The medium is the message: Streaming and its impact on storytelling
“The medium is the message,” argued Herbert Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media.
It may be more accurate to argue that the message is in many ways shaped and defined by the medium through which it will be conveyed. Storytelling has always been filtered through its means of transmission and translation. It is been argued, for example, that the use of rhyme and repetition in oral storytelling traditions is a design feature, designed to make these stories easier to learn and to pass down from one generation to the next.
It makes sense that as technology and media evolves, the default mechanisms of storytelling would change as well. This is particularly true of televisual storytelling.
A lot of the conventions of twentieth-century television were anchored in the realities of television production during the period. Television performances and set design owed a lot to theatre, in large part because television screens were originally rather small and because television reception quality was not universally high quality. Whereas cinema offered breath-taking vistas and epic scale, television had to be designed to accommodate
viewers watching grainy images on black-and-white sets.
The conventions of twentieth-century television dictate other aspects of the
form. The rise of the writer and producer as the auteur of television is in
large part due their roles overseeing entire seasons and series.
Whereas a director oversaw every aspect of production (including
pre- and post-) on a feature film, directors were frequently
treated as hired hands on television series. They were
intended to get a given episode produced on-time and
on-budget, with little eye to continuity or long-term vision.
Recent years have seen significant shifts in how television is
produced and broadcast. There are multiple reasons for these
changes.
26 CinÉireann /November 2017