Musings on the Brave New World of Digital Television

 

Jean Baudrillard in his brief and fascinating monograph The Mirror of Production argued that the world has undergone at least three communication revolutions--oral, representational, and postmodern--and that these communication and cultural revolutions, which are tied to economic change, are as important and consequential if not more important and consequential than the economic transformation from traditional (hunter-gatherer, agricultural), to industrial, and to post-industrial. Marx's approach to the transition from the feudal to the capitalist, Baudrillard asserts, for instance, was grounded in a representational cultural and ideological communication formation pointing up just how consequent, important, and central cultural and communication change was and is.

The transition from analogue to digital television in the early twenty-first century has foregrounded for me again just how important cultural and communication changes and the relation between these cultural changes and economics is in human history. In the brave new world of on-air commercial digital TV there are, as far as I can tell, two broad types of digital television networks. There are, to name a few, the Me-TV, Antenna TV, Start TV, Get TV, and Decades TV networks of the brave new digital TV universe. These TV networks operate as TV networks typically have in Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US during my lifetime. They show TV shows complete or slightly edited (commercials have increased over the years) in acts with commercials as part of the televisual flow between the acts. 

Then there are the TV networks which, in my case, can be found on more fly-by-night and less economically sound TV stations such as that of WYBN in New York's Catskills Region. WYBN, a TV station that is more dreadfully incompetent technologically than I have ever seen from a TV station during my 67-year-life. WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV, for instance, are the television equivalent of capitalist snake oil salesmen and flim flam men. They buy shows on the cheap, shows that haven't been seen on the airwaves for decades, something that actually makes them of interest for the historian, and may even be in the public domain, and stick them around the commercials that dominate the televisual flow of the networks on the station. For these stations and networks, the commercials that run around and over the TV shows cutting them into fragments rather than acts in the process, are the raison d'etre and at the heart of these TV stations and its several networks. WYBN and these networks appear to care little about the fictional and non-fictional TV shows they broadcast and care all about the monies fragmented TV brings from showing the commercials that are the real stars if probably not the real draws of the networks and station. 

I know endless commercials with fragments of TV shows in between are not of interest to me which is why I avoid WYBN like the covid plague these days. I tried to watch the 1957 film The Pajama Game on Classic Reruns TV and WYBN last week but gave up because of the slicing and dicing and commercial saturated bombing of commercials during the film in the wee hours of the morning to such an extent that it was no longer possible to make sense of the film. I have not watched WYBN since. Others, if Facebook posts are representative, also seem to have a problem with the commercial dominated WYBN as well. WYBN's Facebook page, which once allowed comments, no longer does. It doesn't even allow you to contact or message this king of incompetents anymore though a contact email address does remain on the page. I understand the reason for this; the station got hammered on Facebook for its everyday incompetencies, its commercials running over the beginnings of shows, its commercials running over the ends of shows, its commercials fragmenting shows, and its regularly disappearing networks, particularly Retro TV and the now sadly disappeared France-24. Interestingly, now one can only share the commercials that now dominate the WYBN Facebook page just as they dominate the station in general. All this, of course, tells you everything you need to know about WYBN.

I want to come back to Baudrillard again as I end this post. Baudrillard was categorised by commentators as a postmodernist theorist during his intellectual lifetime. In one understanding of postmodernism, one Baudrillard emphasised, the switch from a representationally dominated cultural formation to a postmodernist cultural formation has brought with it Disneyfication or simulation, the confusion of the simulated "fake" with the representationally "real", and the conflation of the "real" and the "fake". In this scenario the commercials that are the stars of WYBN represent the conquest of simulated magical commercial capitalist "realism". On the other hand, one might argue that the fact that commercials are at the heart of WYBN's Retro TV and Classic Reruns TV simply foregrounds what has always been at the real pecuniary rather than the fake entertainment and, to a much lesser extent, informational heart of American TV, commercials and their magic system. TV has always been and always is all about the profit.