Dawson - Rationalizing Television in The USA

M A X D AW S O N
Digital video recorders (DVRs) the so-called smart VCRs that use
databases, metadata and digital compression algorithms to eliminate many
of the hassles associated with recording television broadcasts on tape
arrived on the shelves of US retailers in the spring of 1999. Though slow to
catch on with consumers, the new devices were a source of seemingly
endless fascination for media professionals and media industry analysts,
many of whom spent the better part of the early 2000s engaged in urgent
speculation about how digital recording would impact on the institutions
and business models of the US television industry. Of all of the new devices
features, it was the DVRs ability to zip accurately through recorded
programming in thirty-second increments the precise duration of the
majority of US television commercials that most captured the publics and
the industrys imagination. For a considerable number of commentators,
the question was not if this commercial skipping capability would
transform US television, but rather how much time remained before the
thirty-second commercial, the national broadcast networks, and even
advertiser-supported television itself would meet their respective demises at
the DVRs hands.
Hyperbolic forecasts of cataclysmic revolutions and violent paradigm
shifts dominated media coverage of the DVRs early years in the USA. But
the advent of this technology also provoked a great deal of public discussion
about the more prosaic ways in which it would affect the everyday leisure
activities of US television viewers. In many instances, the participants in
221
Screen 55:2 Summer 2014

The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hju011
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015
Rationalizing television in the USA:

neoliberalism, the attention economy
and the digital video recorder
these conversations proposed that viewers might use DVRs to become more
efficient and effective consumers of television entertainment and
information. In a 2003 article on time management skills, for example, the
mens magazine Esquire proposed a novel way of using DVRs to watch TV
faster: youre going to need to get TiVo, the article advised, referencing
the Alviso, California-based startup that had taken an early lead in the
fledgling DVR market.
Bruce Stockler, A. J. Jacobs and

Andy Ward, The hurried man,
Esquire, vol. 139, no. 2 (2003),
pp. 6667.
Gina Trapani, Favorite TiVo tricks,

Lifehacker, 2 January 2008,
<http://lifehacker.com/351812/
favorite-tivo-tricks> accessed 30
March 2014.
Don Fernandez, A world made for

one, Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
23 May 2004, p. 1.
As preposterous as this tip might first appear, Esquire was neither the first
nor the last media outlet to suggest that viewers could use DVRs to make the
most of, or reduce, the time they spent watching television. Since the
technologys advent more than a decade ago, similar tips have appeared in a
variety of publications and websites. For example, in 2008 Lifehacker.com,
a popular internet destination for personal productivity tips, provided its
readers with a list of TiVo tricks alongside its usual suggestions for
streamlining common information industry job tasks.2 The authors of a
2001 business self-help manual proposed that ambitious individuals use
DVRs to free up leisure time for learning new marketable skills. And the
Parents Television Council (PTC), a conservative media watchdog group,
instructed parents in how to use TiVos products to ensure that their children
watched only age-appropriate educational programming.
In venues such as these, experts in fields ranging from parenting to
personal productivity to attention management identified how digital
video recorders could be used: to avoid aimless channel surfing; to collect,
collate and closely analyze redeeming programming; to monitor and
manage childrens media consumption; or, as Esquire advised, to watch
television faster. While it is difficult to know for certain just how many
people actually implemented these experts tips, anecdotal evidence from
media reports and internet postings suggest that some Americans did in fact
strive to use their devices in this manner. In one representative example, a
2004 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled a man who used
his TiVo to make sure that Every second of his television viewing is
carefully chosen, recorded, and organized. Entertainment and
information are electronically siphoned without an ounce of excess.3 But
regardless of whether or not large numbers of viewers actually used digital
video recorders to watch television in this calculatedly rational fashion, it is
indisputable that during the first decade of the 2000s, popular periodicals,
books and internet sites dedicated a significant amount of attention to the
possibility that they would. The advent of the DVR inspired many
commentators to contemplate different ways of watching television, and
222
Screen 55:2 Summer 2014 . Max Dawson . Rationalizing television in the USA: neoliberalism, the attention economy and the digital video recorder
Once youve got that and have recorded your favorite shows, turn on the
closed captioning. Press fast-forward on the TiVo. The captioned
dialogue will appear quickly but youll still be able to read every word.
You can read Everybody Loves Raymond in eight minutes. Law & Order
will take a beautifully efficient fifteen. Saturday Night Live? With all the
skippable crap, it notches in at about eleven.1
See, for instance, James Bennett

and Nikki Strange (eds), Television
as Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011); Graeme
Turner and Jinna Tay (eds),
Television Studies After TV:
Understanding Television in the
Post-Broadcast Era (London:
Routledge, 2009); Lynn Spigel and
Jan Olsson (eds), Television After
TV: Essays on a Medium in
Transition (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
See, for instance, William Boddy,

New Media and Popular
Imagination: Launching Radio,
Television and Digital Media in the
United States (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2004); Matt
Carlson, Tapping into TiVo: digital
video recorders and the transition
from schedules to surveillance in
television, New Media and
Society, vol. 8, no. 1 (2006),
pp. 97115; Mark Andrejevic, The
work of being watched: interactive
media and the exploitation of selfdisclosure, Critical Studies in
Media Communication, vol. 19, no.
2 (2002), pp. 23048.

Boddy, New Media and Popular
Imagination, pp. 6878.
Matt Haughey, 2000s: the decade

