The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition. Amanda D. Lotz
with a range of communication technologies from birth, this generation moves fluidly and fluently among technologies. Anne Sweeney, then cochair of Disney media networks and president of the Disney-ABC television group, cited research in 2006 indicating that 40 percent of Millennials went home each evening and used five to eight technologies (many simultaneously), while 40 percent of their Boomer parents returned home and only watched television.22 Similarly, a 2006 report by IBM Business Consulting Services emphasized the “bimodality” of television consumers in coming years. It predicted a “generational chasm” between the “massive passives” (mainly Boomers who retained network-era television behaviors), “gadgetiers” (members of the middling Generation X who were not acculturated with new technologies from birth but were more willing to experiment with them), and “kool kids” (the Millennials).23 Younger generations, who have approached television and technology in general with very different expectations than their predecessors, have also introduced new norms of use. For example, the television scholar Jason Mittell reflects on the significance of the arrival of a DVR in his home at the same time as his first child, and notes that when she came to ask, “What is on television?” the question referred to what shows might be stored on the hard drive, as she had no sense of the limited access to scheduled programming assumed by most others.24 The widespread availability of control technologies provides a different experience for younger generations, who may never associate networks with television viewing in the same manner as their predecessors. As the generation that came of age using television to watch videos and DVDs and to play video games becomes employed in the industry, it will enable even greater reimagining of television content and use.
At a summit entitled “The Future of Television” sponsored by the trade publication Television Week in September 2004, all but one of the panelists used evidence drawn from observations of their children’s approach to television as justification for their arguments about the new directions of the medium. In addition to their children not operating with a model of television organized by networks and linear schedules, the executives noted, with awe, the mediated multitasking that defined their children’s television use. Research that continues to show growth in all media use supports these anecdotes. For example, as of 2007, time spent viewing television had not diminished despite continued expansion in time spent using the Internet; instead, multiple media have come to be simultaneously used. By 2012, the industry had termed this “second screen” use and found that 85 percent of tablet or smartphone users use these devices while watching television at least once a day, mostly to check e-mail or social media or send text messages.25 Generations who are growing up with smartphones and tablets are accustomed to using multiple technologies to achieve a desired end, whether to access information, find entertainment, or communicate with friends. Such comfort in moving across technologies—or what those in the industry refer to as “media agnosticism”—has been crucial to the adoption of devices for watching television and ways of doing so that further facilitate the shift to the post-network era.
In sum, while features of a post-network era have come to be more apparent, such an era will be fully in place only when choice is no longer limited to program schedules and the majority of viewers use the opportunities offered by new technologies and industrial practices. Post-network television is primarily nonlinear rather than linear, and it could not be established until dominant network-era practices became so outmoded that the industry developed new practices in their place. The gradual adjustment in how viewers use television, and corresponding gradual shifts in production practices, have taken more than two decades to transpire, which is why I distinguish this intermediate period as the multi-channel transition. During this time, viewers experienced a marked increase in choice and achieved limited control over the viewing experience. But the post-network era allows them to choose among programs produced in any decade, by amateurs and professionals, and to watch this programming on demand on main “living room” sets, computer screens, or portable devices.
Implications of a Post-Network Era
I used to start each semester by surveying my classes in search of a show we all shared in common to draw examples from throughout the term. This was a pretty easy feat in my first few years of teaching in the early 2000s. Usually I found a show on my first (Friends) or second (ER) try. By 2007, I gave up on such unanimity. Instead I now gather a sense of what different factions of students might be watching, as it has been a while since I taught a class in which we had all seen the same show at least once (yes, even American Idol, Jersey Shore, or Real Housewives). This development illustrates an important consequence of the choice in viewing provided by the post-network era. The hundreds of channels offering programming by the end of the multi-channel transition significantly fragmented the audience. Then, by the end of 2010, viewers could readily access hundreds of television shows from any era on DVD or online, and an amateur video clip could reach as large an audience as a network show. Although only early adopters may have been viewing television in these new ways by this time, these developments suggest additional coming fragmentation.
One of the first amateur videos to reach a mass audience appeared in April 2006. By the time “The Evolution of Dance,” a humorous six-minute amateur performance of the progression of popular dance styles from the 1950s through the present, had been on YouTube for four months, it had been played at least thirty million times. That figure grew to over 210 million seven years later.26 Site users re-posted the video multiple times, and in at least three different languages, taking advantage of one of YouTube’s technological strengths—the ease with which videos can be linked to other sites—but making it difficult to sum up how many times it had been viewed across these multiple postings and on other sites. As a point of comparison, the most-watched television show of the preceding 2005–2006 television season—American Idol’s Tuesday-night performance episodes—averaged 31.2 million viewers each week. FOX’s blockbuster hit included judges paid roughly $30 million a year, and the network earned $700,000 for a thirty-second advertisement, in addition to the at least $25 million per season paid by each of the three series sponsors.27 In contrast, “The Evolution of Dance” featured the negligible production values of a video camera set up in the audience of a comedy club and was originally posted by the video’s creator and dancer, Judson Laipply. Laipply did not profit directly from the millions of viewers (this was before YouTube enabled profit participation in its advertisements), although stories about the video’s popularity appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Inside Edition and drew attention to his work as a public speaker and “inspirational comedian.” YouTube benefited from the high traffic to the site that may have initially clicked through some of the banner advertisements and later from pre-roll advertisements—the video advertisements that play before selected clips—and the video’s 2006 debut aided growing cultural awareness of the site. When I queried my classes in the fall of 2006 about their familiarity with the video, some had seen it—although fewer than I had expected and by no means as many as had seen various television shows. When I asked coworkers (faculty and staff over the age of thirty), most responded by asking what YouTube was—until a few months later, when Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of the site drew much attention.
By the end of the decade, video sharing and YouTube use had grown considerably: By 2013, YouTube reported one billion unique visitors to the site each month.28 Laipply posted “Evolution of Dance 2” in January 2009, but lacking novelty, drew only twenty million viewers in four years. There have been other so-called viral or spreadable hits such as “David after Dentist” and “Charlie Bit My Finger,” though neither has been viewed nearly as many times as the YouTube topper as of 2013, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video, which had been streamed 1.8 billion times. Most web video circulates through distinct taste communities, and though nearly 2 billion views seems broad, with the possibility of an international audience of 2.5 billion Internet users on computers and 1 billion worldwide smartphone-enabled users, and that these are not unique viewers, even “Gangnam Style” can be seen as a niche phenomenon.29
The changes in how we view, experience, and use television made evident by these anecdotes have massive implications for how we think about television and its role in culture. The increased fractionalization of the audience among shows, channels, and distribution devices has diminished the ability of an individual television