Get out of the lemon squeezer!
Conspicuous recycling, retro and yield thinking have left television in agony. No wonder more and more media consumers are turning away from the former leading medium with boredom.
Column Recycling, retro thinking and return on investment are leaving television in agony. It's no wonder that more and more media consumers are turning away from the former leading medium with boredom. What sounds like a ritual complaint about the annual depletion of the program in the summer months, when its makers react to the wanderlust of their viewers by repeating old films, is a sober finding. After all, the boredom that the screen radiates has long been more than just a seasonal phenomenon.
One indication of this is the media pages of the newspapers. For months, they have been dealing with mere garbage: the return of the old "Sportschau", the private and public activities of Dieter Bohlen or the pity-inducing nonsense of the Ostalgie shows are discussed for days and pages. Depending on the level of the paper, this is done either as simple PR for the trivial program product or in the gesture of the postmodern critic of the times, culture and media, who deciphers the lines of flight of social development from the last junk of popular culture. However, even such efforts provide nothing more than mere background noise for pseudo-events. It looks as if everything has been said, written and discussed at "media days" about TV content. This medium can obviously no longer trigger an exciting, critical discourse.
Not even Haim Saban's entry into the German television market caused a public stir. Even in the journalistic battlegrounds, from where rhetorical barrage against "media moguls" such as Leo Kirch or Rupert Murdoch came not so long ago, this step was only reported in sober protocol prose. The fact that television is a product that is subject to the same market laws as deodorant or baked goods no longer provokes anyone. No wonder that in the USA, the motherland of this idea, the last regulations are currently being removed.
TV coverage of the Iraq war has also made it clear that the core competence of visual information about dramatic current events attributed to it is an illusion. Even if thousands of camera eyes were watching the battlefield, it became increasingly puzzling as to what the "reality" of this war was. The promise of breaking through the propaganda facades with one's own presence was not kept. The only reliable thing that the many journalists knew how to report was a disillusioningly self-referential message: we are at the scene of the action, which we understand just as little as you do at home.
Media analyst Lutz Hachmeister recently pointed out that television entertainment programs have also lost their appeal: Broadcasters are relying on a safety program that only routinely varies once successful formats and concepts. The almost complete economization of the medium has long since blocked the desire for innovation. It is now only a matter of exploiting synergies, expanding brands and thereby binding the audience's attention to one's own program or its advertising.
But even here the limits have been reached: the International Consumer Electronics Fair has brought the news that the nightmare of commercial marketers will soon come true and viewers will finally be able to escape advertising messages with the help of technology.
The almost complete modernization of the medium, which has pushed its journalistic mission completely into the shadow of its economic function, is forcing us to rethink the revenue model and content profile of television. Those who have retained their optimism can only hope for this.
> Heribert Seifert is the media and culture correspondent of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Germany.
One indication of this is the media pages of the newspapers. For months, they have been dealing with mere garbage: the return of the old "Sportschau", the private and public activities of Dieter Bohlen or the pity-inducing nonsense of the Ostalgie shows are discussed for days and pages. Depending on the level of the paper, this is done either as simple PR for the trivial program product or in the gesture of the postmodern critic of the times, culture and media, who deciphers the lines of flight of social development from the last junk of popular culture. However, even such efforts provide nothing more than mere background noise for pseudo-events. It looks as if everything has been said, written and discussed at "media days" about TV content. This medium can obviously no longer trigger an exciting, critical discourse.
Not even Haim Saban's entry into the German television market caused a public stir. Even in the journalistic battlegrounds, from where rhetorical barrage against "media moguls" such as Leo Kirch or Rupert Murdoch came not so long ago, this step was only reported in sober protocol prose. The fact that television is a product that is subject to the same market laws as deodorant or baked goods no longer provokes anyone. No wonder that in the USA, the motherland of this idea, the last regulations are currently being removed.
TV coverage of the Iraq war has also made it clear that the core competence of visual information about dramatic current events attributed to it is an illusion. Even if thousands of camera eyes were watching the battlefield, it became increasingly puzzling as to what the "reality" of this war was. The promise of breaking through the propaganda facades with one's own presence was not kept. The only reliable thing that the many journalists knew how to report was a disillusioningly self-referential message: we are at the scene of the action, which we understand just as little as you do at home.
Media analyst Lutz Hachmeister recently pointed out that television entertainment programs have also lost their appeal: Broadcasters are relying on a safety program that only routinely varies once successful formats and concepts. The almost complete economization of the medium has long since blocked the desire for innovation. It is now only a matter of exploiting synergies, expanding brands and thereby binding the audience's attention to one's own program or its advertising.
But even here the limits have been reached: the International Consumer Electronics Fair has brought the news that the nightmare of commercial marketers will soon come true and viewers will finally be able to escape advertising messages with the help of technology.
The almost complete modernization of the medium, which has pushed its journalistic mission completely into the shadow of its economic function, is forcing us to rethink the revenue model and content profile of television. Those who have retained their optimism can only hope for this.
> Heribert Seifert is the media and culture correspondent of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Germany.