of the DVR, PVR Blog, 2 November
2010, <http://pvr.blogs.com/>
accessed 30 March 2014.
223
beyond that different ways of interacting with and consuming various forms
of screen entertainment.
This essay traces the coalescence and dissemination of a proposition that
circulated widely in the USA over the course of the 2000s: that the DVR
would rationalize the act of watching television, making it a more efficient
and/or productive leisure activity. In what follows, I explore how this
proposition has been discussed and debated in media reports, press releases,
policy debates and promotional materials, but also in management
philosophy books, self-help manuals, and lifestyle and technology blogs. In
doing so, I highlight two of this propositions most commonplace
articulations. The first of these employs populist rhetoric to identify digital
television recording as a liberating act of personal empowerment by which
viewers take control of televisions distribution timetables and their own
lives. The second invokes the attention economy thesis, a fashionable
pseudo-scientific theorization of the human attention spans paramount
importance within postindustrial economies. I therefore trace how in the
USA the DVR has been positioned as a technology that equips enterprising
individuals to manage their and their family members expenditure of two
valuable forms of human capital: time and attention.
In calling attention to the circulation of this proposition, this essay
provides a nationally specific perspective on the social construction of new
digital television technologies. Recent scholarly monographs and edited
collections have approached this topic from a number of different angles,
highlighting the historical, industrial and ideological forces that act upon
these technologies overdetermined cultural meanings within the context of
distinctive national broadcasting cultures.4 If preliminary media coverage of
the DVR focused on talk of revolutions and paradigm shifts, a significant
portion of the scholarship on these new technologies has focused on
investigating and complicating the most extreme claims of the devices most
vociferous enthusiasts and opponents. This scholarship has provided a
useful and necessary counterpoint to the medias coverage of the DVRs
impact (or potential impact) on US broadcasters prosperity, and has
rightfully refocused media scholars attention on issues of political
economy, surveillance and consumer labour that are routinely obscured by
the utopian and dystopian rhetoric that has surrounded the device ever since
its launch.5
This essays contribution to the growing body of scholarly literature on
new digital television technologies lies in its attentiveness to some of the
more prosaic forms of conjecture that digital television technologies, and
DVRs in particular, routinely provoke. The digital television technologies
of the 1990s and 2000s have inspired many commentators to fantasize about
the death or the rebirth and redemption of television.6 But they have
also inspired fantasies about watching television faster, as evidenced by
the Esquire article, or watching television better, as the editor of a popular
DVR-focused blog suggested in a post describing how the device had
apparently changed his viewing.7 In venues ranging from popular
periodicals to personal blogs, these fantasies often became enmeshed
James Hay, Unaided virtues: the

(neo-)liberalization of the domestic
sphere, Television and New Media,
vol. 1, no. 1 (2000), p. 54; Nikolas
Rose, Powers of Freedom:
Reframing Political Thought
(New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 13940.
Rose, Powers of Freedom,

pp. 16065.
224
within wider ambitions about being better consumers, better parents, better
spouses and better employees. It is my contention that these fantasies are
deeply entangled within much broader contemporary conversations about
self-worth, parenting, freedom of choice and citizenship. By examining
them we stand to enrich our understanding of both the technology and the
context of its reception by US consumers.
During the period of the DVRs initial development and diffusion,
conversations on these topics were largely dominated by neoliberal voices.
Neoliberalism is a variant of liberal political thought that is characterized by
a commitment to rationalizing the functioning of the state via processes of
privatization, deregulation and citizen empowerment.8 Central to this
philosophy of governance is a complementary social ideal that places the
utmost emphasis on self-enterprise and accountability. Neoliberal
policymakers and ideologues exhort citizens to assume responsibility for
protecting and improving their own and their families welfare by entering
into relationships with government agencies, their family members, their
fellow citizens and even themselves that are modelled after the contractual
relations of the marketplace, stressing the feelings of liberation and personal
fulfillment that citizens stand to experience by reducing their reliance upon
the state.9
Americans first encounters with DVRs took place in the midst of a
period when this social ideal was the subject of an extraordinary amount of
attention and debate within US popular culture and political discourse. The
ascendant Republican Party had made the values of self-enterprise and
personal accountability two of the most important and contested themes of
the 1996 and 2000 election cycles, articulating these ideals to a project of
rationalizing the functioning of the nations government. Throughout the
eight years of George W. Bushs presidency, the elected officials and
ideologues of both major US political parties would call upon citizens to do
their part to help achieve this goal by becoming informed consumers of
products and private services that would increase their own prospects of
achieving the vaunted goal of self-sufficiency. Neoliberalisms exponents
including not only politicians, pundits and political theorists but also a large
and diverse population of professional counsellors, experts and therapists
argued for the superiority of private schools over public schools, personal
retirement portfolios over Social Security, personal fiscal responsibility
over state welfare programmes, and independent community organizations
over government-funded social programmes. The advocates of these
market-based solutions to the problems of big government spoke with
great optimism about the ways in which competition between the providers
of these services would empower citizens to choose the options that
provided the best fit with their needs and goals, and emphasized that citizens
bore a responsibility to themselves, their families, their communities and
their country to seek out and consume these services to the best of their
abilities. Empowerment was an obligation as opposed to an option, and
achieving it required citizens to commit to continuously educating
Better Living Through Reality TV

(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008),
pp. 17, 31.
225
10 Laurie Ouellette and James Hay,
themselves about the services available and the most effective ways of using
these to improve themselves and the quality of their lives.
Within this climate, the DVR appeared particularly well suited to helping
Americans apply this ethos of self-enterprise and personal accountability to
their consumption of television information and entertainment. Many early
proponents of the DVR based their endorsements of the device on the
premiss that it empowered television viewers to become more actively
involved with the programming they consumed. Those who exercised this
power in a prudent and responsible fashion were able not only to enhance
their enjoyment of television programming, but also to increase their and
their family members prospects of leading successful, fulfilling and
productive lives. Press reports related anecdotes about parents using DVRs
to help lift their childrens grades, while self-help gurus coached aspiring
self-improvers to use them to free up time for more productive leisure
activities, such as exercise or reading. In these contexts the smart VCR was
reimagined as a time-management tool, a defence against distraction, an
educational instrument or a parenting aid, and the DVR owner as an
enterprising investor of her own time and attention. At a moment when
Americans were being besieged with exhortations to take responsibility for
managing their health, their finances, their employment prospects and their
childrens education, the DVR held out the possibility of taking a similarly
entrepreneurial approach to their leisure, or, at the very least, to the time they
spent watching television.
Recent work by television studies scholars Laurie Ouellette and James
Hay has illuminated the extent of televisions involvement in the cultivation
of subjects capable of living up to neoliberal social ideals. Ouellettes and
Hays primary point of reference is television programming, and in
particular the reality shows that came to comprise a sizeable portion of US
networks schedules in the 1990s and 2000s. Makeover programmes, home
improvement shows and other popular reality formats seemingly provided
their participants with opportunities and resources to improve their
appearances, career prospects, financial standing, homes and health.
Reality TV programmes function as venues where enterprising individuals
transform themselves into more productive and self-sufficient members of
society and as pedagogical tools that provide audience members with
practical advice on how they, too, can transform their own lives. According
to Ouellette and Hay, it is not just the content of reality TV programmes but
their incorporation into televisions daily and weekly schedules that makes
them such effective lessons in neoliberal ideals. They use the term the TV
program to indicate that televisions daily and weekly schedules provide a
serialized framework for everyday regimens of personal management and
self-improvement that are as pleasurable as they are effective.10
Ouellette and Hay are sensitive to the ways that recent technological
innovations may reconfigure the TV program, and note that the global
reality TV boom of recent decades has coincided with the diffusion of
more refined technologies of consumer choice and self-enterprise, such as
the remote control, the time-shifting VCR, and more recently the DVR,
11 Ibid., pp. 2930.
slate.com/articles/business/
moneybox/2000/07/ad_
report_card_tivos_insurrection.
html> accessed 30 March 2014.
13 Boddy, New Media and Popular
Imagination, p. 129.
14 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time

and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives (New York, NY:
New York University Press, 2005),
p. 5.
15 See, for instance, David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity: an
Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural
Change (London: Blackwell, 1989);
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the
Network Society (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2000).
226
12 Ad report card: TiVos insurrection,

