Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The business strategies of brand differentiation, narrowcasting, vertical integration, digital distribution, and audience surveillance which made the post-network era's creative revolution commercially viable have also helped to drive the progressive fragmentation of the public sphere, undermining television's role as communal cultural forum and exacerbating trends such as political polarization. In this conclusion, I ruminate on the cultural, social, and political implications of a media landscape which is simultaneously subject to increasing corporate consolidation on the one hand and oversaturated with content, channels, and platforms on the other. Can our increasingly hysterical attention economy cultivate the communal structures of democratic deliberation necessary to end mass incarceration? Or will we find ourselves subtly yet increasingly captivated by a hyperactive media ecology which is itself curiously carceral?
Keywords: American media studies, political economy of streaming TV, digital public sphere, prison reform, narrowcasting and microtargeting, political polarization
In his influential study Inside Prime Time, Todd Gitlin follows a paragraph on the then nascent industry strategy of narrowcasting with a prediction which has not quite stood the test of time: “the brave new cornucopia is likely to create only minor, marginal chances for a diversity of substance – and fewer and fewer as time goes on” (332). Today, an unprecedented number of TV shows self-proclaim their “quality” aspirations even as an increasing array of channels and platforms cater to the tastes of evermore finely grained audience segments. Narrowcasting, media convergence, and multichannel proliferation have fostered an explosion of televisual diversity even as they have at the same time increasingly fragmented audiences, unsettling TV's prior roles as both consensus medium and communal cultural forum. However, Gitlin's book seems to have been prescient in other ways; even though a greater number of programs are now produced for a wider range of niche audiences across a multitude of channels and platforms than ever before, “Conglomeration proceeds apace. Homogeneity at the cultural center is complemented by consumer fragmentation on the margins. Technology opens doors, and oligopoly marches in just behind, slamming them. There can be no technological fix for what is, after all, a social problem” (Gitlin 332).
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- Information
- American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality TelevisionCaptivating Aspirations, pp. 269 - 282Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022