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Chuck Tryon, ‘Make any room your TV room’: digital delivery and media mobility, Screen, Volume 53, Issue 3, Autumn 2012, Pages 287–300, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs020
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Abstract
As films and television shows are more commonly consumed on digital platforms, we need a more careful exploration of how the digital delivery of cinema is altering our notions of film spectatorship. In fact, media companies have begun to appropriate models of the active and engaged viewer in order to sell mobile technologies and platforms as offering greater freedom and control over how we watch. They do this by promoting the concept of ‘platform mobility’, which I define as the ability for media artefacts to move seamlessly between multiple platforms, so that a user can start watching a movie on one platform and finish it on another. Although it is difficult to measure how widely the tools of platform mobility are actually being used, I argue that the depiction of the empowered, mobile spectator has a powerful effect on the cultural imagination. While mobile technologies can be liberating, they must also be normalized and domesticated, often through advertising and other forms of promotional discourse. Thus, drawing from scholarship by Lynn Spigel, Charles Acland and Francesco Cassetti, this essay seeks to engage with what it means to think of mobility as a key term in thinking about spectatorship, especially in a historical era in which we are experiencing rapid media transition. To that end, this essay examines a wide range of media artefacts, including advertisements by cable television providers and interfaces for digital movie lockers, in order to consider how this promotional discourse is positioning the contemporary spectator.
