Overview - Text 2
In his book Timeshift: On Video Culture, published in 1991, Sean Cubitt explored the subversive potential of domestic video recording technology: “the domestic video cassette recorder (VCR) is itself a kind of production device, as it can be used for seizing moments from TV’s incessant flow, compiling, crash editing.”[6] Here there is a shift from a consumer culture to a culture of production, thanks to devices which promote command of television’s flow.
Audiences became increasingly competent, capable of managing their audiovisual experience, of finding their way in the fictional world, of recognizing techniques and stylistic devices, and of having the potential of acting to subvert the system which sought to make them passive consumers:
I have become competent. … These complex modes of storytelling in video – spatial orientation, time orientation, knowing who to believe and who to disbelieve – demand equally complex work on the part of the viewers, whose competence in the practice of the medium, gleaned perhaps from older media but honed still further … through video, is brought into active play as an interaction with the video text in the production (and critique) of meaning. … The role of the audience is much more than simply paying for the cycle of production, distribution and consumption.[7]
Video broke the continuity and synchronicity of the flow and gave viewers the feeling of being part of a community. It also made possible more complex narratives, because it enabled non-linear consumption. At the same time, there was a plethora of possibilities, of sites of discourses, and of gestures on the part of audiences, who could in turn become producers of content, distancing themselves from the idea of broadcasting and contributing, finally, to the emergence of a potentially democratic space.
The remote control, the videotape recorder and later the DVD enabled viewers to stop on an image or to record programs in order to watch them or watch them again whenever they wished without being reliant on a programming schedule. These technologies promoted greater attention to detail in the programs which, for their part, developed increasingly interconnected stories, no longer limiting themselves to the episode as the narrative unit but spreading out, rather, over multiple seasons.
The audience taking command of the televised product made possible new forms of creation, which critics sometimes defined as “cinematic,” in the sense of the greater choice offered to audiences and of the desire, on the part of the television networks, to stand out in an increasingly fragmented and saturated market. The television networks and the cable channels alike called on new talent, or established hiring practices which promoted the development of more auteur-like approaches, whether with David Lynch, who co-authored (with Mark Frost) and directed Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-91), or with David Chase, who at HBO was given generous contracts for creating the series The Sopranos (1999-2007).
