Attending this year's
Flow 2010 Conference reminded me of a few things. It reminded me how far I've wandered down the social science path of communication studies. It reminded me of the value of attending round-table conferences where the focus isn't on simply presenting your findings in a concise format, but rather on thinking out loud with many other informed individuals. Social science is often a matter of incremental gains in general knowledge. Where do the significant changes in theory and thinking about a topic come from? I think they come from places like the Flow 2010 Conference (or the blogosphere?).
I presented a brief position paper at one of two panels dedicated to serial TV narrative. My basic point was that a narrative doled out in semi-regular intervals over the span of years feels like the interactions we have with other people in a way that narratives doled out by other means do not. Something about reading a novel or watching a new Harry Potter movie once every 3 years feels inert and lifeless; I think some of that has to do with the evolution of TV stories over time (like our relationships with people evolving over time) and some of it has to do with our lack of total control over the pace and content of the story/relationship.
The discussion in the first panel got me thinking more about these gaps in between story parts. That seems to be a defining characteristic of narratives on TV as they are broadcast. What happens in those gaps? Janet Staiger noted that the gaps allow for extended periods of speculation of hypothesizing as to what is going to happen net in the story. The internet makes this kind of speculation collective, thereby heightening fan community, and I think this collective hypothesizing helps manage some of the anxiety people experience waiting for the next installment. The gaps also create the possibility for the creators of the story to adjust
some of the elements in the story to respond to real life events (e.g. the incorporation of anti-terrorism federal agents in
The Sopranos and
The Wire post 9/11) while retaining a pre-established overall story arc (see Lindlof and Cuse's account of how they wrote
Lost).
Its also important to note the regularity or irregularity of the gaps and how that affects the audience's experience of the story. I don't think its the existence of the gaps that makes audiences anxious so much as the existence of irregularity of gaps. Once I come to expect intervals of absences of certain durations at certain times, be it in a story I'm enjoying or a relationship of some sort, then I shape my expectations to conform to this. But if the intervals are of indeterminate length (is the show coming back? when is it coming back), people get antsy, or at the very least, they are somewhat detached in their devotion to the show. I like the idea of looking at Facebook newsfeeds as narratives, ones that evolve with us and are relevant to us. We have choice over when we choose to view them (although the bundling of these feeds together and with other sub-applications like party-planning makes it difficult to say "I want to check out how this one particular person's narrative is progression") but we can't choose when they update and typically people update irregularly. So perhaps we cannot be as devoted to an evolving Facebook feed narrative as a fictional TV narrative.
The second panel (in particular Ryan Lizardi's comments) got me thinking about the ideological potential of serial narratives, what I think Ryan referred to as a "long drip of ideology." There's something about a TV show, something about that frequent reinforcement of an idea over time and the ability to get everyone talking about certain topic in a certain way that has the potential to change people's minds about things. I provided two examples at the panel (
The Wire changed how I thought about inner-city blight;
The Up Series changed how I thought about success and happiness), but upon further reflection, I watched both of those on DVDs,
not as they were broadcast. I suppose I'm not saying that other forms of narrative (TV on DVD, novels, movies) can't alter the way people think, but that TV as it is broadcast has the potential to change the national conversation about a topic (again, the water cooler).
Serial TV narratives may have the power to shift people in a positive direction, to help them consider a topic from a new point of view. But what do we lose when more narratives become increasingly serialized? I think we potentially lose the diversity of sampling different kinds of content (this is the "commitment" issue brought up by
Bordwell on his blog on why he doesn't write about TV). If I have to watch 10 hours of a show and then watch it every week to be part of the conversation (which is the case with serial TV narrative), then I can't use that time to try out other content. Hence, there is less overlap in what we watch. This leads to a loss of a type of discourse about TV and, by extension, culture. Readers or DVD viewers can plow through a serial in a few days. Watching a show as it is broadcast requires a kind of protracted, scheduled commitment, and the talk about the show in between episodes is part of that commitment. So, serialization of narratives may be part of the social fragmentation phenomenon that comes with expansion of media options that other social critics have feared.
There is, of course, much more to say about serial TV narrative, but these are just a couple of ideas that I picked up from the panels that I wouldn't mind expanding on.
