Blue Skies Again: Streamers and the Impossible Promise of Diversity
Kristen Warner explores the “illusion [of] the democratizing, diverse ideal of streaming.”...
The Streaming Symposium
IN HER 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood writes of her lonely times on the internet: “(There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.)” Incidentally, these two questions map onto the two dominant modes of streaming media coverage: doomy, rapid-fire industry news-items about big corporate fish being consumed by even bigger fish, and personal ruminations on our shortened attention spans and long media binges, particularly during lockdown.
This symposium seeks to use long-form criticism to fill the gaps around what we talk about when we talk about streaming. In the process, we have committed to pursuing a third way of thinking about the streaming landscape — a way that rejects the reactivity of media merger gossip and the passivity of mindless moving-image consumption. In their essays, writers Michelle Chihara, Jorge Cotte, Joshua Glick, Sun-ha Hong, Phillip Maciak, Michael Szalay, and Kristen Warner put media culture in historical and cultural context; detail the multisensorial and politically inflected aesthetics of streaming movies, television, podcasts, and fitness machines; analyze streaming practices as raced, gendered, sexed, and otherwise embodied; and interrogate our ideological ties to the data-driven narratives that share our air and live rent-free in our busy brains. This collection is not a response to Netflix’s breathless, try-hard demand to “see what’s next.” It has, instead, been our shared purpose to slow down — just enough to see what’s now.
— Annie Berke
Edited by Annie Berke, Michelle Chihara, Phillip Maciak, and Anna Shechtman
Blue Skies Again: Streamers and the Impossible Promise of Diversity
Kristen Warner explores the “illusion [of] the democratizing, diverse ideal of streaming.”...
The Appearance of Light: On Barry Jenkins’s “The Underground Railroad”
On “The Underground Railroad,” illumination travels across media, refracting and shapeshifting....
Strategic Audio: Podcasts, Propaganda, and the Fairy Tales of Data Mining
Michelle Chihara explores the podcast form as a vehicle for corporate puffery masquerading as journalistic inquiry....
Elizabeth Ito’s Neighborhood: “City of Ghosts” and the Rise of Netflix Animation
Phillip Maciak explores the extraordinary niche that “City of Ghosts” occupies in Netflix’s varied animated programming....
Antiseptic Glass Stream
Sun-ha Hong deconstructs the “paradox of intimacy and disconnection” at the heart of the Peloton fitness brand....
Streaming Enthusiasm and the Industrious Family Drama
Michael Szalay on what the rise of streaming platforms and their dark family dramas tell us about the US flagging empire....