Screening the World: Entertainment Unboxed

Television may be remembered, among other things, as having entered a “golden age” even as it ceased to exist. As a term, television feels increasingly inapt, vestigial, at risk of acquiring the air quotes that presage irrelevance. Still, it refers to a form—episodic, moving- image narrative—for which we have not yet found a better alias, beyond awkward talk of streaming content and on-demand services, and the shorthand that is Netflix, a brand name that suggests the merger of two media, neither of which is television. As good “television” proliferates, television as a medium and as an experience is in decline.

The experience of television combined separation and togetherness; to tune in to a popular show was to commune without community. Television made entertainment a more private affair, even as it maintained the idea of entertainment as a public event. In real and abstract terms, advertising was integral to television: When technology made it possible for viewers to bypass the commercials, the whole concept of television began to break down. Today, Americans are rapidly losing interest in the medium as a medium, shedding their cable subscriptions and failing to turn in the same numbers to televised professional football or basketball games. What it offered, in the form it was provided, is no longer quite the thing. I haven’t turned on my TV in months. It’s pressed against the wall like a geek at the dance, unloved and unlooked at.

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In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argued that, beginning in the sixteenth century, “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form.” It was the beginning of the culture of things, and thingness, within which “All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality.” Oil painting became the predominant art form because it rendered most tangible “the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts,” conveying “a vision of total exteriority” at a time when the acquisition and display of material possessions, and the presentation of a sort of material self, became the foremost way of experiencing and organizing the world.

The reciprocal process by which an art form rises from and reflects a culture’s way of seeing took on a dizzying velocity with the arrival of the photographic and then the moving image. The influence of the one over the other, the symbiotic exchange between reality and its reflection, became more and more difficult to parse. For Berger, more than movies or television, advertising images define modern ways of seeing, a domination that bears a direct relation to that of the oil painting, because both speak “in the same voice about the same things.” Before it was anything else, oil painting “was a celebration of private property,” an art form “derived from the principle that you are what you have”; advertising “proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.”

Whereas television could not survive without it, advertising scuttled on, finding both rival and ally in the internet, which is devoted to the idea of the individual as both spectator and actor, the consumer and the consumed. The internet is not strictly concerned with the objectives of art, entertainment, or even commerce; how to monetize this new technology became one of the leading questions of the twenty-first century. Rather than overturning them, that technology replicated the cultural traditions from which it emerged: The internet favors the present, passing moment, making a supreme virtue of choice and turning “consumption into a substitute for democracy,” as Berger wrote of advertising. Still, few could have predicted how fully its users would participate in the internet’s commodification, which has led already-dominant cultural codes and norms to near-global hegemony.

The growing ubiquity of variously sized personal computer screens, and the devotion of users to them, suggests a sort of addiction to diversion. But previous modes of entertainment have not just been modified, privatized, their terms...