Overview - Text 1
The 1980s and 90s in Canada and the United States witnessed an increase in the number of television networks, the arrival of new recording and dissemination technologies, and the gradual segmenting of audiences. In criticism in the press and, later, scholarly writing, new forms of discourse emerged which increasingly saw television programs as artworks, causing them to be likened to cinema. This was a process by which the industry was transformed over a period of several years and which we might call the “multi-channel transformation.”[1] This was a major shift from the television which, until that time, had been conceived as a broadcasting experience, meaning the dissemination of content from one point to several other points, with hierarchical transmitters organized into networks and affiliated stations at the local level. Programs of the day were conceived to please the greatest number of people out of a concern to realize economies of scale. As for audiences, they had the sensation of being part of a community imagined as homogeneous, a phenomenon Benedict Anderson has described as crucial to the development of modern society.[2] In the linear television model, broadcasts were conceived as part of a quite rigid programming schedule which matched each network’s identity and was structured by the civil calendar, encouraging the sense among audiences of having an appointment with a program and thereby of being a part of a “corps of spectators.” The age of the multi-channel transition called into question the preponderant role of the “flow” which had characterized television until then. In 1974, in fact, Raymond Williams had defined television as an uninterrupted series of programs, flowing like a stream and to be conceived as part of a cultural and industrial framework dominated by the broadcasting principle or by systems of centralized power with reception on a national scale.[3] According to Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton,
Everything flows in an uninterrupted stream of images with hierarchies of intensity. The pope goes down on his knees and kisses the ground, mothers change their baby’s diaper with Pampers, Reagan is shot in the chest and John Wayne pulls out his pistol, the newscaster smiles at you, two men walk on the moon, Dalida sings, Scapin bounds onto the stage, well-fed Hollywood actors enter the gas chamber.[4]
Beginning with the birth of cable television channels in the early 1980s there was a shift from television which sought to speak to the greatest number of people to a multiplicity of channels and thus, for viewers, to the need to choose the content they desired, to create their own specific identity, according to precise communications strategies. Broadcast became narrowcast. An increasing number of cultural niches would emerge throughout the 1990s, when subscriptions to cable channels became significant in the North American landscape (in 1996, 65 % of households subscribed to cable) and when these channels began to offer original programming (scripted programs, such as series, as well as reality shows and other unscripted programs).
In this new framework, the role of the viewer’s choice was central, for networks and producers alike. This was related in part to the appearance of technologies which made greater control by audiences possible and to the emergence of specific and increasingly complex forms of television.
Videocassette recording and the use of the remote control appear essential, in audience discourses and in the press of the day, to understanding the new ways of conceiving television outside the traditional “flow.” In fact these technologies contributed to reconfiguring relations among various media, and in particular to distinctions between discrete media (such as cinema) and flow media (such as television, which found itself becoming not only a content producer but also simply a viewing screen).[5] Audience habits changed when decreasingly linear experiences emerged, such as choosing, recording, managing the time of the viewing and subscription. It is important to note that the appearance of video and of consumption practices around the videocassette would, in turn, influence film production (perhaps more, at first, than it influenced television production).
