Week 2★Apr 24th questions

NO.1 Jenner, M. (2018). ‘Introduction’, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television. In Netflix and the Re-invention of Television. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94316-9.pp1-31

1.     How does Jenner approach her own question regarding, ‘whether Netflix can be considered television at all’?

2.    How to understand these statements suggested by the author,  ‘television as discourse has proven remarkably flexible in accommodating technologies, industrial changes, or changes in the social practices in the history of the medium’ (p.7), and ‘Netflix did not completely re-invent what television is, but it is part of a reconception that was already prefigured by the habits linked to DVDs or DVRs, objects that are made obsolete or in need of technological adjustment’ (p.13)?

NO.2 Lamarre, T. (2018). ‘Introduction’ The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. University of Minnesota Press.pp1-29[I think we lay more emphasis on this one because it is more difficult?!]

1.     Lamarre points out, ‘The sense of what’s happening to television depends on what your image of television is’ (p.2), and how to make sense of this (=’two contemporary sides of television’) by referring to Jenner’s approach to TV?

How to take into consideration Lamarre’s focus on the Japanese context (apropos the North Atlantic regions)?

What does Lamarre mean by highlighting ‘the risk of erasing the sociohistorical and geopolitical dimensions of contemporary television formations by introducing a globally synchronized break’?

2.    How to understand the ‘macrohistorical level’ of television, and the ‘microsociological level’ in Lamarre’s approach? Any inspiration for your own studies?

3.    How to grasp the three lineages of Japanese animation as outlined by M? (Miyazaki/Anno/manga adaptation into animated TV series) What is your understanding of the framing of ‘technosocial assembling’, and whether it may be useful for you own project?

4.    How to understand such argument, ‘After its encounter with television, animation is not only a form of content but also (and, I will argue, principally) a force of distribution’ (p.12).

And how has Lamarre constructed the argument that animation ‘is no longer a localizable discrete object but a technosocial mode of existence’?

5.    How to grasp ‘subsuming’ in relation to ‘assembling’? How does Lamarre approach ‘infrastructure’ referring to Marx, Deleuze & Guattari, and Williams? For instance, how to understand this: 

on the one hand, something produces distribution (technical experimentation, financial, military, and government investments in

platforms and infrastructures), and on the other hand, distribution produces something (affects and values).p.13

6.    How to understand the ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ sides of TV infrastructures? (it sounds so Deleuzian to me!) What is your understanding of the ‘intensive’ aspects of Japanese TV infrastructure?

7.    How do you understand this below (p.16) so that to further grasp TV/telecommunication infrastructure, and its ‘entangling of psychosocial machines and technical machines’(p.25)? IN which sense this contributes to rethinking the simple consideration wherein infrastructure is taken as ‘something upon which something else “runs” or “operates,” such as a system of railroad tracks upon which rail cars run’? p17

8.    In terms of reception practices, L maps out two modes of address. What are they and how they relate to the discussion of television’s approaching electromagnetic reality?

9.    Therefore, how to frame ‘media ecologies’ in relation to television (‘technopsychosocial assembling’)? What might be the extensive and intensive sides apropos television media ecologies?