Bravo, TV!

In the McPherson reading this week, I was particularly interested in the author’s discussion of causality and the internet. On page 202, she writes, “…unlike television which parades its presence before us, the Web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the movement.” As I read this passage, my roommate was watching a Project Runway rerun in the background, and one of its promotional clips advertised the possibility of text messaging a vote for your favorite designer. It occurred to me then that this principle (audience participation a la American Idol) is a television example of McPherson’s “volitional mobility.” When we choose a singer/designer/model that we would like to win and vote online or by phone, we are engaging with television in the same way that McPherson suggests we surf the Net. By clicking on a link, I am directing my browser to a new page, but I did not forge the path to this page; it was predetermined by the site’s author or constructor. Similarly, I don’t really think that my text message is going to decide the outcome of American Idol; I think that the network decides, and then allows me the illusion of participation. McPherson refers to this as the “experience of choice (or its illusion) within the constraints of Web space and Web time.” This would seem to imply to me that McPherson’s text is completing its cycle- our “passive” television-watching informed the development of internet interactivity, which is now transforming our engagement with television. I am reminded of Leyla Harrison, an X-Files fanfiction writer, whose 2001 death prompted X-Files writers to create a character in her name, based loosely on her fanfiction interests. The scope of “Web space” seems to be expanding as “Web time” collapses; our media seem to be vying for our attention and participation. This article also highlighted for me the extent to which Web browsing (and now, it seems, also TV-watching) has become a forum for individuals to be alone together. McPherson writes that “There’s a sense of presence with strangers,” and, indeed, our sensation of mutability and change derives from the fact that other people are constantly transforming cyberspace. Like “socializing” in a chatroom, texting the Bravo network or creating a body of fanfiction has become television’s response to Bob Stam’s diagnosis of TV as adhering to “a certain syntagmatic orthodoxy” of disconnectedness.