Universiteit van Amsterdam November 27, 2019

Media Culture inTransformation:

Recorded – Live

Lecture 5

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 Questions
• How are media transmitted? Does this transmission imply
storage or not?
• What is broadcasting?
• What is “liveness” and how has this idea changed over the
decades?
• How do we deal with the fact that "live" broadcasting may
not have been recorded?

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 Outline
1. Recap from previous weeks
2. Radio, Broadcasting, and the Notion of Liveness
3. Television and Constructed Liveness
4. Liveness as an Aesthetic or‘Ideology’
5. Recorded – Live today:
Terrace House, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Skam

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 Recap from last week

• spectacle – narrative:
integration of these two tendencies in cinema

• proximity – distance:
‘wireless telegraphy’ first used for point-to-point
communication

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Radio and the Notion of Liveness

• print, photography, film ➝ recording media

• telegraph,telephone,radio,television ➝ transmission media

• What kind of content should be transmitted by radio and

television?

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Radio and the Notion of Liveness

• 1919/20: beginning of broadcast radio

▪ 1919: Dutch station PCGG
▪ 1920: commercial broadcasting station
KDKA
• much of the content was recorded material
(PCGG broadcast music played on a
“pathéfoon”)
• foundation of radio networks in all countries
over the 1920s
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Radio and the Notion of Liveness

Dominant Model of Broadcasting

• organized around technical properties of radio,
later television:
▪ one-to-many communication
▪ simultaneous reception
▪ instantaneous transmission
• the apparatus itself was the sensation, not the
content

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Radio and the Notion of Liveness
Towards a culture of liveness
• early radio stations used mainly recordings
because they were more affordable and reliable
• this met with resistance from networks who
wanted radio to be true to its technological
potential
• technological features lead to the a for-profit,one-
way, live medium

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Radio and the Notion of Liveness
Reasons for the Push towards Liveness
• aesthetic considerations (Kompare 22):
▪ ‘bringing the world home’ as it happens
▪ ethos of presence (as in theater)
• association of recordings with amateurism (22)
• political regulation (22-23, 27):
obligation to identify recordings
• economic incentive: expensive infrastructure was
justified by means of the superiority of liveness (23)
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Radio and the Notion of Liveness

Liveness
• rarefied presence: the voice of that radio speaker
• immediacy: right now
• intimacy: in the domestic space
• simultaneity: everyone listening at the sametime
• spontaneity: anything can happen live
• eventfulness: big stars playing in concert
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Radio and the Notion of Liveness
Recordings take over again
• reasons for the return of recordings (24-25)
• lower cost
• programming flexibility
• syndication
➝ giving control to local stations
• flexibility for sponsors
• higher sound fidelity or quality
• acceptance of recordings by the late 1930s
• but no notion of “reruns” yet
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Radio and the Notion of Liveness
“Double standard” (30-31)
• networks promoted live content for ideological
reasons
➝ live content broadcast on the most visible
network schedules

• but they heavily invested in recording libraries for

economic reasons
➝ recordings broadcast on lower prestige
schedules on local and government stations
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Radio and the Notion of Liveness
Transition to TV
• big radio networks became the first TV networks:
▪ in the US: NBC,CBS
▪ in the Netherlands: AVRO, NCRV,VPRO,
VARA
• same problem of “live vs. recording” posesitself
again
• but TV will focus on “closing the perceptual gap
between live and recorded programming” (25)
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Television and Constructed Liveness
Television as a domestic medium
• postwar domesticity
➝ return of husbands and wives to the home
• TV and the living room as the center of the
home
• TV explicitly advertised as a family medium ➝
“standards of purity and decency” (Spigel 142)

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Television and Constructed Liveness
Texaco StarTheater (NBC,1949)
Early Television Genres
• variety shows
▪ live address of the audience
▪ short acts or sketches
➝ lack of continuity
▪ stand-up comedy and physical humor
▪ ethnic humor
• anthology drama
§ weekly episodes with changing
characters
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Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcom
• sitcom = situation comedy
• often set in domestic sphere around the life of a
family
• tames or ‘domesticates’ the male stars’ humor
(151)
• inclusion of female comedians (151-152)

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Television and Constructed Liveness

Sitcom
• creates an aesthetic middle-ground by
▪ merging vaudeville with
theatrical realism (144)
▪ integrating performance acts into
storylines

I Love Lucy (CBS,1951-57)

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Television and Constructed Liveness

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Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcom
• often filmed in a proscenium space in front of live
audience
➝ emphasis on the immediacy of performance
even though it is recorded on film (154)
• the family setting creates a sense of warmth,
sentimentality, and intimacy (157-158)
• slapstick humor creates a sense of spontaneity
➝ “simulated neighborhood” (165) 19
Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcoms and Self-reflexivity

