
What should we call television now that it’s not necessarily on television?
Somehow the term “serialized fiction” doesn’t have the right ring. But I’m at a loss for anything better. Any ideas?
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I think the word “television” does the job perfectly well. It literally means seeing things (ie moving images) at a distance. It refers to the expression of the content, rather than the physical means of delivery. In the old days, a TV was called a “television set”. Television itself can now be received in many other ways, including mobile phones and computers. But it’s still television.
I would agree with you with the proviso that the images aren’t moving, but rather a series of still images refreshed at such a rate that the human brain interprets it as movement. :D
Rather than focus on the medium, I think the narrative form might be the way to go: distinguish between (what we now know as) films (broadly, 1.5-3 hours, usually telling a complete story) and (what we now know as) television (broadly, in 42-ish minute chunks completish in themselves, but 6-24 of them may make up a broader story arc, and several of those may make up the complete story).
Whatever terminology evolves, it won’t make sense – look at how “novel” and “romance” have jumped around in meaning…
Maybe we’ll say, I’m watching that new novel House of Cards…
Well, I’ve been referring to John Scalzi’s serialized novel The Human Division as the best TV show I’ve seen in a while.
Since television originally indicated the device and not the content which was shown on the device, I don’t think we should keep on calling it television.
I generally talk about shows, series, movies or mini-series when I discuss what you call television. This also helps when distinguishing other forms of “television” such as news or commercials from these particular forms of entertainment.
I hope we won’t start referring to the content as “internet” when we switch more and more to streaming or other forms content delivery via said internet. That would be extremely silly.
It didn’t indicate the device. The device was a television “set”. Television was the content: “moving” images sent from a distance away.
If I can have a desktop on my computer and watch films that aren’t on film, then I’m perfectly happy to watch television shows without a television.
But if we do change the name, we should call the shows philos, so that Philo Farnsworth finally gets some credit.
I’m fine with keeping old terms, even if they shift around in meaning, as long as people agree on what they mean. After all, we still “dial” numbers, and “show people the ropes” even when we aren’t on ships, and use “gyms” even though we generally don’t exercise naked in them. Lots of us don’t actually compute on our “computers.” And my iTunes “library” isn’t a building full of books.
If we must have a catch-all term to replace “television,” I think “show” works perfectly well. And to distinguish between kinds of shows I think PJK’s terms are fine.
Don’t forget “rewinding” a movie!
Indeed. Also, “tape.” Just this morning I heard a radio reporter say “let’s go to the tape” before playing something that very probably wasn’t made on tape. But I didn’t need him to say “let’s go to the digital audio recording” or “let’s go to the mp3.” “Tape” was fine and I knew exactly what he meant. Language is flexible and cool that way.
Episodic storytelling
Yea! The medium is no longer the message!
(I really hated so much of what Marshall McLuhan said. Everything of his I read left my hands with arguments pencilled into the margins. This is despite agreeing with some of his conclusions…I could still hate it, ya know?)
Good question. I suppose we can still call “House of Cards” a TV show or just “a show”–it seems to resemble a traditional show in presentation and layout and I bet they put it on the televisual-machine at some point. I’m probably going to watch it on a television set. But there are other types of visual entertainment that present a more complicated problem.
My current fav “viewing entertainment” is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on Youtube; I wanted to tell my Pride & Prejudice-loving sister about it, but had trouble explaining what the heck it was. She found it difficult to grasp the concept of a “vlog” let alone a faux vlog that tells a story over time in 5 minute-or-less video-bites, posting twice a week, with associated material on twitter, tumblr, and various websites. Plus, some of the other characters have their own YouTube vlogs that explain what they were doing when something went down on Lizzie’s vlog. It’s all over the map and people are sitting on the edge of their seats for the next installment just as people stood on the docks in NYC waiting for the next installment of a Dickens novel (despite the fact that it follows P&P, so theoretically we all know what’s going to happen.) But what the heck is it??? Ya got me.
You could call “House of Cards” a web series, though that term already has its own connotations. Also, not everyone watches Netflix via a web browser. How about “streamed” show or series? That matches the use of the programs’ original delivery method or medium: TV series for over the air broadcast television, versus cable series for paid television (satellite will have to suck it up), versus web series for programs viewable only on a web site, versus streamed series for services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, etc.
Ah, but how do you know that when I walk down the street, I’m not actually microteleporting between unmoving poses at such a rate that, to all extents and purposes, I appear to be moving?
But I take your point: the word “television” doesn’t actually literally contain any reference to moving images. I should have written “moving” images, to denote one of the various ways (like film) of simulating the appearance of movement.
Having come back to it recently, I’ve come to the conclusion he was a serious obfuscator. And he wanted to be radical but was, at heart, a conservative bibliophile. All the stuff about the ratio of the senses, it was wild guesses by a literature professor who hated TV.
“The medium is the message” is a great soundbite, and he came up with a number of other ones (“The medium is the massage” being my favourite), but his analysis of the impact of literacy isn’t helped by his failure to understand how Asian writing systems actually work.
So instead of TV it’s streamy?
Heh, sure. Why not?
I wrote an article in reply to this for Popshifter.
http://popshifter.com/2013-02-15/tv-is-dead-long-live-tv-why-we-should-still-call-it-television/