Redirecting Flow Analyzing Strategies of Re-Positioning Television in a Cross-Media Sphere
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Extending Liveness - Redirecting Flow Analyzing strategies of re-positioning television in a cross-media sphere Name: Felix van Gisbergen E-mail address: [email protected] Student number: 6075991 Supervisor: Sebastian Scholz Second reader: Anne Kustritz Master: Television and Cross-Media Culture: Beroepsgeoriënteerde Specialisatie Department: Graduate School of Humanities University: University of Amsterdam Date of completion: 26-06-2014 Word count: 20.676 Acknowledgements The past year as a Master student in Television and Cross-Media Culture I was challenged to deepen my knowledge about television studies. The bachelor provided a comprehensive foundation and the master created a valuable opportunity to further specialize in the area of television studies. It seems like only yesterday that I started this degree, yet the end is now nearly in sight. It is satisfying, yet also strange to write this with the knowledge that my academic career as a masters student will end in just a few days. The thesis is, as written in the course guide, the ‘final exam’ where the student has to show his independence and skills in conducting academic research. Although, as previously mentioned, the thesis is an individual project I want to express my thankfulness to everyone who supported me during these past few months. I couldn’t have done it without the support of all the people who had confidence in my research during the writing of this thesis. First of all I want to thank the creators of Wie is de Mol? for making this great television program for the past fourteen years. I want to thank my family, friends and fellow students for their feedback and support. Also my colleagues at BNNVARA have been of great support during my traineeship by sharing their knowledge about the functioning of the Dutch public television system. I want to thank Sophie Buijsen for the proofreading of my thesis. Special thanks goes to Sebastian Scholz for his excellent supervision during the entire process. He has been of great help with all the feedback and criticism but at the same time always motivating me to keep the focus and trust, which was very important when writing this thesis. Felix van Gisbergen Amsterdam, 25th of June 2014 2 Abstract A debate is taking place in media studies about the future of television. Some academics claim that the fragmentation, cross-platform and multichannel media landscape has lead to a point where television will lose one of its core qualities as a mass medium; the ‘community thing’ that television once was will disappear. This research focuses on the question how television uses new strategies in addressing an audience in this new cross-platform media sphere. This will be exemplified with a case study of the Dutch television program Wie is de Mol? (AVRO, 2000). The focus in this research is on how the concepts liveness and flow are linked to the medium television and operate in a cross- platform television landscape. Therefore the aim of this research is to critically show how these concepts have changed in this new context, where the logic and strategies of television are not solely connected to the medium itself. This will lead to the reconceptualization of the concepts and determining how relevant they still are in this ‘new’ television landscape. Keywords Television, Flow, Liveness, cross-platform, Convergence 3 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................ 5 1. MEDIUM SPECIFICITY IN AN CHANGING TELEVISUAL LANDSCAPE ....................... 9 1.1 Liveness ................................................................................................................................................... 11 1.2 Flow ......................................................................................................................................................... 15 1.2.1 Flow and the structure agency debate .................................................................................................... 17 1.2.2 Flow nowadays: convergence culture and the rise of cross-platform television strategies ................... 18 2. CASE STUDY: WIE IS DE MOL? (THE MOLE)................................................................... 23 2.1 Flow in the context of the television broadcast ................................................................................. 24 2.2 Liveness in the television broadcast of Wie is de Mol? ...................................................................... 28 3. MOLTALK: ‘’DON’T FORGET TO STAY TUNED AND GIVE YOUR OPINION!’’ ....... 30 3.1 Liveness and flow in Moltalk ............................................................................................................. 30 4. WIE IS DE MOL? APP .............................................................................................................. 38 4.1 Liveness and flow in the Wie is de Mol? App ..................................................................................... 38 5. WIE IS DE MOL VODCAST ..................................................................................................... 42 5.1 Wie is de Mol Vodcast in relation to the cross-platform media flow ................................................. 42 6. DE ROODSHOW ....................................................................................................................... 46 7. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 48 7.1 Keeping them and Moving Them ............................................................................................................. 48 7.2 Why ‘old’ concepts never get ‘old’ ........................................................................................................... 57 LIST OF SOURCES ........................................................................................................................... 61 4 Introduction As a true fan of the Dutch television game show Wie is de Mol? I sat ready on the couch in anticipation of the start of the 14th season last January. The season premiere was spectacular as always and I was glued to the television screen for the duration of the broadcast. At the end of the program there was a live connection with the online after talk show Moltalk. In the short clip they emphasized that you, in this case I, the viewer could go online and witness a live stream of the program. Due to an endless desire to get more information about that evening’s broadcast I decided for the first time ever to turn on my computer and watch the online live stream. From that moment on I was ‘trapped’ in the whole network around the program and moved from one extra feature to another. For the first time in my life there was a program that made me go online, play apps, listen to radio shows and sent me on an online route to know more about every detail of the television broadcast. The situation mentioned above is an example of how the relationship between television, other media and its viewers has changed over the past few years. In media studies there is a debate about the influence of time-shift viewing on traditional media tactics in addressing potential audiences. An example of this is Gentikow who claims that television and new media compete and struggle to get their place in the media landscape (2010, 143). A number of authors claim that broadcast television, as we now know it, will soon be gone. Eligu Katz raises questions about the future of television and states that what has become clear in the last decades is that ‘[…] the era of “sharedness” is dead or dying’ (2009, 8). In her article ‘’The End of Television?’’ she makes a division between ‘new’ and ‘old’ television where the new is about the individual and the old about the mass. In her article Gentikow also claimed that the fragmented audiences and time-shift viewing of the last decades will result in the fact that nobody watches the same program (at the same time) anymore. She further emphasizes that the ‘community thing’ that television once was, will disappear due to the individualized and fragmentized audience (2010, 147). This debate starts with the changing notion of flow. In the early years of television there were only a few channels to choose from and the main focus for programmers was to keep their audience connected to their channel. With the introduction of the videocassette recorder people got more power over their time schedules and in this way gained some agency over the televisual flow of different connected units. In recent times the rise of new media initiatives enforced time-shifting possibilities for the viewer, some examples are Youtube1, Uitzending Gemist2, NL Ziet3 and Netflix4. 1 http://www.youtube.com/ (Online video streaming/uploading platform) 5 With all these technological innovations and social changes it is clear that the way we watch television is changing. We adjust and customize to new modes and habits of watching television. But the emphasis should not only be on the negatives for the future of broadcast television. Instead, I want to analyze what has been defined as essential qualities of broadcast television that always were specific to the medium and still are, and maybe especially relevant in the current debate. Important is that my aim is not to essentialize, instead, I want to take the focus from essentializing to a perspective that is open for new interpretation.