Chapter 20
Flow and mobile media
Broadcast fixity to digital fluidity
In this chapter, we argue for an updated and materialist understanding of the concept flow as a means for examining how mobile media function to create free subjects amenable to neoliberal configurations of governance and capital. Raymond Williams first described flow in his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974/2003) as the televisual techniques used to maintain audiences’ attention to the television screen, at times for several consecutive hours. Williams was trying to understand how disparate television content (news, sports, movies, commercial advertisements, public service announcements, game shows, etc.) were made to seamlessly flow together almost as if working in narrative unison. This approach was ground breaking and Television has been said to be “the founding text of television studies” (Gripsrud, quoted in Williams 1974/2003), which reoriented scholarship away from “the content of television programs” toward “the shaping effect of television’s technological structures” (Turner, quoted in Williams, 1974/2003). Obviously, within these technological structures the flow of television content did matter, but content was merely an element in the complex of societal, technological, economic, and cultural forces that had integrated broadcasting into a new way of living that was both more private and more mobile. Over the past 35 years flow has been fruitfully applied periodically in television studies (Boddy, 2004, 2011; Hay, 2003; Kackman et al., 2011), the online journal FlowTV has taken its name from the concept (flowtv.org), and it has been given new meaning in the world of computer gaming and internet architecture where users are said to go into “flow-states” which keep them immersed in various sorts of virtual environments. In all of these accounts, flow acts as a metaphor of movement in which audiences are mentally or cognitively moved through media content, while their bodies remain fixed in space.
Other recent scholarship suggests that the concept needs to be rethought given the radical changes to television’s technological structures that began with the advent of the remote control, cable, the VCR, and other smart appliances (Hay, 2003) and continue to be reshaped by digitization (Boddy, 2011). Other scholars have attempted to treat Television as Digital Media (Bennett & Strange, 2011) and answer the question of what is Television after TV (Spigel & Olsson, 2004). We suggest that digital screens need to be understood outside the conventions of media specificity; that is we should no longer treat film, television, the computer, and telephones as separate entities. Following from James Hay (2003), we suggest that one way of renewing the concept’s vitality given these changing structures is by approaching flow in terms of the very material set of practices, techniques, and technologies that integrate individuals into the temporal and spatial dynamics of contemporary economic and cultural expectations. More specifically, rather than attend to the flow of content that works to maintain an audience’s attention in fixed position toward the television screen, according to a set schedule, and over extended periods of time, we examine how the use of multiple screens orchestrate the individual’s material flow through space according to a fluid set of temporal programs. The media environment is no longer devoted to keeping viewers fixed on one transmission, but rather fixed in transmission through multiple screens that guide subjects through all of time and space. In our conception, flow is the process by which subjects and attendant data move seamlessly through the world in unison. Numerous and varied screens (television, computer, tablets, mobile phones) work in concert to network and extend the self in whatever ways are necessary to link and guide the constant flow of the self’s social, governmental, economic, and biopolitical data in ever-present and in ever-useful means.
Raymond Williams’ account of television was in large part devoted to understanding changing forms of mobility. He looked to how the automobile and broadcasting worked to newly organize the movement of capital, subjects, and ideological content, largely through the concept of mobile privatization. Understanding television as a cultural and social technology, Williams pursued a line of inquiry that avoided the technological determinism/determined technology dichotomy which had proven unproductive, arguing instead that television must be understood as a cultural technology. Looking to the development and deployment of telegraph, telephone and radio, he described two phases of communication: operational and broadcasting. The operational phase involves the sending and receiving of messages in the realm of military and business ventures and operated as point-to-point modes of communication. The second articulation – broadcasting – moves past the operational view, and had widespread significance as part of an emergent mass culture throughout much of the 20th century and further, can be seen as “a powerful new form of social integration and control” (1974/2003 p. 16).
