TVless Life

Television used to be my life.

I decided that was what I wanted to research when I saw my first Oprah Winrey Show in Chicago in 1992. Those were the days of mothers who dated their daughters' transvestite boyfriends. That kind of anarchy on TV, the most official and powerful of all media! Afterwards, as if to balance this out, I got to calculate content diversity indices for annual studies of the Ministry of Communications of Finland. I realised that television systems and programming strategies could also 'create audiences' and be real sites of (media policy) power struggles. I spent some 10 years researching the small screen.

TV Disappears

But since January 2008 when I moved to New York I haven't had a TV. People talked about 30 Rock and enthused about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. I had no clue.

I noticed that I didn't desire any of it. I read online from the New York Times that my favourite show ever, ER was about to have its season and series finale (what is it about all these grand finales in 2009?) and would log on to Hulu, to see it after the 'real time' broadcast.  I would also check some excerpts of old Finnish sitcoms, on YouTube, that someone would share in their Facebook profile. I read a lot at night.

TV = Less Life

Now, having spent 6 weeks in Finland this summer I realise that more TV equals less life. I was back being hooked.

Housesitting a friend's place with a nice HD wide screen TV, I started the mornings with the public service moning show.  Serious discussions about the necessity of biking helmets. Afterwards, I felt bored (but in a good way),  engaged (in a distanced way); in other words, ready to start my day as a citizen.

Then I stayed tuned in the PSB channel TV1 for the Canadian soap, set on the 19th century Nova Scotia. Road to Avonlea (remember, anyone?) .  My taste degraded as the day grew old: The enlightened Oprah and the spin-off favourite, Dr. Phil; followed by reruns of fashion-related reality shows (Australian Top Model) and B class romantic comedy series (the Ex List) in commercial channels.

TV is National and Nostalgic...

This experience has taught me two things: how old habits such as media practices stick with us, and how broadcast TV is still very much a national construct. Although I don't miss American television, I feel attached and drawn to the kind of programming, on Finnish television, that resembles television culture that I grew up with (I'm 41).

But I also found out, as I bet many expats and fans of foreign TV shows before me, that no matter of all the webstreams and digi-TV-ready computers, the present copyright regime keeps the (free or low-cost) flow of television programming within national borders.

The Case of TV-Kaista

Professor Hannu Nieminen of the University of Helsinki has recently written a unique case study on a Finnish attempt to bypass national borders in television webstreaming (in print: Jostein Gripsrud and Hallvard Moe, eds.: The Digital Public Sphere: Challenges for Media Policy, Nordicom).

He tells a fascinating story: 

From summer 2006 TVkaista has offered a global service which allows anybody from anywhere in the world to have access to all Finnish free-to-air television broadcasts for a small fee. Only difference to watching live television is the time that it takes to record the programme before having access to the copy.  In autumn 2006 major Finnish television companies challenged TVkaista for breaching their copyright. The argument was that in effect, TVkaista was nothing but commercially motivated re-transmission of the TV-companies’ copyright-protected programmes, and as such it was plainly illegal. TVkaista, in turn, claims it only offers recording service, not the programming.

Nieminen concludes:

• TVkaista as a service-format is an exciting example of the hardships that today’s global copyright governance faces. There is an urgent need to study similar experimentations and their reception in other countries. Does the prevailing copyright regime offer any real solution to TVkaista’s challenge? 

• The case of TVkaista brings out interesting topics concerning cultural democracy in the digital era, especially regarding both the creation of comprehensive and publicly accessible national audiovisual archives, and the competencies of the ex-patriots to actively participate in the social and cultural life of their home countries. However, is this participatory potential is real or is it just wishful thinking? If it is real, what more is needed in order to make it stronger?

• From the viewpoint of the European public sphere, the case of TVkaista includes promising prospects: these kinds of services can be seen both to represent and to promote a new kind of European cosmopolitanism. Again, the problem is if this cosmopolitan promise is just our optimistic projection or do we have some concrete evidence of the democratising effects of such services?

