Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future

Introduction: When Television and New Media Work Worlds Collide

1 Introduction When Television and New Media Work Worlds Collide DENISE MANN In a 2005 trade article entitled “The End of Television (As You Know It),” a cable executive reduced the vast cultural-industrial transition then under way to a singular, technologically driven event—the incongruous conjoining of two black boxes—by stating, “The computer has crashed into the television set.”1 In fact, the situation is far more challenging and elusive to describe, given the glacial pace at which vast bureaucratic organizations like the networks embrace change and the epochal nature of the impact of the Internet and Web 2.0 companies on the traditional television industry. Complicating matters for media scholars engaged in the perilous task of analyzing the operation of network bureaucracies during a period of transformation is John T. Caldwell’s warning: “‘The industry’ is not a monolith controlled by 5–6 giant conglomerates , but a series of dense rhizomatic networks of sub-companies held at a safe distance, loosely structured to flexibly adapt to new labor markets, new digital technologies, and consumer unruliness.”2 Max Weber’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century theories regarding bureaucratic structure and its formative influence on the genesis of capitalism inform a recurring strain of later critiques of the workplace as a site of cultural sameness , from Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to American sociologists David Reisman (The Lonely Crowd) and William Whyte (The Organization Man).3 The legacy of sameness can be seen in today’s 2 • Denise Mann post-network entertainment industry insofar as the charismatic and rationalist authorities placed in charge of these complex organizations tend to avoid risk associated with change, despite mounting evidence that their aging, linear system is failing. Weber described how additional layers of managers typically analyze the performance of employees in their respective divisions while also drafting and dispersing reports across the entire organization. In the case of today’s Disney-ABC Television group, that workforce numbers more than seven thousand.4 Unraveling these complex bureaucracies and entrenched hierarchies is not easy, prompting most scholars to rely too heavily for insight on the public utterances of network heads. While acknowledging the obvious benefits of “ethnographic fieldwork [which] can provide rich insights that speculative theorizing misses,” Caldwell warns media scholars to be aware that what “high-level professionals say has almost always been scripted and rehearsed.”5 To triangulate their findings, the authors in this collection move beyond the public statements of network personnel in the trade press to include textual analyses of specific television franchises and, when possible, analyses of the self-statements of a variety of production personnel, all in an effort to understand the changing workplace rules and bureaucratic structures operating at the major broadcasting units. That said, even the well-rehearsed sound bites of high-level professionals can shed light on a particular situation, albeit in unintended ways, so long as the scholar considers the underlying meanings of these discursive statements. For example, even though network presidents routinely assure journalists and the public of their interest in digital new media, most have been conditioned to see their future largely as a virtual (pun intended) replica of their present reality, that is, simply a shift from broadcast to online viewing. For instance, when asked to describe the future of broadcasting at a public event in late 2011, CW Television Network president Mark Pedowitz stated that “TV viewing . . . will eventually migrate online with full commercial load.”6 This off-the-cuff comment is symptomatic of the larger problem facing the networks as they transition from a broadcast to a digital era: their tendency to return to old patterns and profit centers, which reinforces their reluctance to rethink their creative and business models.7 Even though digital video recorders (DVRs) are typically cited as the biggest threat to the traditional ad-supported television industry, given the consumer ’s ability to fast-forward past the expensive thirty-second spots that are the networks’ primary source of income, it is more likely that the infiltration of broadband into the majority of homes and the popularity of Web 2.0 social media companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have jeopardized the smooth operation of the networks’ existing hierarchies and interlocking bureaucracies since 2005. These two landmark events radically altered consumer behavior, prompting network gatekeepers and their advertising part- Introduction • 3 ners to demonstrate an uncharacteristic openness to engaging outsiders— writers...