Situating the emergence of broadcasting in an expanding market of “consumer durables” such as appliances and automobiles, Williams contrasts public technologies such as street lighting and railways with “a new kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet been found” and explains that this kind of technology, which serves an “at-once mobile and homecentered way of living” is a form of mobile privatization (1974/2003 p. 19). Mobile privatization refers to a tendency associated with a group of emerging technologies and infrastructures that organized mobility, privacy, technology, and the home in ways decidedly different from a previous era dominated by public technologies and closer proximity. In particular, televisions, automobiles, and suburbs were organized in conjunction with the needs of postwar consumer capital. Of importance to our analysis is Williams’ explanation that these technologies helped to integrate the daily work commute with the suburban lifestyle, and how television’s schedule worked to temporally and spatially organize idealized and highly normative ways of life. The daily routine was accompanied at home by a television regimen that coincided with specific periods for children’s, women’s, and family’s viewing: morning, daytime, afternoon, the news hour, primetime, late night, and “offair.” The routine of commuting was accommodated by “drive-time” radio broadcast. Broadcasting was a mechanism that managed spatiotemporal configurations, through both flow and fixity.
In “From windscreen to widescreen: Screening technologies and mobile communication” (Packer & Oswald, 2010), we looked at the ways in which screening technologies function as the infrastructure for newly organizing mobile privatization, tracing the genesis of many mobile technologies back to the automobile and suggesting that the relationships between (auto)mobility, domestic life, communication technologies, and economic productivity have been significantly reorganized since Williams’ analysis of the 1970s. The role of screens has been fundamental in creating greater spatial and temporal fluidity of the population, information, capital, and labor. Such fluidity has been built on a series of recently developed or intensified communication capacities and infrastructures – storage, access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence – that enable greater social, political, and economic control through the seemingly contradictory extension of self-empowerment.
Flow 1.0
Williams proposed the concepts of flow and “flow analysis” as a fluid replacement for static distribution analysis. Explaining that broadcasters arranged programs in a fashion designed to keep viewers on a particular station – sequencing – he argued that the planned flow of programming was “perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form” (1974/2003 p. 86). Flow analysis worked to help a critic look beyond ratios of programming by type and commercials on a given channel for a given time, and rather focus on the ways in which sequenced programming – consisting of a carefully articulated combination of programs and advertisements – worked to keep the viewer glued to the screen. This was particularly relevant before the widespread adoption of the remote control: viewers literally had to be compelled out of their seat to change the channel. In a world of few networks or channels (think spatially here), television for its first 30 years of widespread use in the United States and Britain (Williams’ two primary examples) was a device for which the key consideration of programmers was how to keep viewers in front of the screen or channel viewers’ attention into a rut. A re-examination of flow in an increasingly mobile media environment requires our attention to shift from focusing on how content was programmed in sequence for a single device (a static space–time orientation) to the reprogramming of a fluidly scheduled mobile life via networked terminals and mobile devices. The television channel that Williams described had a fixed frequency, speed, and direction.
Broadly configured, flow is a way of understanding one specific element in the new social and economic arrangements that Williams describes as mobile privatization. In thinking about broadcasting as part of industrial and bureaucratic capitalist arrangements that had changed the temporal and spatial arrangements of everyday life, flow was a means for situating subjects in the spatiotemporal program of capitalist production and reproduction. Broadcasting and flow kept viewers in a fixed position between work time and bed time for the productive (male) subject and helped to integrate television into the circuits and routines of (female) domestic reproduction (Spigel, 1992). Thus the “television program” can be seen as a means for governing specific temporal/spatial arrangements that kept the flow of capital moving (by maintaining consumer demand through advertising) while providing a home-centered means for passing “idle” time – or for making this time productive, turning TV time into “the work of watching” as Jhally and Livant (1986), inspired by the work of Dallas Smythe (1977, 1981), suggested. More recently Andrejevic (2003, 2009) suggests that watching and being watched are both work done to generate capital for media conglomerates. From this perspective, flow provides an explanation of how time could be made most productive for the longest period of time. Flow worked to maintain focus upon not just narrative and news, but upon commercials for the benefit of networks whose profit was built upon Nielson ratings. Making subjects as immobile as possible while at home while aiding their mobility during commutes, shopping trips, and vacations, could be seen as a particular way of programming flow through television and radio broadcasting.