Slate, 17 July 2000, <http://www.
[that] make the TV program more useful within ones particular lifestyle.11
But the fantasies provoked by the advent of the DVR also provide a
somewhat different set of conclusions. Indeed, by the start of the 2000s
aspects of the TV program were seemingly in conflict with contemporary
lifestyles and values. Conclusions of this sort were encouraged by some of
the DVRs early promotional materials. Advertisements and press releases
identified timeshifting (the practice of recording television programming
for later playback) as a heroic act of consumer insubordination committed
against an oppressive centralized authority that for decades had imposed a
uniform schedule upon Americans leisure time. This authority, of course,
was the broadcast network an institution that the DVRs promoters often
cast as elitist or even undemocratic. One oft-cited example of this
marketing trope is a TiVo commercial that aired in the summer of 2000, in
which a pair of muscle-bound goons hurl a cocky network programming
executive out of the window of his corner office. It concludes with the
appearance on the screen of TiVos slogan at the time: Program your own
network.12
As numerous observers have noted, TiVos anti-authoritarian posturing
was disingenuous. At the time of this commercials airing the company was
in the process of securing contracts to supply highly detailed data about the
viewing habits of its subscribers to the same network executives that its
advertisements portrayed as unsympathetic villains.13 Still, TiVos slogan
Program your own network presents a provocative twist on Ouellette
and Hays concept of the TV program. To programme ones own network
was to reject not only the regimented schedules that are a central component
of the TV program, but also the model of social organization from which
these schedules originally arose. In the USA the basic contours of the daily
television timetable, as well as of the mediums weekly and yearly
schedules, are built upon templates that were originally established during
the 1920s by radio broadcasters. These templates were shaped by the
insights yielded by early studies of the behaviours of American radio
listeners, as well as by broadcasters commonsense assumptions about their
audiences lifestyles and lifecycles. Radio schedules were to a large extent
modeled after the customary timetables of work, leisure, marriage and
reproduction for example, the eight-hour working day, the forty-hour
working week, and the September-to-June academic calendar. Their daily,
weekly and yearly contours thus reflect strict bourgeois rules of
respectability and scheduling that coalesced in the USA during the early
decades of the twentieth century, and that were themselves closely linked to
the calendar and clock of industrial capitalism.14
The rules that shaped the contours of radio broadcasting have changed
quite dramatically since the period when these schedules initially took
shape. By the mid 1970s, economic instability, changing social mores and
neoliberal policy reforms had resulted in the fragmentation of formerly
synchronized timetables of work and leisure and the proliferation of a
multitude of idiosyncratic, unstable and highly irregular clocks and
calendars.15 The heterochronic lifestyles that emerged during this period
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995),

p. 168.
17 George Gilder, Life After Television:

the Coming Transformation of
Media and American Life
(New York, NY: Norton, 1994),
pp. 49, 47, 16.
227
16 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital
were facilitated by new methods of asynchronous media distribution and

consumption, such as the VCR, videogames and, eventually, the World
Wide Web. And yet, with a few notable exceptions (for instance, the shift to
a twenty-four-hour broadcast day or, more recently, broadcast networks
implementation of a twelve-month programming calendar), televisions
daily, weekly and yearly schedules remained largely unchanged throughout
this period. Until the advent of the DVR, the TV program continued to be
modelled upon the inherited radio template, one egregiously out of sync
with the lifestyles and lifecycles of many of televisions viewers.
Even before critiques of the television timetable found their way into
TiVos advertisements, the idea that televisions schedules were
incompatible with contemporary lifestyles and values had been debated in a
variety of non-promotional contexts in the USA. In his 1995 bestselling
book Being Digital, MIT media lab head Nicholas Negroponte identified
the television schedule as an antiquated relic of a bizarre economic model
that infringed upon the liberties of the audience. We are constantly
interrupted or forced into being punctual for things that truly do not merit
such immediacy or promptness, Negroponte complained. We are forced
into regular rhythms, not because we finished eating at 8:59 p.m., but
because the TV program is about to start in one minute.16 Along similar
lines, the conservative pundit George Gilder remarked in 1994 that The
top-down television system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic
capitalism. In a broadcast medium manipulative masters rule over
huge masses of people. Television is a tool of tyrants. Televisions tyranny
was, according to Gilder, a side-effect of the conditions of scarcity created
by broadcasters irrationally inefficient use of the radio spectrum. It was
likewise a tyranny of the clock, in which the centralized synchronization of
consumption enforced a homogeneity of taste and lifestyle that Gilder
regarded as being both undemocratic and an affront to humankinds drive
to self-improvement and autonomy.17
Negropontes and Gilders observations about the coercive powers of the
television timetable echoed contemporary critiques of the regimented work
and leisure schedules of industrial capitalism. During the 1990s and early
2000s numerous social commentators argued that new technologies,
including computers, fax machines, mobile phones and PDAs, were
making possible flexible labour arrangements that offered individuals new
opportunities to achieve success and personal fulfillment through their
work. The technology journalist Daniel Pink described the difference
between these labour arrangements as that between Taylorism, the
brutally rational scheme of scientific management developed in the late
nineteenth century by industrial efficiency expert Frederick Winslow
Taylor, and Tailorism, a thoroughly modern work-style in which
employees determined where, how, when and with whom they worked. In
the era of the Organization Man, work was a one-size-all proposition, Pink
explained.
18 Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation:

How Americas New Independent
Workers Are Transforming the Way
We Live (New York, NY: Warner
Books, 2001), pp. 1819.
Fast Company, no. 10 (1997), p. 83;

