Explanatory attempt: for whom is television dead?
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Tags: Television, media theory
The Blogpiloten are currently covering the topic “Television is dead”. Over the last few days, several guest authors have published their thoughts on the subject, such as Thomas Praus with his four theses on the art of television survival or André Krüger with his astute analysis of current developments in television.
The tenor of these posts is usually that television is changing or needs to change. And although I agree with this opinion as a long-time non-television owner, I would like to put myself in the shoes of “the others” for a change: namely those who do not generally leave their computers switched on and use the web, but see it as a pure work tool. So how dead is television for a television viewer?
What television has to do with decisions
One of the main arguments against television is the program itself. It is boring or outdated or does not reflect one’s own interests. These arguments do not apply to everyone. Here is a typical example of a conversation:
- TV watcher: “No telly? What do you do in the evenings then, if you don’t watch TV?”
- TV refuser: “I watch whatever I want.”
- TV watcher: “Then you have to think about it every time… But that’s stressful.”
Why can you use “thinking about it” as an argument against TV refusal? Michael Jäckel drew attention to the aspect of decisions in a lecture. His idea: when it comes to buying a car, all people react similarly. They spend weeks gathering information about what is on the market and looking for alternatives. Television is a different matter: here, it is not about a car that you are tied to for years. Instead, it is just about an evening. In the worst case, you have seen a bad movie and are a little annoyed – but nothing more.
To sum up, we could say that there are various decisions that have consequences of varying severity. However, making decisions is always inconvenient because it involves work. So how come some people leave their TV decision to the program creators, but others want to be program creators themselves?
The personal threshold
The answer seems to lie in the evaluation of the consequences, as the exemplary dialog above already suggests. While the television program is so unimportant to one person that alternatives on the internet are too much work, the same decisions do not bother the other person at all. Personal interest in a topic thus seems to take on the function of a “threshold” to a certain extent. It causes the risk of a “bad movie” to be evaluated differently.
The idea of the threshold comes from audio technology: it is used to indicate the volume level at which a particular device should intervene in the sound. In terms of decisions, there also seems to be something like a “personal threshold”: it determines when a person considers an issue to be worth deciding. Everything below this personal value is simply left to others. The work involved in making a decision is no longer in proportion to the personal benefit.
The concept of a personal threshold could explain why it is incredibly important for some people to create their own TV program, while for others it is not at all. However, the threshold should not be understood in a judgmental way: it merely refers to personal interests that have to be accepted as given. Of course, every media user has different thresholds for different topics. If you want to be passively entertained and relax, you simply have a high threshold for television and do not want to decide on the program yourself.
Is there a television of the future?
Although it can be helpful to think about decisions and the threshold, this does not tell us anything about the future of television. Here are some questions and discussion points:
- Is there a general tendency that lowers the threshold in relation to television behavior? In other words, are there more and more people who want to make their own program, or are such people exceptions and will remain so?
- Are there alternatives to the established structures, especially for people who do not want to deal with their program? Could they fall back on recommendations from acquaintances (a kind of “Television 2.0”) or recommendations based on statistics and calculations (a kind of “Television 3.0”) instead of leaving the decision to anonymous broadcasters?
- No one is entirely without decision-making ability: every viewer chooses between various programs and does not appear to be overwhelmed by the options. However, clicking together your program on the internet is more work. How should television sets of the future be designed to offer these options as easily as usual?
- What role does the option of making your own program via services such as hobnox play? Will this also change pure consumer behavior?
- How do personal threshold values and individual decisions relate to each other? For example, someone finds the series “24” so important that he watches the latest episodes on the internet; but for everything else, the normal program is sufficient. Does an example like this refute the idea that there is such a thing as a personal threshold?