Media context and influence in communication

¶ … age of intense commercialization and open national markets, the media landscape is transforming to mirror the new pace and host proffered by concentrated ownership, internationality, and technological convergence. The global issues that affect the universal marketplace illicit a direct metamorphoses from the galvanizing source instituted in the modern media, focusing particular attention on public interest, relations between the internet and television, the power of syndication, and the textualities behind aggregation of form and repurposing content in the 'culture of conglomeration.' The sudden rise of the internet by the global community in the 1990s demanded of the media a contextual shift in the push-pull relations galvanized by old-seated technological hegemony and the capitalization of the broadband network already in place in television.

To the shock of the established 'televisuality' of the post 1980's television world, what Caldwell critiques high theory with a focus on visualization, the internet proved a volcanic eruption in the sphere of media relations. The rise of convergence television, or the combination of the high-tech digital world and the powerhouse of television relations established in the 1950s, was provided most directly by the 'meteoric' rise and fall of the dot com industry in the middle of the last decade. The dot com boom paralleled the rise of the binary paradigm of old vs. new, high tech vs. low tech, DVD vs. VHS, internet vs. television. Yet despite the theorization and vaporware practices effective in massing capital, the Silicon Valley crash witnessed a perceptive shift in attitude from high- versus low-tech to analyzing the stability of the broadband networks that survived the bottom-out: the few remaining techie powerhouses and the workable broadband network essentially in place in current television.

The formidable position that television held as a media power was put through indisputable tribulation during the nascent dot com boom/bust period, but instead of faltering indefinitely, it maximized on its historic cash-cow of syndication. While the web, even after its bust survival, was reconfigured by the advertising allowed by surfing and browsing, television remained true to itself as a transformative power capable of keeping up with the times, technology, and changing infrastructure. Additionally, the solid marketing power provided by television was unrivaled online, where octopus.com and its affiliates undercut the power of the established advertising world, the bank rock of American commercial success, with "meta-browsing" and "restructuring." The new generation of media questioned the status-quo with ubiquitous infringements on competition norms and aggregate content.

A series of inter-television industrial negotiations confirmed the aesthetic of television that would be maintained in the convergence of TV and its resiliency. These changes directly affected the mass medium wielded by television in its culture of production - a force bigger than its production of culture. The end of the multi-channel era of narrowcasting gave rise to the current mixture of digital technologies and the internet which have changed not only the television's interaction with the public, but each individual's interaction with the public.

Caldwell supports the paradigm shift evidences as examples of Geertzian 'local knowledge,' like dot.com-tv permutations, tv-web synergies, and multi-channel branding. As such, industry leaders like NBC's President Bob Wright sought survival by remaining afloat on the new tools provided by the high-tech industry; NBC, for example, executed a board-room surveillance of the competition by investing directly in TiVo and Replay. "Our company," he told Caldwell, "invested in both TiVo and Replay in part to keep track of the mayhem they could cause.

We thought it was smart technology, but we weren't sure how it would be deployed." Keeping tabs, however, resulted in a surprising productivity in utilization of the new powers; forfeiting what proved for many to be a jockeying between the push (TV) and pull (web) industries, those to succeed in the new digital broadband age were those who micromanaged the technology and, instead of fighting its viability, sought to converge it with the old for a seamless transition between TV and web posing, branding, pitching, stunting, and syndication in the proto-digital TV age.

Syndication, the power of networks like CBS and Viacom to relinquish and maintain their lesser competition like UPN through hackneyed reruns, was officially undercut by the age of in the internet, which saw middle school and college-age music junkies successfully distribute media for free online, en masse. The network era of the 1960s and 70s was one of the rerun empire, but the cyclical liberty provided by a wired audience forced TV networks to find new programming and reshape the "ancillary afterlife" of well-loved shows in the digital epoch. As a result, four major changes by purposeful agents to syndication directly preempted the death of the television at the hands of new media.

The first of these changes was a reanalysis of the "shelf life" of a program. While syndication remains an important aspect of the media world, it was been forced to mix reruns with a "collage" of marketing campaigns that target international audiences. Exemplary of the global marketplace transformation is the attraction of the Latin American audience to the Acapulco Heat and Baywatch fads of previous years of domestic success. Likewise, at home, the shelf-life for more nefarious productions, like the V.I.P series of Pamela Anderson, was given "new" legs by marketing directly to the demographic. Secondly, studios and companies throughout Hollywood began to see their archives as a "legacy." Technologically advanced archivists reformatted, reframed, and re-famed old shows, providing a wealth of old footage for new uses. Networks used their syndication rights as legal power tools, making "sweetheart" deals to reaffirm their market share. That power, the third driving force to change, was augmented by the combination of programming repurposing and migrating content to the benefit of the studio house.

TV executives were able to analyze the holdouts online to watch for successful business trends in the changing seas of media; notably, the similar strategies of Bill Gates to create, own, and remarket a very specific idea - to him, software; to TV, content. The rhetorical shift was egged on by the up-to-the-minute demand of the hyper-wired audience; "news" was no longer new after it had been published by online media sources, as a result, the standard footage demanded by TV had to meet the same standards of perpetual birth, evidenced in news network schemes for CNN's Live From and MSBNC's Up to the Minute, Every 15 Minutes motto. While the news cycle remains very consistent from update to update, the conception and marketing power NBC exhibited by portraying the update as "new" maintained a vital sphere of branding control over their market share.