Williams’ flow analysis looked to broadcasting in order to understand something about culture in the United Kingdom and the United States, and while his critical insights have continued to inform television and media studies, options for communicating and consuming have been vastly expanded. Along with claims that newspapers are dead or dying, we hear about a “crisis in American Broadcasting” that suggests not only that viewers are more distributed than ever before, but that they are time shifting, format shifting, and screen shifting. With literally hundreds of cable and satellite channels, multiple Internet platforms, torrent sites, online stores, storage media and devices on which consumers view what we think of as “television,” it is difficult to argue that Williams’ notion of flow or his approach to analyzing it are adequate tools for today’s media scholars. As William Boddy explains (2004), Williams’ account of television as a cultural technology generally, and flow in particular, was an historically and hence generation-specific analysis. Jason Mittell, one of the few authors in the edited collection Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (2011) to discuss Williams’ concept of flow, suggests that “files” (p. 50) is a more adequate term for understanding how children growing up are thinking about programming with TiVo. Try explaining flow to a Millennial: they balk at the notion that someone would watch the same channel for two hours. Fortunately, many of them remember a few of the hold-overs: ABC’s TGIF (Thank Goodness it’s Funny) programming and Nickelodeon’s SNICK (Saturday Night Nickelodeon). With both ending in the mid-2000s, it is only a matter of time before conversations about flow become completely irrelevant to a generation raised on-demand, shifted in both space and time.
Williams’ approach not only accounted for programs and advertisements, but further was scalable to different levels of focus – from a day’s worth of programming to a close analysis of the interplay of programs and advertisements or a scene-to-scene analysis of a newscast. Flow offered a holistic account ranging from the broad understanding of weekly programming to a focused textual analysis. With long-range analysis of sequence and flow, one could look broadly at programming over the course of several hours, listing programs aired by type or content summary. In this regard, long-range analysis is much like distribution analysis, only programs are listed in the order they aired: think TV Guide. Medium-range analysis of flow and “sequence” pays closer attention to the succession of events within and between programs, and is of great value in demonstrating “over a sufficient range, the process of relative unification, into a flow, of otherwise diverse or at best loosely related items” while close-range analysis looks closely to the flow of words and images to understand “the flow of meanings and values of a specific culture” (Williams, 1974/2003 p. 97, 120).
In terms of our analysis, this element of scalability can be leveraged in two important ways. First, in terms of the range of analysis, we see value in understanding the flow of screens and persons at a broad level to discern the ways in which populations are programmed to shift their primary focus between cultural technologies throughout the day (the computer terminal at work, the mobile phone in transit, and the television or laptop screen at night). At the same time, we recognize the value of close analyses which track intermittent use of various screens: the personal cell phone at work, the brief consult with the television for the score and the screens of work – made portable through Virtual Private Network connections and Personal Digital Assistants – interrupting prime television (and family) time. Second, while Williams’ analysis of broadcasting looked to a limited range of programming options for a broadly conceived mass, with screens we can now leverage scale in terms of sample: will the analysis look to the flow of one individual, family, workplace, or overall network traffic? These analyses can trace individual trajectories (Adams, 2005) or more large-scale patterns of aggregated consumption.
While the financial payoff for network television depended upon delivering stable eyes for advertisements, the financial incentives for mobile media are more nuanced and built upon numerous funding sources ranging from advertising, data-veillance and data-processing to service provider plans to charging by the byte. More than getting us to a better understanding of the crisis in American Broadcasting, such an examination would bring us closer to talking about convergent media as mechanisms for reorganizing how life is conducted, managed, processed, stored, and digitized in real time across space. However, it is important to think about some of the specific ways that “television” has changed, before taking on-board all mobile media. So what does this new form of flow analysis look like? What sorts of screens and activities are we referencing? We now turn to how such screens manifest themselves in terms of flows.
