During that time, the medium gained its status as a primary cultural institution precisely because network-era programming could and did reach such vast audiences. Television derived its significance from its capacity to broadly share information and ideas and facilitate an “electronic public sphere” of sorts.37 Its stories and ideas reached a mass audience that some have argued enabled television programs to negotiate contradictory and contested social ideas, while others have proposed that this reach allowed television to enforce a dominant way of thinking.38 Significantly, both perspectives ascribed importance to television because of its pervasiveness.39 Viewers’ lack of control over the medium and the limited choice at this time aided its ability to function as both forum and ideological enforcer. Network-era norms imposed the synchronousness of linear viewing, and television earned its status as an instigator of “watercooler conversation” by providing shared content for discussion. Coworkers and neighbors chose from the same limited range of programs each night, and thus were likely to have viewed the same program.
Assessments of television that consider how it contributes to the sharing and negotiation of ideas understand it to operate as a “cultural institution”—that is, as a social conduit that participates in communicating values and ideas within a culture by telling stories and conveying information that reflects, challenges, and responds to shared debates and concerns. Educational systems, clubs and societal orders, and religious organizations are also cultural institutions, although we may more readily identify and accept the influence of these sites on how we know and understand the world around us.40 At the same time television functions as a cultural institution, however, it is also a “cultural industry.” That is, in a context such as the United States, the television industry operates as a commercial enterprise that primarily seeks to maximize profits, while nonetheless producing programs that are important creative and cultural forms that communicate social values and beliefs. Industry workers may primarily make decisions based on what types of programming they perceive to be most profitable, yet these decisions still have important cultural implications for what stories are told, by whom, and how society comes to understand the worlds that television presents. Remembering the commercial mandate of television—again, particularly in the United States—is imperative: in the cultural industry of television, business and culture operate concurrently and are inextricable in every aspect.
Studies that explain the economic and industrial norms of television in the network era are particularly relevant to the focus here upon television as a cultural industry. Until recently, few attempted to bridge the chasm between humanities-inflected theories about the operation of media in culture and political economy research that emphasizes economics and industrial operations.41 This history of avoidance, and at times hostility, between approaches is increasingly being corrected by theories and methods that deliberately merge aspects of culture and economics or explore quotidian industrial processes to better understand the agents, organizations, and processes involved in cultural production—as I attempt here.42
As is the case of dominant cultural theories about television, most political economy work assumes television to be a mass medium and attributes much of its importance to this characteristic. The notion of mass media and the scale of such businesses are important to political economy approaches examining the assemblage and distribution of labor and capital, while the mass audience was crucial to cultural approaches because of the necessity for programs to be widely shared within the culture. In both cases, the breadth of the audience reached by network-era programming allowed television to circulate ideas in a way that asserted and reinforced existing power structures and dominant ways of thinking within a society.
In many cases, the changed industrial context has not negated the value of theoretical tools provided by these perspectives, but some require reconsideration and adjustment. For example, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch’s argument that television programs provide a cultural forum to negotiate ideas within society makes sense insofar as television continued to facilitate this cultural role after the network era on certain occasions; however, broad and heterogeneous audiences now rarely share individual programs in the manner that could be assumed in the network era. Television might continue to provide a cultural forum for those who tune in to a particular show, but it has become increasingly unlikely that television functions as a space for the negotiation of contested beliefs among diverse groups simply because audiences are now more narrow and specialized.43
Other theories, such as Raymond Williams’s network-era theory of “flow,” require more significant revision.44 Williams used the idea of flow to comment on the nature of the steady stream of programming through the set and the manner in which narrative, advertisements, and promotions all intermixed. The continuous infiltration of control devices into television use has greatly disrupted flow as a fundamental characteristic of the medium, at least in terms of television flow being determined by someone other than the individual viewer.
Television’s transition from its network-era norm as a mass medium toward its post-network-era function as an aggregator of a broad range of niche and on-demand viewing audiences has required significant adjustments to industrial assumptions about the medium. For example, in his 1989 book The Capitalization of Cultural Production, Bernard Miège located television among media industries that operate under a “flow” model (this use of the term differs substantially from that of Williams) and rely on “home and family listening,” “an undifferentiated, indirect mass market,” the “instant” obsolescence of content, and the use of a programming grid that creates daily interaction and cultivates viewer loyalty, all of which eroded during the multi-channel transition. By the mid-2000s, the market characteristics of U.S. television had come instead to resemble those of his “publishing” model, which features a “segmented mass market” and the “dialectic of the ‘hit and catalogue,’” along with the purchase of individualized objects—in this case, particular episodes of television shows.45
Noting that “‘television’ now functions as a bookstore, a news stand, or a library,” Newcomb has departed from the “cultural forum” concept he and Hirsch offered in 1983 and conceived of the medium similarly to Miège’s publishing model.46 Television has adopted multiple possible revenue streams in ways that mirror the bookstore (DVD sell-through, iTunes downloading), magazine subscription (premium cable networks such as HBO), and the subscription library (MVPD on demand, Netflix). Each of these possible transactions of capital for content created new and distinct relationships between the economic model, programming, and how these forms of television might function as a cultural institution. And, as Newcomb notes, these alternative transaction or publishing models thrive on specialty, distinction, and niche taste, all of which unmistakably distinguish the practices of the multi-channel transition and post-network era from network-era norms that privileged the opposite characteristics.
Post-network-era practices have led the television audience not only to fracture among different channels and devices, but also to splinter temporally. The control over the television experience that various technologies offer has ruptured the norm of simultaneity in television experience and enabled audiences to capture television on their own terms. Moreover, as the New York Observer columnist Tom Scocca notes, the ephemerality once characteristic of the medium has also come to be less prominent; for example, the video experiences offered by YouTube allow for archiving images so they may be called up at will.47 New devices have provided tools to capture television and consequently have produced a norm of asynchronous viewing that has altered the interaction of the culture with the medium in crucial ways. Television devices remain ubiquitous and accessible in the post-network era, but the ubiquity of specific content has been eliminated as broad audiences have come to share little programming in common and less frequently view it simultaneously.
The nature of post-network television will likely be profoundly different than that of the network era, but the contradictory affordances of these changes make assessing the relative quality of either era difficult. The uncertain future often instigates a nostalgia for past norms that imagines the past differently than it was experienced. As Time’s James Poniewozik opines,
The