Beyond televisual flow

     This week's lectures brought up the emergence of new technologies and their relation to convergence culture.  Television no longer, simply television, but rather extends online through games, forums, blogs, chats, shopping, and so on, as was brought up in lecture.  How does this effect the notion of "flow" as Raymond Williams describes it, which is so central to television?  Television when analyzed within its programming still very much relies on flow, though even here it begins to diverge as the audience is prompted to access MySpace pages or other external sources.  Thus, a new flow seems to emerge.  Is this flow fundamentally the same or different from the televisual flow described by Williams?  It would seem that now, the flow that once characterized television, is a cross-medium, all-encompassing flow.  

     Williams says that the phenomenon of "planned flow" is the defining characteristic of broadcasting (86).  The planned flow is the "sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence," which he says follows from the innovation of commercial advertising and trailers of upcoming programs (90).  Williams' argument must now be re-evaluated as the television audience is increasingly prompted to continue the flow created by television, outside of television.  This goes then to Jenkins' discussion of convergence as both a top-down and bottom-up process (18).  From the top, the consumer is prompted to act in certain ways and indeed is provided with a certain limited set of options.  Conversely, the consumer has the choice of what prompts to act on and indeed, it is in the nature and to the advantage of firms respond accordingly.  Though, the consumer would seem less empowered in light of Terranova's article, "Free Labor."  

However, to return to Williams', he states that while "the items [on t.v.] may be various the television experience has in some important ways unified them" (95).  Reconsidered, the cross-medium flow now unifies even more disparate items while also unifying otherwise disparate technologies.  Furthermore, the flow, which Williams says "is always accessible, in several alternative sequences, at the flick of a switch" (94) is now accessible at the flick of switch or click of a button be it on one's computer, cellphone, or other PDF.  It seems we are truly in a web of our own making, forever entangled in an extension of the televisual to the all-encompassing technological flow.  The only escape would be to take oneself off the map entirely, with the consequence of losing touch with an imagined community that seems increasingly to define "reality."