Richard Florida, The Rise of the
Creative Class and How its
Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life
(New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002),
p. 113.
20 Peters, The brand called you, p. 83.
Invoking William Whytes The Organization Man and Sloan Wilsons The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Pink equated 1950s anomie with regimented
clock-time and calendar of the postwar industrial economy. The social
synchronization required by industrial capitalism robbed workers of their
individuality, reducing them to a homogenous mass of (uniformed) workers
that circulated in step with each another through the economic and physical
infrastructure of a mass-market Taylorist economy.
During the mid 1990s Pink was followed by numerous other consultants
and commentators, many of whom shared his enthusiasm for the Tailorist
labour arrangements that were apparently becoming increasingly
commonplace within the information and creative industries.19 Under
such arrangements, autonomous individuals created their own work
schedules based on their personal proclivities and needs, working when
they felt inspired, as opposed to when the clock told them to. Authors such
as Pink, Tom Peters and Richard Florida wrote of this Tailorism in terms
that were entirely consistent with neoliberal social ideals, describing
flexible work arrangements as simultaneously more fulfilling for the
individual worker and more profitable for employers. Tailorism applied
the neoliberal ideal of empowerment through personal accountability to
the clock-time and calendar of labour. Within this paradigm, workers
would be empowered to set their own hours, to work where they wanted,
even to choose their own employers and clients. No longer constrained
by the rigidities of standard working hours, or expectations of lifelong
employment, workers would become free agents who contracted out
their skills on a freelance basis over the course of their portfolio careers.20
Of course these new freedoms were in no way free. Rather, they were
predicated upon the surrender of many of the benefits enjoyed by many
permanent, full-time employees under the labour arrangements of
industrial capitalism. In exchange for the privilege of creating their own
work schedules, Tailorisms free agents forfeited hard-won benefits
such as employer-funded health insurance, guaranteed salaries and basic
job security. And yet for the champions of Tailorism these tradeoffs were
warranted, as the flexibility of this new style of work stood to unlock the
potential of ambitious and self-enterprising workers, individuals who, in
their estimation, were far better equipped to look after their own welfare
than the corporation or the state.
The perception that the broadcast schedules, or schedules of any type, are
coercive, constraining of human potential or even antidemocratic, became
increasingly prevalent as the 1990s progressed, particularly as greater
numbers of Americans began to use digital media technologies in their work
and leisure. The media analyst Josh Bernoff summed up this view when he
told the New York Times in 2002 that consumers experiences with these
228
19 Tom Peters, The brand called you,
Try to picture work in that era and youll likely conjure one of two images:
a regiment of identically dressed assembly line workers exiting factory
gates at the sound of the whistle or a herd of gray-flannelled middle
managers boarding a commuter train in lockstep at precisely 7:31 am.18
21 Amy Harmon, Skip-the-ads TV has

Madison Ave. upset, New York
Times, 23 May 2002, p. A1.
2122.
23 Robert W. McChesney, Media

policy goes to Main Street: the
uprising of 2003, The
Communication Review, vol. 7
(2004), p. 226.
24 Benny Evangelista, Everybodys
talking about TiVo, but the digital
video recorder pioneer is just one of
many, San Francisco Chronicle, 24
February 2003 <http://articles.
sfgate.com/2003-02-24/business/
17476170_1_tivo-s-competitorsdvr-service-video-recorders-ordvrs> accessed 30 March 2014.
25 Noam Scheiber, The way we live
now: 9/21/03. Questions for
Michael Powell: King of all media,
New York Times Magazine, 21
September 2003, p. 17.
Im my own programmer, not NBC. Ive got a system looking all around
the 300 channels I have. And picking out the stuff I like, putting them
together and letting me decide whether 24 is on at 9 oclock or 9:45.25
In his description of his own television viewing, Powell invokes TiVos
marketing slogan to identify himself as a technologically savvy
programmer as opposed to someone who followed a TV program. This
distinction appears to have been critical to both Powell the television viewer
and Powell the bureaucrat. The DVRs push-button timeshifting and
automatic recording features apparently make television compatible with the
life Powell led as the busy chairman of an important federal agency. These
229
22 Gilder, Life After Television, pp. 16,
technologies had trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning
in the nude on the Internet and the idea that CBS is going to determine
when I watch CSI flies in the face of that trend.21 Like Bernoff, many of the
DVRs proponents suggested that the device could make television more
compatible with the twenty-four/seven, on-demand nature of internet
commerce and entertainment. However, as the Tailorist theories described
above underscore, by the late 1990s televisions synchronized schedules
were incompatible with more than just the internet culture of instant
consumer gratification. They also ran counter to contemporary conceptions
of liberal subjects natural rights and responsibilities as citizens and
workers. According to Gilder, televisions top-down, synchronized
delivery of lowest-common-denominator content denied viewers the
freedom to choose how they would spend their leisure, and therefore
impeded their ability to carry out their right to pursue their own selfimprovement and autonomy. Provided with technological means of
liberating themselves from televisions Taylorist scheduling conventions,
Gilder predicted that people who now sink into a passive stupor before the
tube will find themselves travel[ling] around the world, taking courses,
conducting transactions, and shaping their own programs and software.
The result would be a better popular culture, but also a more viable
democracy populated by enterprising, active and self-motivated citizens.22
In hindsight Gilders sentiments appear outlandish, yet during the 1990s
his writings on telecommunications technologies and policies were highly
influential, especially amongst US policymakers. One of those that Gilder
influenced is Michael Powell, chairman between 2001 and 2005 of the
United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under
President George W. Bush. During his tenure, Powell earned a reputation as
an enthusiastic, almost religious, proponent of neoliberal ideology.23
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Commissioner was also an outspoken
proponent of the DVR, once describing his TiVo to an audience of tech and
broadcasting industry executives as Gods Machine.24 In numerous press
interviews Powell described the DVR as exemplifying a more productive
and more satisfying way of interacting with television that was being made
possible by new technologies developed by US corporations. He also spoke
of how the DVR had changed his own relationship to television. As Powell
explained to the New York Times, with a DVR,
DVR (emphasis added).
27 John Richardson, TiVo your way to

profit, January 2011, Personal
Success Today, <http://
personalsuccesstoday.com/tivoyour-way-to-profit/> accessed 8
April 2012.
28 DVRs can save you lots of time,
Free by 50, 12 March 2010,
<http://www.freeby50.com/2010/
03/dvrs-can-save-you-lots-of-time.
html> accessed 30 March 2014.
29 Thomas H. Davenport and John
C. Beck, The Attention Economy:
Understanding the New Currency of
Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Business School Press, 2001),
pp. 88, 91.
230
26 Haughey, 2000s: the decade of the
features also seemingly made television compatible with the neoliberal