The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (CBS,1950-58) 20

Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcoms and Self-reflexivity
• self-reflexivity does not break with naturalism
• training for families in their new suburban roles
➝ emphasis on social performance (161-162)
• reflection on the artifice of postwar consumer
culture (163)
• reflection on the role that the new medium
television should play in the home (159)
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Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcoms and Women

I Love Lucy (CBS,1951-57) 22

Television and Constructed Liveness
Sitcoms and Women
• housekeeping as a performance (174)
• but also rebellion against the domestic ideal (174)
• television as a channel of access to power (175)
• ultimately the tension is oftentimes resolved

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 Recorded – Live
Different concepts or forms of liveness
• ‘classic’ liveness
• live broadcast
• live recordings and “live on tape” TV
• television‘flow’ (sequence of programmes,commercials,trailers)
• real-time ‘liveness’ (e.g. in Rope orBirdman, videogames)
• internet liveness (“always on”)
• social media liveness (instant messenging, live tweeting)
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 Recorded and Live

“[…] as television becomes less and less a ‘live’ medium in the sense of an
equivalence between time of event and time of transmission, the medium
in its own practice seems to insist more and more upon an ideology of
the live,the immediate,the direct,the spontaneous,the real.”

Feuer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.”

Regarding Television. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Frederick, MD: U Publishers of
America,1983,p.14.

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Recorded – Live today
Terrace House (Fuji/Netflix, 2015-present)
• reality TV show about young Japanese people in
Tokyo
• in addition to the events in the house, every
episode contains a group of people commenting
on these events
• the show presents a domestic community of
viewers
➝ training in appropriate reactions to TV
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Recorded – Live today
RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo,2009-present)
• season finale:
theatrical show with live studio audience
➝ big event television
• but it is not broadcast live
• in order to keep the big ‘live’ revealmoment
for TV, three different endings are recorded
(one for each finalist as the winner)
• The finalists have to watch the recorded
broadcast to find out who actually won 27
 Recorded – Live today
Skam (NRK,2015-present)
• told in ‘real time’:
things that happen on a Friday night will
http://www.dazeddigi
tal.com/artsandcultur come online on a Friday night
e/article/33790/1/the
-risque-norwegian-
tv-series-causing-
• real time effect is enhanced by means of
teen-hysteria fake instagram profiles and SMS threads
• strong connection between program and
http://skam.p3.no
fans
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Universiteit van Amsterdam November 29, 2019

Media Culture inTransformation:

Recorded – Live

Response lecture 5

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 Announcement

Next Monday, we’ll resume our regular screenings at the EYE Film
Institute.
The screening starts at 10AM.

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 Outline for today

1. Conclusion of lecture: Contemporary examples of Recorded – Live

2. Kahoot
3. Quotations
4. All your questions
5. Explanation concerning course registration for 2nd semester

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You can find all our Kahoot quizzes by logging into
Kahoot and searching for “mcit.” 32
 Recorded and Live
Live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization,
since liveness was made visible only by the possibility of technical reproduction. […] My
argument is that the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction –
that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.
I want to emphasize that reproduction (recording) is the key issue. The Greek theatre may
have been technologically mediated, if one subscribes to the theory that the masks acted as
megaphones. What concerns me here, however, is technological reproduction, not just
technological mediation. Greek theatrical masks may have amplified the actors’ voices, but
they did not reproduce them, in the manner of electric amplification. Throughout history,
performance has employed available technologies and has been mediated in one sense or
another. It is only since the advent of mechanical and electric technologies of recording and
reproduction, however, that performance has been mediatized.

Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London and New York: Routledge,
2008,p.56-57.
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 Recorded and Live
Recorded and Live
I do not believe in an essentialist view of technologies, nor am I a technological
determinist. Rather, I think that liveness should be interpreted as a development
within media history as a whole. Media technological history at least partly
reflects an effort to reduce the gap between events and media users. It is
intimately linked to a history of communication as speed, where we experience
the rhythm of printing presses, the use of the telegraph by press agencies, the
transmission of photographs, the circulation of films (by plane), then the
circulation of video signals through transmission and satellite. Live broadcasting,
in this context, is the quintessence of ‘news,’ whose discovery [was] a major
break in the history of the press.(551-552)

Bourdon, Jérôme. “Live Television is Still Alive: On Television as an Unfulfilled

Promise.” Media, Culture & Society 22.5 (2000):531-556. 34
 Your questions

I can imagine that you have many different questions. To make this
productive, let’s order our questions a bit.

1) recording media vs. transmission media

2) radio’s push toward liveness subsequent and return to recordings
3) the notion of liveness and its associated terms (immediacy, etc.)
4) the transition from radio to television
5) the ideal/idyll of postwar domestic
6) early TV genres: variety show, anthology drama, the sitcom
7) constructed liveness
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After the break, my colleague Maarten Reesink
will come and explain course registration for the
2nd semester.

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