flow is now viral is agency: re-working the site(s) of new television

flow is now viral is agency: re-working the site(s) of new television – Phil Ellis This paper will seek to address the potential for agency in relation to television in the age of remediated and convergent media. Clearly, the nature of contemporary television is both uncertain and fluid as its apparatus, production, distribution and reception struggle to find form in a capitalist structure that is at odds with the technological, social, political and artistic potential inherent in the emerging media form. I propose that it is this very tension that opens up creative possibilities that had been closed down and locked out of pre-convergent television. This discourse will be articulated by examining semiotic readings of message-making and receipt in relation to pre-convergent television, enhanced television (or web interrelated), through to networked television (Castells 2004) on the Internet (Terranova 2004). Crucial to this debate are the roles of the makers of ‘programmes’ as well as the positioning of an active receiver. These will be explored through a brief examination of the post Habermasian Public Sphere and cultural citizenship (Van Zoonen 2005), as a means of highlighting the political tensions between empowered viewer/users and the needs of the broadcast industry to ‘monetise’ the viral feedback (Joselet 2007) exemplified in the mash-ups of remediated broadcast. Mash-ups and similar acts of resistance can be seen as key acts of agency and affect (Gray 2008) and a new type of ‘flow’ in the avoidance of the invasiveness (predicted by Williams and Dovey), of personalised selling and product placement that, unchallenged, will be heralded as the hegemonic ‘common sense’ of new television. The low-grade technical quality and production values of web cam sites and YouTube-type mash-ups mirror early television’s ‘darkened stage’ and the single camera realised on the (literally) small screen, exemplified in early experimental television drama such as the first ever tele-play: Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (BBC: 1930) and the first scheduled tele-play Das Schaukelpferd (The Rocking Horse) by Adolf Weber in 1936. While early television sought a technological escape from these limitations, this paper will argue that it is limitation (or constraint) itself, aligned with the current uncertainty of a ‘new’ television and its myriad of creative possibilities that might be harnessed as resistance to the programme and the market. The competing elements and attractors (Wood 2007) of the digital interface and the immediacy of creative and productive feedback allow for a new television that is empowering, active and demands open meaning production and exchange. Flow is now viral. The viral is agency. The paper will be accompanied by a mashed-up or live re-working of The Rocking Horse (2009) and/or The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (2009).