From the little screen to the little mobile screen
Even after large-scale shifts in the ways in which television content is delivered in the United States, television studies are still largely invested in television content, political economic analysis, television as device, globalization, and more recent shifts to media convergence and transmedia storytelling. While some scholars have looked to the specific ways that television is reformed in particular as it has to do with governance and forms of power (Andrejevic, 2003; Bratich, 2006; Ouellette & Hay, 2008), by and large television studies continues to focus on content even as it attempts to deal with the digital. Most of the research questions and foci remain the same: even in looking at the use of multiple screens in television, transmedia storytelling (content) guides the discussion (Evans, 2011; Jenkins, 2006), and does not adequately address the mix of techne and modes of governance that we might call an apparatus, and largely looks at television through the lens of broadcasting rather than the larger set of emerging tele-practices made possible by an increased variety of contents, functions, devices, mobilities, and a range of new services offered through telecommunication bundling such as “Triple Play” options offered by telecom giants Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon.
A large part of this change in focus tracks alongside major networks and large media companies merging with and buying interests in telecommunications companies. Programming on radio was initially a way to sell radios (and later advertising), programs (both media content and applications) are now essentially a way to sell bandwidth. In the Over The Air broadcasting model, the content was delivered for free and supported by advertising – a viewer needed only to buy a “set” to tune in with. Now the content is paid for, the transmission is paid for, and there are a new “set” of ever changing devices that are necessary to fully participate in telemedia culture. It is widely known that the average life of a cell phone in the United States is 18 months. Many of our televisions are wide-screen format, and after the cathode ray tube, have moved to projection, LCD, plasma, LED, 720, 1080, 3D, and so on. Our computers must be constantly patched, upgraded, and even replaced as battery technology and other advances make them ever more portable. Now we buy devices, content, and transmission, and we do it all the time and must use different devices and services depending upon where and how we move through space.
In most simple terms, television content has been made fluid and mobile due to digitization and a proliferation of screens. If there ever was such a unity as a television program, or whether we should have always treated television programming as a remediation of past forms, it should be eminently clear that the lines used to distinguish any audiovisual content in terms of their intended or dominant medium of distribution no longer holds. However, the traditional accounts of what television viewing did, continue but across more devices. Moreover, the acts of being informed, entertained, kept awake, or distracted are increasingly accomplished via screens. Not counting windscreens or other vehicular panoramas (Hay & Packer, 2004; Schivelbusch, 1987), on average Americans spend around 11 h a day looking at “the three screens”; those being television, internet, and mobile device (Knudsen & Ensley, 2011). Add in the average daily commute of nearly an hour and we approach half the hours of a day and nearly 75 percent of waking hours looking at a screen. Further, not only is screen use trending up, but so too is the portability of multiuse screens. The iPad, introduced in 2010 is on pace to become the most rapidly adopted consumer device in history with over 17 million units sold by early 2011 (ibid.).
New flow economies
In his essay “Advertising: The Magic System” (1999, originally 1980), Raymond Williams examined the development of advertising from an action to an institution, which became fully developed between World War I and World War II. During this time (and as advertising expands its platforms to radio and television), he observes a shift from information and repetition to less savory methods of psychological warfare and explains that a critical quality of the institution is that “the material object being sold is never enough” leading him to describe advertising as “magic: a highly organized and professional system of magical inducements and satisfaction, functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies, but rather strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technology” (1980/1999 p. 422).
With more information at our fingertips than ever before, we might question whether this system is still magical. Advertisements still sell us more than the product itself, but as information overload creates conditions in which attention is more divided than ever before, an institution that deals in attention (advertising is from the Latin advert, to turn attention to) still finds ways to catch some eyes. Increasingly, this means following the shifting flow of the user in time and space across devices. Within the larger shift to user-driven consumption of programming, consumption of messages and products is increasingly enacted through or informed by the screen: product placement, online purchase, user reviews, location aware technology, contest, digital download. It is not only targeted, but also optional: it is information rather than noise. In this configuration, the subject pays for content or programs that suggest products that can be bought over a paid network on a paid-for device: triple pay rather than triple play.
