Course News

Television is Dead, Long Live Television

OK so, I have two things that everyone needs to look at by Tuesday... one is a text, one is a video (although it, too is all text). These are to give us a kind of formal/historical/political introduction to television as a communication technology. Both are roughly from the same time - the early to mid 1970s, so these are reflections on the media roughly half way between its introduction and our current moment, but closer to its beginning in many important ways - pre-cable, pre-WWW, pre-satellite.
1. Raymond Williams: " The Technology and the Society"
2. Artists Carlotta Schoolman & Richard Serra: "Television Delivers the People"
But we can take the discussion up to the present... let's take Google's Youtube. Just the other day the New York Times ran a story about new implementations of data-mining technologies for Youtube videos. This kind of data-mining puts traditional tv ratings systems to shame - we're not talking statistical averages anymore - the individuated mass media of the web supplies real-time and automated meta data.
About two years ago, some ambitious directors/writers began a covert drama on Youtube called Lonelygirl15. It was created in tandem with other media (like myspace pages) to create the appearance that this was actually a 15-year-old girl's life - it got major coverage, and hundreds of people watched it and even wrote advice to lonelygirl15. And more recently, the writers of Scrubs produced a pilot sitcom that the WB network turned down. So, they put it on Youtube.
In class, we'll look at a few more things related to art and advertising and get into the project parameters.
Have a great weekend.

posted by ryan griffis at 9:07 PM Thursday, March 27, 2008

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Course News

Television is Dead, Long Live Television

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