In today's NYTimes, David Carr posits that one reason for the depressed ratings for The Tonight Show over the past couple of years is that the internet - specifically, sites like TMZ, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even forwarded emails - serve the audience's desire for snarky commentary on current events, which is most of reason why people watched late-night TV. The internet does so more efficiently, tailoring content to individual interests and providing it anytime people want, even right after the events happen, not to mention the fact that it doesn't have Broadcast Standards and Practices looking over its shoulder.
Maybe this is why ratings are down, and maybe it isn't. All we have are the Nielsen numbers, which indicate that, yes, people are watching less late-night TV and going online more, but we don't know if that's because Jeff Zucker screwed up when he switched Leno to 10pm and put Conan at 11:30, because people are satisfying their desire for snark online, or some combination of the two. But the possibility raised by Carr provides an ideal example of why scholars and critics cannot make claims about how an audience/user responds to a medium, or even a media text (like The Tonight Show), that would be true even if there were other media options available to consumers. Certainly, there's a need for in-depth commentary that applies in-the-moment to an audience's relationship to a genre or a show or a medium at a given time, and certainly, it is impossible to anticipate what the mediascape will look like in 2 years let alone 10 or 20, but there is an alternative to simply making claims about texts or genres or a medium: making claims about media experiences.
In an era with fewer media options, you could describe the audience's (or your own) experience with a medium such as television and assume that when someone read your analysis, that person would know what "television" was and would've experienced "television" in ways that are similar to the ways in which the audience did at the time the analysis was written. You could describe an audience's experience with a show or a genre, and even if the show or genre weren't available to the reader, the reader could find an equivalent in his or her own time and place. If I read a piece about what The Tonight Show meant to viewers in the 1960's, I would imagine that viewers of 2005's Tonight Show or perhaps viewers of any late-night comedy show might feel similarly. What Carr suggests is that although the show is still called The Tonight Show and that it hasn't radically altered its content, its relationship to its audience is not the same. Therefore, anything we said about the appeal of The Tonight Show 20 years ago doesn't really apply anymore.
In his essay, Carr says, "The show hasn’t changed, we have." I don't think this is quite right. We stay more or less the same. We experience the same basic set of emotions, our minds are just as capable or incapable of deciding between various options, we relate to one another in ways we related to one another thousands of years ago, we are creatures of habit. To use the example of The Tonight Show, we're still in need of funny commentary on current, shared, cultural events on a regular basis. So really, in the ways that count, in the ways that determine what media we choose and the ways we act in life, we have not changed.
So, if the show hasn't changed and we haven't changed, what has? The ways in which we are connected to each other have changed and will continue to change at rapid pace. We're left with an environment that won't sit still long enough for us to make claims about the role of any one of its elements - be it a technology or a TV show - that will be relevant to the world 10 years from now. Also, there are simply too many texts for any scholar or critic to keep up with. If twitter or Facebook feeds are the functional equivalent of late-night comedy TV for some people, how do we get access to this information and how do we preserve it? We can't.
What we need is a way of identifying and categorizing media experiences that is not contingent upon the text or medium's relationship to other available options at a given time, or rather, one that takes into account that relationship in the claims that it allows scholars to make.
To stick with The Tonight Show example, here are two ways of making claims about people's use of that show (these claims are probably not true, but they're just an illustration of the kinds of claims that one could make):
- People who watch The Tonight Show do so b/c they want to relax, they want to stay informed about current events, they want to be entertained, and they want something to talk about with other people. We know this b/c they tell us. We also know that its true especially of people who watch that one show b/c people who watch other shows do not rate these reasons for viewing as highly. We also know that watching the show is associated with higher levels of political knowledge and better relationships with others.
- Given a set of options that is roughly equivalent in terms of its monetary and temporal costs, if people are in a certain mood and they been encouraged to engage in an experience habitually by the way in which the experience is made available (once every night, 5 nights a week, year round), and that experience allows them to relax, stay informed, be entertained, and maintain bonds with others, they will choose that media experience. That media experience, so long as it contains commentary related to current events, will result in higher levels of political knowledge and better relationships with others.
The categories that we're using now - genre, medium, text - either won't exist or won't mean the same thing that they mean right now. The state of rapid media change does not require that we be able to see into the future. No one in any other branch of science is any more capable of seeing into the future. It just requires us to concentrate on other variables, ones which have numbers of levels that remain relatively stable. An incomplete list:
- emotions
- motivations
- the number of options one can consider at a given time
- monetary and temporal costs
- whether or not some experience appeals to our ideology
- whether or not we identify with characters
- ease of use