political rationalities that informed the FCCs oversight of the
telecommunications sector during the 1990s and 2000s. Powells
appointment prevented him from (publicly) entertaining some of Gilders
and Negropontes more extreme views about the tyrannical nature of
broadcast television. However, his speeches and writings suggest that he
shared with these and other prominent neoliberal pundits a conception that the
ability to consume information and entertainment from a timetable of ones
own design was the inalienable right of every American. As articulated by
Negroponte, Gilder, Powell and many others, this was a right that could only
be experienced by technologically empowered citizenconsumers within the
unregulated and highly competitive telecommunications sector that
neoliberal policymakers strove to establish, the very sector within which the
DVR was initially developed by corporations such as TiVo.
Like Powell, many other DVR owners have written or spoken about the
pleasures of programming their own networks. For example, in a post on
the website pvrblog.com, one television programmer discussed using his
DVR to take control of television and his own life. He explained: having a
TiVo around meant I could concentrate on important stuff around the house
like my family and my work, and make time for entertainment when I
needed it. I literally became more productive because of TiVo.26 Some of
the most enthusiastic promoters of this practice came from the ranks of the
counsellors and consultants who have made a business of supplying selfhelp strategies to the USAs growing Tailorist workforce. In blogs, books
and workshops many aimed at information industry workers self-help
counsellors and consultants discussed the productivity gains that
enterprising individuals stood to enjoy by forsaking the established
television schedule for their own, self-programmed networks. The
average American watches over 6 hours on a daily basis, explained the
editor of the website then called SuccessBeginsToday.org. Imagine the
books that could be written, the paintings painted, and the projects
completed if we would just turn the box off. You could finish a degree, train
for a new job, or learn a new computer program. The author of this post
goes on to recommend using a DVR to timeshift favourite primetime
programmes from weekday evenings, which were better spent on
productive avocations, to Saturday morning or other non productive time.
By doing so, he suggested, viewers could get that promotion at work or
take on a part time job without having to give up the adventure of watching
[a favorite] show.27 Other commentators suggested that similarly positive
results could be achieved by effectively utilizing the DVR to skip
advertisements. According to the calculations posted on one DVR
enthusiasts blog, viewers stood to regain upwards of forty hours a month
of free time by recording all of their programming and fast-forwarding
through the commercials.28 In the business self-help book The Attention
Economy, management consultants Thomas H. Davenport and John
C. Beck reasoned that this free time could be used to watch more edifying
television programs, or, for Gods sake, read a few pages of a book.29
30 See, for example, Paul Goodman,

Leisure: purposeful or
purposeless?, in Pauline Madow
(ed.), Recreation in America
(New York, NY: H. W. Wilson,
1965); Harold Mehling, The Great
Time-Killer (Cleveland, OH: World
Publishing Company, 1962); Steven
Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the
Culture of Work in America
(New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1999); Cecilia Tichi,
American Television Culture
(New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
31 Michael H. Goldhaber, The
attention economy: the natural
economy of the net, First Monday,
vol. 2, no. 4 (1997), <http://www.
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/
article/view/519> accessed 30
March 2014.
32 See Georg Franck, The economy of
attention, Telepolis, 7 December
1999,<http://www.heise.de/tp/
artikel/5/5567/1.html> accessed
30 March 2014; Florian Rtzer, The
attention economy will change
everything, Telepolis, 5 March
1998, <http://www.heise.de/tp/
artikel/1/1419/1.html> accessed
30 March 2014; Michael
H. Goldhaber, How (not) to study
the attention economy: a review of
The Economics of Attention: Style
and Substance in the Age of
Information, First Monday, vol. 11,
no 11, (2006), <http://journals.uic.
edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/
view/1416/1334> accessed 30
March 2014; Tom Portante and Ron
Tarro, Paying attention, Wired, vol.
5, no. 9 (1997); Michael
H. Goldhaber, Attention shoppers!,
Wired, vol. 5, no. 12 (1997).
33 Herbert Simon Designing
organizations for an informationrich world, in Martin Greenberger
(ed.), Computers, Communications
and the Public Interest (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1971), pp. 4041; Gina
Trapani, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks
to Turbocharge Your Day
(Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing,
2007).
34 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
Perception: Attention, Spectacle
and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 13.
in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of

something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention
of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it.33
During the 1990s, management consultants, technology writers and selfhelp gurus appropriated elements of Simons argument to describe the ways
in which new digital technologies were transforming not only the global
economy but also peoples everyday experience of labour and leisure. The
avalanche of information and stimulation delivered by the internet had
produced a crisis of attentiveness that threatened to compromise the
abilities of individuals, businesses and national economies to maintain
adequate productivity levels.34 Within this climate of information overload,
individual workers were required to become managers of their own
attention, both during their working hours and their time off the clock. The
successful management of attention entailed the filtering out of distractions,
but also involved learning how to allocate attention profitably. These acts of
filtration and allocation represented a deeply reflexive project, one that
231
Electronic Hearth: Creating an
Recommendations such as these reflect traditional hierarchies of cultural

value in which active reading trumps passive viewing as a leisure pursuit,
no matter how edifying the programmes one watches might be. Since the
1940s, televisions critics have accused the medium of being incompatible
with the achievement-oriented conception of leisure engendered by the
work ethic of industrial capitalism.30 Indeed, one of the most enduring
critiques of television is that it is a waste of time that could otherwise be
spent on more productive activities. That said, Davenport and Becks
contention that the DVR could be used to free up attention as well as time is
suggestive of decidedly contemporary attitudes towards productivity,
labour and leisure, attitudes that have been inflected by neoliberal social
ideals. The very title of Davenports and Becks book The Attention
Economy references a thesis that gained many adherents in the years
immediately prior to the DVRs advent: that within postindustrial
economies such as the USA, attention supplanted manufacturing
capabilities as the basis of productivity and power.31 The attention
economy thesis was extensively debated in the press, online and in
scholarly circles during the 1990s and 2000s, and these debates were a
major influence on early responses to the DVR.32 Specifically, this thesis
lent credence to the notion that enterprising viewers could use their
DVRs to manage their own and their family members investments of
this precious form of human capital in ways that made them better
equipped to carry out the responsibilities faced by the citizens of a neoliberal
society.
The thesis that inspired these debates was actually an updated version of
an argument first outlined in 1971 by the political scientist Herbert Simon.
Simon observed that:
35 See, for instance, Georg Simmel,
M. Przyblyski (eds), The NineteenthCentury Visual Culture Reader

(London: Routledge, 2004),
pp. 5160; Siegried Kracauer, The
Mass Ornament (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995),
pp. 32330; Walter Benjamin, The
work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction, in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
(London: Pimlico, 1999),
pp. 21145; Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer, The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture (London: Routledge,
2001), pp. 2960.
36 Trapani, Lifehacker, p. 197.
37 Colin Gordon, Governmental

rationality: an introduction, in
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and
Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault
Effect: Studies in Govermentality
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), p. 44. See also Paul du
Gay, Consumption and Identity at
Work (London: Sage, 1996).
38 Now found at <http://
p2pfoundation.net/Attention_
Trust> accessed 30 March 2014.
232
The metropolis and mental life, in

Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene
required individuals to constantly audit themselves and evaluate the

worthiness of the activities, individuals and information sources on which
they spent their attention.
The debates that surrounded the attention economy thesis at the turn of the
twenty-first century hark back to similar arguments advanced by the social
critics of the Frankfurt School many decades earlier. Like the theorists and
counsellors of the attention economy, the Frankfurt School critics described
a society in which individuals were assailed in their work and leisure by an
unyielding barrage of stimuli that overwhelmed the finite limits of their
attention.35 However, the Frankfurt School critics were largely concerned
with the structural basis of modernitys crisis of attentiveness, and regarded
their ages epidemic of distraction as one of industrial capitalisms
overdetermined consequences. By contrast, the self-help gurus and
management consultants who debated the attention economy thesis did not
share their Marxist antecedents concerns with modes and relations of
production, and instead identified distraction first and foremost as a problem
of the individual. Accordingly, the remedies they prescribed placed an onus
upon the individual to combat distraction in his own life via disciplined
applications of management strategies, new age mantras, digital
technologies and psychotropic medications.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, countless self-help gurus,
consultants, life coaches and quasi-professional counsellors marketed
proprietary solutions for conquering what one blogger turned self-help
author described as modern lifes tornado of distractions.36 Though by no
means a monolithic group, taken together the investment tips that these
advisors proffered call to mind the observation of political theorist Colin
Gordon that neoliberal subjects continuously attend to an enterprise of
oneself, the primary business of which is to make adequate provision for
the preservation, reproduction and reconstruction of ones own human
capital.37 The website of AttentionTrust, a non-profit group established to
create and distribute technologies that would offer individuals greater
control over their attention data, is exemplary in this regard. You own
your attention, AttentionTrusts statement of purpose read. You can pay
attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention
has WORTH.38 In this and many other instances, counsellors and
consultants applied the attention economy thesis in such a way so as to
construe attention as both a form of (human) capital and as a right. As
AttentionTrusts website argued, each individual was or should be at
liberty to invest her attention as she saw fit. As with any right, however, this
prerogative was accompanied by a corresponding responsibility.
Investments that squandered attention on unproductive activities could cost
the individual attention investor time, money and opportunities for
professional advancement or personal growth. The consequences of these
poor investment decisions had the potential to ripple outward, affecting the
attention investors coworkers, family members and fellow citizens.
Accordingly, within the attention economy theorized by these counsellors
and consultants, each individual became responsible for investing her
39 Davenport and Beck, The Attention

Economy, p. 11.
responsibility for yourself: Judge

Judy and the neoliberal citizen, in
Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette
(eds), Reality TV: Remaking
Television Culture (New York, NY:
New York University Press, 2004),
p. 234; Barbara Cruikshank,
Revolutions within: selfgovernment and self-esteem, in
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and
Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and
Political Reason: Liberalism,
Neoliberalism and Rationalities of
Government (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1996). See also
Rose, Powers of Freedom,
pp. 16064.
41 Davenport and Beck, The Attention

Economy, pp. 88, 91.
simply record the program, watch the first 10 minutes, fast-forward

through the middle 40 (stopping to watch anything that looks particularly
233
40 Laurie Ouellette, Take
attention wisely, lest her poor decisions compromise her self-reliance and
ability to take care of her own familys welfare.
Conversely, those individuals who became successful investors of
[their] own attention portfolios stood to enrich themselves and the
members of their professional and social networks. As Davenport and Beck
proposed, The payoff for allocating my attention in a specific direction can
be great I can learn something, change something for the better, fix whats
broken, or gratify another human being.39 Equally, successful attention
investors stood to insulate themselves from risks that might arise as a result
of neoliberalisms progressive dismantlement of the welfare states social
safety net through privatization and deregulation. The individual who
invested her attention wisely could expect to learn more, earn more, do more
and achieve more, as she would be less distracted, less prone to making
errors on the job and less at risk of being caught off guard by illness,
economic volatility or errors caused by the distractedness of others. Laurie
Ouellette notes that self-help is a cultural manifestation of neoliberalism
that encourages [people] to evaluate and act on themselves so that the
social workers, medical establishment and police do not have to.40
Similarly, the attention management advice offered by websites such as
Lifehacker.com and 43Folders.com, or in books such as The Attention
Economy and David Allens Getting Things Done, offered people practical
tips on how to evaluate and act upon the various inputs vying for their
attention so as to increase their productivity and reduce their vulnerability to
the contingencies of life under neoliberalism.
DVRs performed a number of functions within these personal attention
management programmes. Because they could be programmed to find and
automatically record content that met user-defined criteria, the devices were
well suited to filtering the vast volumes of programming available to many
US viewers. Commentators identified this feature as a powerful means of
defending ones attention from the profligate activity of channel surfing. For
instance, in the context of a discussion of email-filtering software, caller ID
systems and other technologies for managing attention in the workplace,
Davenport and Beck singled out TiVos DVRs as being smart attention
investments: following an initial outlay of attention on training a TiVo to
recognize his preferences, a viewer stood to reap considerable attention
dividends by allowing his DVRs to automatically record worthwhile
programmes on his behalf, thereby eliminating the attention wasted on
seeking out suitable content.41 Other advisors advocated using DVRs to
streamline viewing. In a suggestion highly reminiscent of Esquires
instructions to watch television faster, Leo Laporte and Gareth Branwyn
recommended using DVRs to skip past intros, setups, tired action
sequences in movies or other uninteresting parts in the programming
they viewed. As opposed to watching television programmes from start to
finish, Laporte and Branwyn suggested that viewers
42 Laporte and Branwyn, Leo Laportes

Guide to TiVo (Indianapolis, IN: Que,
2004), pp. 64, 8990.
efficiency: convergence television

and the digital short, in James
Bennett and Nikki Strange (eds),
Television as Digital Media
(Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011), p. 204.
44 May Wong, Find educational

childrens programs through TiVo,
USA Today, 14 March 2006, <http:
//www.usatoday.com/tech/
products/services/2006-03-14-tivoeducational_x.htm> accessed 30
March 2014.
45 The TV Boss, <http://www.

