Blog Post #3 - Jaclyn Lattanza

Blog Post #3

Jaclyn Lattanza

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

When Abigail McFee, a sophomore at Tufts University, saw a small television in her friend’s dorm room, “it was [a] little bit weird,” she said, according to Alex Williams who, this year, wrote the New York Times article “For Millennials, the End of the TV Viewing Party.”

Not having a television would have been unheard of 10 years ago, but now with laptops, Hulu and Netflix, it’s not so strange. McFee has never owned a TV set, nor do 90 percent of her friends at school. “When I walk into a dorm room and see one, my first thought is, it’s unnecessary,” she said, “almost a waste of space.”

When John T. Caldwell wrote “Televisual Audience: Interactive Pizza” in 1995, he explained that viewers are an important aspect of television programming. “While the stylistic demands on audience that define televisuality are…necessary, they are typically not sufficient, or exclusive, properties,” he said. Viewer ratings are one statistic that plays a major role in the success of television networks and individual programs. But in order for these calculations to be recorded, viewers must be watching the program on their own personal television.

“By 1993, more than 28 million adults each week watched some television outside of their home, in locations such as the workplace, college facilities, hotels, motels, restaurants, and bars,” Caldwell said. “Such out-of-home viewing is not even reflected in the television ratings.” If television networks do not record a viable amount of viewer ratings, they cannot determine what the overall consensus of the program is.

Since then, the popularity of the Internet and introduction of online streaming services by HBO, CBS and Netflix, have lured viewers away from their television sets even more, making it difficult for networks to accurately track ratings.  

Williams explains that TV programming itself is not the problem, it is how and where they are watching. “Many millennials who have ditched their TVs still actually love television,” he said. “ They may, in fact, watch more of it than ever since unplugging, thanks to the relatively newfound ability to catch up on their latest shows on their phones or tablets anywhere, at any time.”

Andrew Wojtek, a museum event producer who lives in Harlem is one of those people, according to Williams. “I can sit on the couch and watch the new season of ‘Orange Is the New Black’ in a weekend,” Wojtek said.

As the culture of watching television changes, networks continue to alter the way they classify viewers. “Many audiences are now no longer even defined by the home or the family,” Caldwell said.

But according to Williams, there is a bigger issue at hand. “The television set in American life is being shaken for the first time,” he said.

Sources:

Caldwell, John T. “Televisual Audience: Interactive Pizza.” Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995. 249-83.

Williams, Alex. “For Millennials, the End of the TV Viewing Party.” The New York Times 7 Nov. 2014: Online.