Television Textuality and the Imagined Community

[I've bolded important points for easy skimming]

Perhaps I’m drifting us away, but I can’t resist. Gavin’s post has made me think of television.

Actually, though, Anderson’s book made me think of television. Since I’m a LCS guy, I was most struck in Anderson’s text when he talks about the role of texts—in particular novels and newspapers—in representing “nationhood.” Anderson explains that part of acknowledging nation-ness is the awareness that there are countless other individuals anonymously going about their lives in simultaneity. He says, for instance, that although we don’t know all of the other Americans, we’re confident that they exist and that they are all off doing various things. Basically, he says that simultaneous activity suggests community.

He gets to novels and newspapers by explaining that they suggest this simultaneous activity. In novels, Anderson explains, we get several—or even a host of—characters, some of whom are unaware of one another’s existence. In this way the novel conjures up the idea of nation-ness: “That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, byut by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds” (Anderson 29). In newspapers, likewise, readers get a number of stories regarding the affairs of a great many people. These stories are juxtaposed in a way that suggests the anonymity and diversity of the community that the newspaper represents. And, Anderson suggests, although stories and the people they’re about appear and disappear in the paper, readers have no doubt that the people continue their lives, the stories continue, and the issues endure, long after they’ve ceased to be newsworthy. It is this idea of simultaneous representation of individuals in media that I want to focus on here.

Reading Anderson’s discussion of simultaneity in novels and newspapers made me think of a really cool essay on television that I used to teach in one of my freshman classes at Ohio University during my adjunct year. It’s “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson. Johnson is interested in how television programs have “progressed” or “evolved” from the 1960s to today—you could say, rather aptly, that he’s interested in how the plot has thickened. In short, he argues that today’s television programs are significantly more complex and sophisticated than those of the past, and from this assertion he builds an argument that today’s television is “cognitively demanding” and hence, as the title suggests, can “make you smarter” just by watching. In particular, Johnson focuses on multi-threading, a term that simply means that the television show is made up of multiple, independent narratives involving separate characters that are threaded together with dramatic and artistic editing. He’s talking about shows like 24, Lost, E.R., The West Wing, and so on. Discussing The Sopranos, he says that the show “routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters” (173).

So here’s my question: If we grant Johnson his point, how does this newly multi-threaded brand of TV complicate the “imagined community” that Anderson explains was initially suggested textually through the simultaneity depicted in novels and newspapers? Now, instead of a few characters sneaking around anonymously in a Balzac novel, we’ve got a great number of characters, each with a thick plot, happening simultaneously. Does this simply make the community seem larger? Does this make us feel our lives are dull because they’re not complicated or fast enough? Does it suggest that the community has in other ways changed since the community of the novel? Does our community seem like a really “busy” or “dynamic” one?