Nieminen's article depicts a case par excellence of how TV could matter, precisely because it's national but its distribution is potentially global. At the same time, the discussion on the role and funding of Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) continues, e.g., online in yesterday's (8/19) biggest Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat. The core idea simplified: although people might not watch TV they are likely to follow content though some distribution channel. Consequently,  every household should pay a 'media fee' and that would be used to fund public service media. 

As noted in my last post, commercial media houses are in a mission to challenge YLE's existence in all possible ways. Not surprisingly, a new poll (commissioned, unsurprisingly, by the Finnish Association of Newspapers,  a major opponent of PSM) showing people's major discontent to the idea most comments to the news item seem to call for a narrowed mission for PSB, and budget-based funding. 

Long Live TV!

Television is no longer only the apparatus in the living room. Public service is no longer only broadcasting. And mainstream audiences are indeed getting more and more comfortable in watching content on their laptops,  as the New York Times recently reported:

By some estimates, one in four Internet customers now uses Hulu, an online home for NBC and Fox shows, every month. “Dancing With the Stars,” the popular ABC reality show, draws almost two million viewers on ABC.com, according to Nielsen. (...) While online video is not going to replace television anytime soon, it is now decidedly mainstream. About 150 million Internet users in the United States watch about 14.5 billion videos a month, according to the measurement firm comScore, or an average of 97 videos per viewer.

At the same time, TV still gathers biggest audiences, most ad money, and even changes the aesthetics and duration of the online video. From the aforementioned NYT article:

Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule. (...)

Yet TV networks get much of the credit for the longer-length viewing behavior. In the past two TV seasons, nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20-plus minutes at a time. 

To echo the scholar/media practitioner John Ellis, who set to write his book Seeing Things about the death of television, but had to change his mind: Television is not dead. Television did not kill cinema. Net/mobile video content will not kill television. There will be interaction, and mingling and mixing, and convergence. 

As the case of my old habits and TVkaista show, the conventional, 'old-fashioned' characteristics and qualities of television (national-bound aspects, public service traditions,  'liveness' and simultaneous consumption) could be used to its advantage. In the times of Ipods, vinyl records became popular again. Rephrasing Ellis: the lone net surfer may increasingly begin to yearn the sense of common witnessing.

Much Ado about Participation

It seems to me that in today's public and scholarly discourses about the media the underlying issue is always about 'participation' .

To start with, there's the aspect of a kind of media (form & content). The term 'Participation Media' is frequently used to refer to cross / multimedia content production and products, as well as to interactive possibilities for consumers to take part in the production. Most often, the presumption still seems to be that the framework of participation media is provided by specific, conventional media institutions, and a great part of the content is produced by professionals -- such as in so called 'reality programming' where individual audience members vote by mobile and chat online.

At the same time, we know how 'informal' media outlets and social media tools facilitate informal new agency functions and serious political activism (here's an example of an interesting analysis on the US). Facebook and Twitter provide for the most current, and infamous, examples regarding Iran, but for instance professor Ullamaija Kivikuru has analysed the Tsunami news coverage in 2005 in Finland and noted the importance of Finnish diving sites in providing the most up-to-date information about Finns in Thailand.

Yet another mutation of the theme is a certain crowd-sourced encyclopedia (we know what I mean) or often short lived projects of crowd sourced online journalism (see also the PEW report), or Facebook-directed animation, or a collaborative translation service for TV shows... The central aim is the joint production, and while there is a hub that gathers the information, the production is not facilitated by and/or channelled through conventional , professional media production and distribution means.

Then there are the more scholarly, conceptual and abstract discussions about how audience members are addressed by the media and/or how they position themselves. The conventional dichotomy of citizens versus consumers still lurks in the background, but (as I noted in the previous post) some researchers have come up with new roles (or modes of address) such as that of a customer, player (Syvertsen), or 'enjoyer' (Costera Meier). To be sure, for example my analysis of Finnish television journalism some five years ago already revealed that within that relatively formatted genre (or generic programme family) there were several very different and distinct way to address the (imagined) recipients of journalistic contents.

In broader terms, some scholars want to bypass the idea of audiences and talk about 'audienceship' as referring to the very interface between audiences and texts (Li; as opposed to, I guess, the subject positions of audience members); while others note that the idea of mass communication and 'the work' of its audiences, are still valid concepts, when appropriately reconfigured (Napoli).