New logics of consumption intensify the previous model of advertising as creating a continual set of desires, creating the opportunity for the immediate spatially and temporally situated moment to become a moment or purchase. Margaret Morse (1990) examined the homologous sets of desires and phenomenological fixations that overlap in the ideological commitments to freedom, choice, and mobility that intersect in the television, the mall, and the freeway. While such ideological interpenetration remains, the ubiquity of the mobile screen has detached some of the fixity of such circuits of mobility becoming central to the purchase (and not just a vehicle for advertisements and the production of desire), helping people get to brick and mortar places and facilitating the movement of goods and information from online points of purchase to mailing and IP addresses alike. These devices work to transform “the real world” into a magical place, an ever shifting landscape of mobile desire. Some newer Global Positioning System (GPS) units have an option where a user can draw a line over routes they have traveled (or consumed) marking them as used (or used up?). Discount coupons for food and lodging accompany lifetime traffic updates, turning the environment into a consumerscape even for those who have learned to ignore billboards and avoid location-based services on their mobile phones. Other apps make the sound environment searchable for purchase (Shazam) and Google Goggles promises to similarly archive the visible environment. In the meantime, apps that read Universal Product Code codes can be used to facilitate the online purchase of items in the brick and mortar store.
While increased bandwidth expanded possibilities for narrowcasting (broadcasting intensified), the present on-demand model represents a change in kind. While the net is still being cast (widely and narrowly), users have more “power” than ever before in choosing when, where, and to what they will be connected. In this sense, we identify on-demand as the model of communication that best describes a new set of tele-practices, and ultimately, a new model of flow. Subjects are able to leverage screening technologies in order to navigate the moves from orbit to orbit – work from home, home to work, leisure time, travel time, work time and domestic time all from any time and space so long as those places and responsibilities were networked, or made accessible by the screen. In terms of flow, however, we cannot say that “surfing” takes us far enough away from the concept of a channel to adequately describe the new ways in which subjects are made responsible for managing flow, designing their own channels, stations, and content queues from the same devices they use to network with friends, family, and work while managing schedules that transcend traditional fixed 9–5 work, commute, viewing, sleep, and repeat schedules. Tablet PCs are a perfect example – even in the old time schedule, one can read the paper at breakfast, work, navigate home via GPS, and consume traditionally televised media content. While a GPS unit used to mean a discrete single-use device with a screen, usually permanently or semipermanently attached to an automobile, GPS software and locative capabilities are now integrated into all sorts of screens. One’s mobility, auto and otherwise, is now aided, if not guided, by screen. This is a theme attested in numerous advertisements for mobile devices and communications data providers. With these new screens – advanced remote controls for living – subjects are not only being made responsible for the management of flow, but also become empowered in the environments they flow through.
Future flow
We conclude with a brief analysis of advertisements and media content that speak to an imagined future where flow is fully accomplished via screens. Within these narratives everyday challenges and problems, as well as problems specific to mobile devices, will all be solved by integrating new screens into the flow of our mobile lives. Further, previous problems associated with the use of mobile media, such as accidents or inattentiveness to face-to-face interactions, will also be solved by faster and more networked devices. Microsoft, in their “Really” campaign, makes jest of all the ways people miss out on the wonders of their material surroundings such as a floating lantern display, time spent with children on a teeter totter, or attempts made by a sexily clad partner to get intimate due to the excessive attention afforded antiquated mobile phones. They also point out the apparent stupidity and danger of staring at devices while riding bikes, driving cars, jogging, walking down stairs, or swimming near sharks. Their solution is not to suggest it is time to get rid of devices, but rather that “it is time for a phone to save us from our phones,” a phone that can get us “in and out and back to life” (Microsoft, 2010). While this commercial speaks to some concerns, Microsoft still seems to be set in a world where mobile media and life are not yet integrally intertwined. They follow an earlier logic of “lack and excess” in which too little or too much communication causes accidents or social problems (Packer, 2006). Microsoft is clearly in the minority here as nearly all other ads focus exclusively on how mobile media will produce an optimal flow to an everyday life inseparable from media.