thetvboss.org/> accessed 30
March 2014 (emphasis added).
It is unclear from this excerpt how Laporte and Branwyn are defining a
satisfying viewing experience. On the one hand, it is possible that the
authors refer here to the pleasures viewers derive from an enjoyable
television programme. In this interpretation, the DVR would offer a means
of multiplying these textual pleasures by enabling viewers to watch more
television in less time. On the other hand, based on the context in which
these comments appeared, it seems far more likely that the sense of
satisfaction to which they refer does not derive from the viewers enjoyment
of a particular programme, but rather from an awareness of the time and
attention she has conserved by watching in fast-forward. Their strategy hints
at a new way of relating to and judging televisions texts, in which
programmes are evaluated not only in terms of their narratives,
performances, production values or style but in relation to their duration,
pacing and amenability to viewers attention budgets.43 This new aesthetic
is also detectable in the Esquire article. According to Esquires calculations,
at a duration of ninety minutes, Saturday Night Live is a waste of its
audiences time. Reduced to eleven minutes by a viewer who uses his TiVo
to skip over advertisements and fast-forward through credits, annoying
sketches and lip-synched music performances, the same show becomes a
worthwhile expenditure of his time and attention.
If tips such as these outlined ways that viewers could protect and focus
their own attention during their leisure time, others suggested ways that they
might use DVRs to do the same for other members of their family. From the
start, DVR manufacturers promoted their products as parenting aids that
would allow parents to manage their childrens television viewing. TiVo,
for instance, incorporated software into its products that allowed parents to
limit the channels their children could access, to filter programmes based on
the recommendations of various media watchdog organizations (including
the Parents Television Council, Parents Choice Foundation and Common
Sense Media) and to automatically record childrens educational
programmes.44 Non-profit groups, corporate lobbying organizations and
independent parenting experts took note of these capabilities and offered
tutelage in how to use DVRs to monitor and manage childrens attention
investments. Many of these resources echoed the guidance offered by
attention economy self-help tracts. TheTVBoss.org, a website funded by
the Ad Council (Madison Avenues non-profit clearinghouse for public
service announcements) greeted visitors with the following salutation:
Youre the boss of what your kids watch. Make the rules. Know the ratings.
Use parental controls. Elsewhere TheTVBoss.org elaborated on the
philosophy behind these monitoring technologies: Todays hot topic is
media management not elimination, and this means balancing televisions
advantages with other activities, and helping your child get involved in
making good TV decisions.45 To help parents equip themselves and their
234
43 See Max Dawson, The aesthetic of
interesting), and then watch the last 10. Youll be amazed how many
shows you can watch this way and still feel like youre getting a satisfying
viewing experience.42
seal of approval to TiVo KidZone,

PTC, 11 October 2006, <http://
www.parentstv.org/ptc/news/
release/2006/1011.asp> accessed
30 March 2014.
47 John Eggerton, FCCs McDowell
warns broadcaster about Sirius
argument, Broadcasting and Cable,
1 March 2007, <http://www.
broadcastingcable.com/article/
107952-FCC_s_McDowell_
Warns_Broadcasters_About_
Sirius_Argument.php> accessed
30 March 2014.
48 Wong, Find educational childrens
programs through TiVo.
49 Lawrie Mifflin, TV industry vows

fight to protect new ratings plan,
New York Times, 13 December
1996, p. A1. It is worth noting that
the V-Chips introduction did little to
curb the FCCs involvement in
policing broadcast indecency. Since
the V-Chip became mandatory in
2000, indecency fines have
skyrocketed, peaking at $7.7 million
in 2004.
50 David Morley, Media, Modernity
and Technology: the Geography of
the New (London: Routledge, 2007),
p. 207.
51 Rose, Powers of Freedom, pp. 215,
164.
235
46 See PTC awards entertainment
children to make good TV decisions, TVBoss recommended using DVRs

to assemble a library of family-friendly programming, and to timeshift
programmes with adult themes for viewing when children are away from
home or in bed. Other advisors offered similar tips: the Center on Media
and Child Health advised parents to use their DVRs to schedule their
childrens viewing around homework and extracurricular activities,
thereby teaching them to include television viewing into their lives in a
healthier way. It also recommended that parents use DVRs to screen out
advertisements for unhealthy snack foods, suggesting that by doing so
parents might reduce the effects of television on childrens obesity.
The DVRs uses as a parenting tool earned the technology the
endorsement of parenting groups, media literacy foundations, religious
organizations and US policymakers.46 Republican FCC Commissioner
Robert McDowell singled out TiVos parental monitoring software, TiVo
KidZone, as an example of how new technologies were empowering
parents to control their kids TV viewing.47 Representative Fred Upton,
Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications
and the Internet, also offered strong praise for TiVo. Referencing federal
legislation that requires broadcasters to set aside a small portion of their
weekly programming offerings for family-friendly fare, Upton called
TiVos parental monitoring feature a major breakthrough of technology
through public and private cooperation [that] directly addresses the goals
that Congress and the FCC had when they created the childrens Educational
and Informational programming category.48 Uptons comments linked the
DVR to another parental monitoring technology endorsed by US
policymakers during the 1990s and early 2000s: the V-chip. As part of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, policymakers charged the US
broadcasting industry with the task of devising a ratings system for its
programming, and stipulated that from 2000, every new television receiver
sold with a screen larger than thirteen inches must include parental
monitoring features. Bipartisan supporters of this portion of the Act framed
it as deputizing parents to regulate television content on a household-byhousehold basis, thereby freeing the FCC to pursue more important matters,
such as the ongoing deregulation of broadcast licensing policy.49
Chiming with neoliberal policymakers telecommunications reform
agenda, the prospect of using DVRs to monitor and manage childrens
viewing also resonated with neoliberal conceptions of the nuclear family as
a kind of private enterprise in its own right. As David Morley has noted, in
many western countries families increasingly see themselves and their
problems in the terms of management theory, and go about solving these
problems by adopting technologies, strategies and mindsets originally
developed for use in the business world.50 Neoliberal policies and
policymakers encourage citizenconsumers to regard their families as a
commercial enterprise, whose foremost function is to maximize the return
they can earn on the investment of their members human capital.51 This
entrepreneurial mindset is further reinforced by advice from physicians,
counsellors, therapists, educational experts and media personalities, as well
52 Ibid.
54 Eric A. Taub, How do I love thee,

TiVo?, New York Times, 18 March
2004, p. G1.
Before we got the TiVo, my son was getting Cs and Ds in school

because he was staying up late to watch his shows and going to school
half-awake. Now we watch TV together as a family after dinner. And
my son even has enough time to get a job. So its improved his sense of the
value of time. And its improved my relationship with him.54
In this and other accounts of the DVRs utility as a parenting tool, family
unity was routinely equated with family productivity. By using a DVR to
manage his sons television viewing, the father in this story strengthened the
family unit and instilled in his child an awareness of the importance of
disciplined self-enterprise. In doing so, he fulfilled his own obligations as
the manager of this family business: to ensure that his son became a
productive and contributing member of society. The business-like family
that invests its human capital effectively is equipped to thrive in an attention
economy in which television, but also the internet, computer games and
mobile devices, threaten to fragment individuals attention and devalue
their human capital. It is also a family that is self-sufficient: in this particular
instance, the acquisition of a DVR obviated the need for the father to rely on
outsiders (teachers, guidance counselors, truant officers or law enforcement
officials) as he carried out his parental duties.
Like many of the texts referred to in this essay, the New York Times article
recapitulated the commonplace assertion that the time and attention freed up
by DVRs could easily be reinvested in more productive activities such as
studying, taking a part-time job and family viewing. As indicated above,
236
53 The TV Boss.
as non-profit organizations. These experts supply the constituencies they