It is clear, however, that the slogan of 'participation' -- audiences as 'participants' in (or even 'in partnership' with) the media -- is a marketing strategy of both conventional commercial and public ('mass') media organizations. In terms of (internal and external) public service ethos, clients and prosumers have already a while ago bypassed the core idea of citizens (regarding the Finnish case, this is noted by researcher Johanna Jääsaari, in a forthcoming article by the research team of the project Media, Citizenship and Circuits of Power).

A White Paper on Public Media 2.0 by the Center for Social Media notes laconically that 'The people formerly known as the audience are now at the center of media'.

At the same time, it is curious that some recent surveys on the topic, in the US (PEW) and in Finland (the Circuits of Power project, by Karppinen & Jääsaari), seem to indicate audiences' criticism towards the media. The US/PEW survey on citizen-based media verified that citizens are mostly used as sources rather than given opportunities to really produce journalistic contents. The Finnish respondents felt that the least likely parties to have any influence on media contents were audiences.

Two things come to mind, one completely practical (and normative), the other theoretical (but to be operationalised in research, for instance).

While content, distribution and the related roles of those (formerly?) known as audience members are important in the participation discussion, there's yet another sphere which is becoming increasingly crucial, in terms of content and access. IMHO, participation in (or, just to begin with, the awareness of) media policy making is a crucial aspect of the entire participation process. And I mean real engagement.

The situation is analogous to participation in content-making. The ability to send an SMS comment to the current affairs TV show is not an incredibly radical solution. Some years ago, I did a brief analysis of the content of a website by the Ministry of Communication. The site was set up to allow citizens the possibility to comment on 'Radio and TV programming in 2010', read: how they think about the role of public service. What emerged, among other things, was a lot of resigned skepticism on decision-making processes.

I'm not an expert on contemporary political climate and participatory modalities -- this may be the case every time when citizens are asked to comment or participate in such informal manner. I'm just thinking, by the way of an illustration, the momentum when organizations like Prometheus Radio and the Free Press were able to mobilize millions of Americans to challenge the FCC regarding ownership regulations in 2003-4. And I'm thinking the hundreds of transnational advocacy and activist organizations that are interested in rethinking and challenging media policies, nationally and globally (see, e.g., the Resource Database of the Mediaresearchhub).

If I were employed by any European public media organization, I'd probably work on launching a mega campaign on behalf of PSM. I'd reach for grass roots allies of all kinds (from social justice NGOs to consumer organizations), I'd use all kinds of social media campaigning tools. And I'd work on media literacy so that people would understand the questions of diversity and access, net neutrality, and the like. And what PSM and related policy-making have to do with them.

Another point that I'd work on, as a scholar, would be how to assess participation. As Bridget Griffen-Foley has so humorously proven, 'audience participation' has existed at least over a century -- so what can be new and revolutionary? And don't give me new media platforms as the explanation. While all kinds of texting, chatting and blogging can be fun, I'm still an old-fashioned believer of the possibilities of mediated communication to build up and strengthen democratic societies.

The most sober, and ethical, and suitable for the foundation of PSM, and useful conceptualisation that I have come across (but I may be biased) is Peter Dahlgren's (2005) idea of Civic Cultures (see also this article). If it is claimed, as it seems to be, that participation is now the key to a democratic mediated communication (and perhaps even to related public sphere/s), then what kind of participation really counts? While scholars like Liesbet van Zoonen have celebrated the immense power of the engagement and participation fostered by reality shows, that format, and the kind of aspects it brings out in the participants, may not be transferable to all kinds of contents and purposes of communication.

I claim that the five circuits of what Dahlgren labels as civic cultures are quanti -or at least qualifiable, researchable concepts, that is:

Does participation (participatory possibilities) foster:
1) knowledge and competencies (related to democracy)
2) values (procedural and broader)
3) affinity and trust (providing 'minimal sense of commonality among citizens in heterogeneous late modern societies')
4) practices (those necessary for democracies), and/or
5) identities (as participants in a democracy).

Did I just set up a postdoc challenge to myself?