In a recent campaign by Verizon for their new multiplatform data plan, FiOS, we see families and individuals make use of screens to manage numerous tasks during the mobile flows of their day. One set of screens provides mom the ability to move her kids through the home, the dentist, and the family drive to grandmother’s house (Verizon FiOS, 2011a). Another grouping allows a young professional to move uninterrupted from home to airport to airplane as he maintains his autonomous mobility (Verizon FiOS, 2011b). Verizon’s purest manifestation of such a vision is an internet video titled “Verizon FiOS is Bringing You the Future of Technology” that imagines the potentials of communication in the next 10 years (2010). This commercial also uniquely provides an exemplary account of a series of mechanisms and “technologies” (of governance) that will be managed via one’s “multiscreen connectivity.” The commercial follows a young male creative professional as he moves through his day – always with the aid of mobile screens. The day begins in a home displaying several flat screens throughout a very contemporary loft space. The camera pans from one screen to the next, landing upon a multi-windowed screen much like that made famous in the film Minority Report. A multi-person, multinational conference call is made possible via real-time translation capabilities as we watch a virtual meeting that seemingly spans continents. The dream of perfect communication is finally fulfilled, the difficulties of overcoming time, space, and culture are finally managed. The commercial then moves our subject through a series of daily events in which the mobile media device’s capabilities are punctuated by a series of statements: “network security”; “smart devices” – a mobile media device “talks” to the parking meter; “digital medical records” – mobile device talks to a treadmill and collects data for his health; “intelligent networks”; “social media” – he notices an attractive woman jogging next to him and without slowing down or taking out his earphones, he uses the interactive screen on the treadmill to ask her to coffee; “seamless coverage” – while out for coffee he uses his mobile screen to talk “machine to machine” to add parking time; “one company is bringing together devices in ways never imagined”; and “bringing everyone together connecting us all to the future.” Our subject is now back at home using a photo, taken with one of his devices, of a child’s bracelet that serves as his creative inspiration for the design of a bicycle wheel he is laboring to create. The commercial ends with his screen notifying him that there is “incoming traffic” from his coffee-date, Tyffany, who wants to follow-up on their semi-face-to-face meeting.
Similarly we are told by Samsung (2010) that “life is spontaneous,” “life is instantaneous,” “life shouldn’t be interrupted,” because “life is a continuum.” Samsung promises us that their screen technologies will unify this life. Your life. In part this is because your mobile screens will allow you “to do one thing” without “stopping to do another.” As the various lives represented in the commercial move through their days, we see them sunning at the beach, playing in a park, working in an office, walking through vast cityscapes, partying at a club, babysitting grandchildren at home, hailing a cab, crossing a bustling street, queuing for an ATM, or sitting at a pub. They are variously shown updating flight itineraries while attending business meetings, watching stocks rise and fall while posting on Facebook, or watching a movie as they find out the score of a sporting event. They are shown working, learning, socializing, and watching. As the commercial attests in its final segment, “live life uninterrupted” and “LET THE INFO FLOW” (caps in original).
What becomes eminently apparent in the idealized world of these advertisements is that a key set of conceptual concerns (or problematizations) are at play in which the screen is seen as the technological solution. Taken as a whole they resonate with the sense that networked smart screens are the mechanism by which time and space will be both overcome and reanimated. The screen becomes the guide for moving from place to place and the mechanism by which spaces and institutions are interconnected. In this sense they are infrastructural, they forge and maintain linkages. The hospital and clinic are interconnected with the gym, with the coffee shop, with the home, and with the entire world. Permeating these interconnections are a set of contemporary neoliberal logics used to govern and organize lives through and by freedom. Network security ensures personal security. Biopolitical enhancement will be accomplished by the collection, storage, and accessing of digitized medical histories. Creative labor will be an integral part of one’s daily routine – inspiration can and will happen everywhere, but can only be actualized through screening technologies. Mobility, automobility especially, will be made seamless and safe through screens. The spatial and temporal interpenetration of sociability and labor, privacy and publicity, will be heightened and leveraged by the flows made possible via our screens. Flow unifies the materials of our lives.
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