What is the role of media culture in my life and environment? What media artifact reflects my relationship with the dominant media culture in America? Those questions are as impossible to quantify in one artifact as is the concept of media culture itself. Currently that relationship for me is centered on the Internet. It is the ultimate series of tubes feeding me media [cult]ure day and night. How shall I count its ways? I considered writing about my daily date with digg.com. The resident army of diggers turns up the profane and the profound, most anything worth looking at on the Internet from the latest lolcat to articles advising the president on how to handle the Chinese on his next diplomatic trip to Beijing to the discovery of water on the moon. Through digg.com, I stay connected with a demographic of user whose Internet taste appeals to my own, though that is probably all that I have in common with this group mostly made up of twenty-something male iJunkies. They scour the Internet so I don’t have to.
A second candidate for my artifact of choice is 4chan.org. The website, too, represents a side of my relationship with contemporary media culture. I first encountered this fast-moving image board a couple of years ago while doing research on l33t. 4chan is a digital wild west where users can gather on a collection of scrolling discussion boards focusing on everything from health and fitness to hentai (look it up on Wikipedia, if you are curious and over 18). The most notorious of these boards is /b/, a churning cesspit of subversive irreverence and outrageously offensive content—and also the amazingly fertile hatching ground for next trendy meme you will be saying to all your friends any day now. Long before Nancy Pelosi put a Rickroll in her self-promotional You Tube video so she could look all hip and cool with everything happening on the Interwebs, /b/ had declared their original creation hopelessly over-exposed and therefore uncool. /b/ is also the sometime haunt of anonymous, for whom I have great admiration, especially when anonymous is rescuing abused cats or doing battle with evil cult mind control while wearing Guy Fawkes V for Vendetta masks. I go to the boards on 4chan so I can keep in touch with the bleeding edge of a particularly potent no-name brand of media culture. Wherever that may /b/.
Whatever it is now, my relationship with the media and its artifacts began long before the Internet was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. Like the so-called digital natives today, I was born into a media environment markedly different from the one occupied by my parents. I was one of the original TV-generation kids—we who never knew the world except through lens of that flickering screen in the living room. TV showed us hillbillies with cement ponds in Beverly Hills, horse-drawn caissons for a dead president, crazy castaways on a three-hour tour that lasted three years, and dusty silvered human footprints on the moon. I loved TV.
My family had a big black and white Zenith console equipped with ‘Space Command’—a tuning-fork style push-button remote control! Now my dad could change his own channels, instead of making me get up and do it for him. TV culture was a major part of my life in those days. Each September when the networks began to trumpet their new shows for the year, I memorized the primetime schedules for the big three in advance of the premier dates so I would know exactly want I wanted to watch from the new television season. I fondly remember my mother’s birthday gift to me the day I turned thirteen: my very own portable nine-inch black-and-white TV made by the Singer Company of sewing machine fame. In 1967 not many young teens could boast having a personal TV set. I was as proud as the NBC peacock. Now I could watch what I wanted to see instead of being at the mercy of a communal set. And what I wanted to watch more than anything else were the voyages of the starship Enterprise. I lived and breathed Star Trek, always on the lookout for print articles about its cast or characters. One source, TV Guide, proved a gold mine. This fifteen-cent digest of everything television featured profiles of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and even a 1967 Isaac Asimov article entitled “Mr. Spock is Dreamy,” in which Asimov explains the sex appeal of a well-developed intellect to those who couldn’t understand why teenage girls like me were so fascinated with the stoic alien genius from the planet Vulcan.
Which brings me to my true and final choice for an artifact that epitomizes my relationship to media culture. Rather, it is approximately twenty-one variously sized boxes of artifact: my thirty-eight-year collection of TV Guide magazines that spans from 1967 through 2005. Yes, I have every issue, except for one or two that failed to catch up when my husband and I were moving back and forth across the continent several times during the late 70s and early 80s. I began saving issues of TV Guide as a teenager because I enjoyed archiving my interests. These (initially) inexpensive little magazines were tangible records of TV’s ephemeral images. (There were no video recorders in those days. You were completely at the mercy of the network programmers and summer reruns.) I could thumb the pages of my TV Guides, read the pithy program listings, and remember: “Kirk clashes with a 20th century tyrant revived from suspended animation. Kahn, who once ruled a quarter of the earth, now plans to conquer the cosmos.”
As a physical artifact of media culture, a single issue of TV Guide was lightweight in those early days. Our region of the Midwest had only five TV channels to choose from; a week’s schedule plus a few gossipy articles about the stars and shows didn’t take many pages. After two or three years of collecting, I had only half a shelf of magazines. Not even enough to fill a box yet. Later, when cable TV listings bulked up the magazine’s girth, the sheer volume of my collection made my decades of magazines impossible to display. I had to resort to keeping them in boxes in the garage. I never imagined I would still be collecting TV Guides nearly forty years after I saved my first copy, but I was. I kept on saving my weekly editions until the collection itself became the reason for continuing. The capstone of my collection is the magazine’s April 20-26, 2002 edition, which was issued as a set of thirty-five different covers, each featuring a Star Trekseries character from one of the franchise’s permutations.
I collected my last TV Guide in 2005 when the publishers abandoned the magazine’s traditional digest format in an effort to save it from extinction. In the 70sTV Guide had enjoyed a circulation of close to 20,000,000, but the 21st century saw its sales drop by two-thirds. On-screen program listings had made TV Guide’s pre-cable usefulness obsolete. I saw this change in the magazine as the end of an era and a signal that my collection was complete. The fading of TV Guide’s primacy as the source for information about what to consume from the media cornucopia reflects my own shift away from television towards cyberspace. I still watch TV of course, but not with the devotion I once did. Its window on the world has opened up into immersive connection with what’s-out-there at the click of my mouse finger. Its passive viewerscape has given way to Web 2.0 and the power to participate in creating my media experience.
Despite the fact that my thirty-eight year collection of TV Guides currently sits taped in cardboard and stowed under a workbench, I consider this ‘artifact’ a defining media connection for me. Its span covers most of my life. Its content is the media memory to which I tie many of my experiences. The media culture represented in four decades of TV Guides was an ever-moving forward edge of American life. I wanted a piece of it then, and I still do.