serve with practical advice on how to rationalize the households productive
and reproductive functions, with the understanding that by doing so, family
managers do their part to make their families self-sufficient and capable of
dealing with the contingencies that may arise in neoliberalisms thoroughly
privatized public sphere.52
Within this framework, parenting is reimagined as a personnel issue. As
the managers of their families, it is parents job to monitor and manage
their childrens activities (and attention expenditures) so that they may grow
up to become, in the words of TVBoss, happy, healthy, and productive
adults.53 If the neoliberal conception of the family designates parents as
domestic managers, children occupy a much more ambiguous position in
this formulation, somewhere between that of the employees that domestic
managers supervise and the commodities that these family businesses
produce. This ambiguity is borne out by press coverage of the DVRs impact
on family viewing. In the early 2000s media reports related stories about
parents who put into practice the sorts of strategies outlined by, among
others, TVBoss and the Center on Media and Child Health, and had taken
more active roles in administering their childrens media diets. For example,
a 2004 New York Times article told of a single father who used a DVR to
teach his son valuable life lessons about time management and hard work,
and therefore provided his son with the means of capitalizing on his own
productive capacities:
55 Christine Rosen, The age of

egocasting, The New Atlantis, no.
7 (200405), pp. 5172.
56 Haughey, 2000s: the decade of the

DVR.
p. G1.
58 See Gilder, Life After Television;

Max Dawson, The 800-pound
gorillas in the room: the mobile
phone and the future of television,
in Kelly Gates (ed.), Media Futures
(London: Blackwell, 2012).
59 I borrow the term evocative object
from Sherry Turkle, who uses it to
refer to artefacts that both provoke
and materialize thought. See Sherry
Turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects:
Things We Think With (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007).
237
57 Taub, How do I love thee, TiVo?,
this notion was the basis of many of the fantasies that surrounded the DVR in
its early the years. But while scores of self-help gurus, management
consultants, technology writers, bloggers and consumers enthusiastically
claimed that DVRs had given them their free time back, empirical research
conducted during this period indicated that many viewers watched more
rather than less television after purchasing a DVR.55 If, as these studies
suggest, DVR owners reinvest their reclaimed attention in watching more
television, they appear to do so reflexively, secure in the knowledge that, as
one blogger explained, although they may be watching more they also are
watching better.56 Another DVR owner offered a similar rationale to the
reporter from the New York Times, arguing that with a DVR You control
your TV, not the other way around. So the amount of TV you watch is not
even the question.57 These viewers explanations are suggestive of another
way that DVRs rationalize television. These devices consonance with (and
evocation of) neoliberal ideals of self-enterprise and personal
accountability absolves their users of any guilt they feel over investing their
time and attention in television.
For much of the last decade, self-help books, technical manuals,
websites, magazine articles, advertisements and countless other texts have
portrayed television as an obstacle that stands between enterprising
individuals and the heightened levels of flexibility, productivity and
happiness that neoliberal policymakers and ideologues argue are the
birthright of all self-sufficient, self-governing subjects. As I have
demonstrated, this conception of television is compatible with neoliberal
social ideals, as well as with the labour arrangements and lifestyles they
celebrate. It is similarly aligned with US policymakers conceptions of
televisions place within the nations economy and telecommunications
infrastructure. Policymakers on both the right and left have identified
television as an anachronistic and profligate medium that wastes another
precious resource the radio spectrum allocated to broadcasters for the
over-the-air transmission of television signals. Many of the
telecommunications policy initiatives of the last two decades, including the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, the 2009 digital television transition and
the Obama administrations national broadband plan, have been predicated
on the notion that on account of its wasteful use of spectrum, television
stands in the path of technological progress and economic expansion.58
Throughout this essay I have argued that this consonance between popular
fantasies about the DVRs capabilities, neoliberal social ideals and national
policy priorities is far from incidental. On the contrary, the DVR is an
evocative object in the sense suggested by Sherry Turkle.59 It is an artefact
that at once catalyzes, focalizes and materializes thought and debate about
topics such as information, subjectivity, citizenship and national priorities.
The history of the DVR is inseparable from the history of these ideas. Its
significance lies not simply in its impact on broadcasters profit margins or
audience members viewing habits, but rather in how it has made and
continues to make these abstract concepts concrete, comprehensible and
immediate for its users and non-users alike.

Dawson - Rationalizing Television in The USA

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dawson - Rationalizing Television in The USA

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

M A X D AW S O N

Screen 55:2 Summer 2014

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

Rationalizing television in the USA:

Bruce Stockler, A. J. Jacobs and

Gina Trapani, Favorite TiVo tricks,

Don Fernandez, A world made for

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

See, for instance, James Bennett

See, for instance, William Boddy,

2 (2002), pp. 23048.

Matt Haughey, 2000s: the decade

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

James Hay, Unaided virtues: the

Rose, Powers of Freedom,

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

Better Living Through Reality TV

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

10 Laurie Ouellette and James Hay,

11 Ibid., pp. 2930.

14 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

12 Ad report card: TiVos insurrection,

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995),

17 George Gilder, Life After Television:

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

16 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

were facilitated by new methods of asynchronous media distribution and

18 Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation:

Fast Company, no. 10 (1997), p. 83;

20 Peters, The brand called you, p. 83.

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

19 Tom Peters, The brand called you,

21 Amy Harmon, Skip-the-ads TV has

23 Robert W. McChesney, Media

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

22 Gilder, Life After Television, pp. 16,

DVR (emphasis added).

27 John Richardson, TiVo your way to

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

26 Haughey, 2000s: the decade of the

features also seemingly made television compatible with the neoliberal

30 See, for example, Paul Goodman,

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

Electronic Hearth: Creating an

Recommendations such as these reflect traditional hierarchies of cultural

35 See, for instance, Georg Simmel,

M. Przyblyski (eds), The NineteenthCentury Visual Culture Reader

37 Colin Gordon, Governmental

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

The metropolis and mental life, in

required individuals to constantly audit themselves and evaluate the

39 Davenport and Beck, The Attention

responsibility for yourself: Judge

41 Davenport and Beck, The Attention

simply record the program, watch the first 10 minutes, fast-forward

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Berkeley on October 19, 2015

40 Laurie Ouellette, Take

42 Laporte and Branwyn, Leo Laportes

efficiency: convergence television

44 May Wong, Find educational

45 The TV Boss, <http://www.