Page 36 [36]
OCR
Part I. Interdisciplinary Approach to Storytelling | 35 With the advent and spread of VHS and then DVD technology and thematic cable television, time-independent television viewing became possible. Fans could watch cult films and series at any time and watch multiple episodes at a time. The ratings of channels and their shows have declined, and at the same time, viewers have sought series with more complex narratives (Mittel, 2006). Viewers no longer appear to enjoy being distracted by commercials in their reception of narratives. Uninterrupted quality storytelling existed only through public service broadcasting in Europe and subscription channels in the US. Since the turn of the millennium, US content providers (first HBO and later Netflix) have become globally available, allowing unlimited and uninterrupted access to film narration. These providers owe their success and hence their economic profit to their viewers’ insatiable hunger for stories. High-concept series are characterized by a basic plot that becomes more complicated from episode to episode, but each episode also has its own storyworld. Series build their episodes according to their own narrative logic, but Mittel (2006) notes that they can deviate from this logic in the plot or in the time management of individual episodes by means of so-called narrative spectacles in order to maintain the attention and long-term engagement of the viewer who follows the logic of the series structure. 3.2 The Medium is the Message Among media theories, media narratology should be highlighted as a subdiscipline which examines the structure of media narratives and analyzes them with the approaches and assumptions of media theories. McLuhan’s (1962) maxim “The medium is the message” conveys the notion that the technology and communication conventions of the medium determine the content and message of the narrative, and also that the content and the medium itself are always the shapers of socio-cultural dialogues. A narrative has a different message when viewed in the form of a comic strip, a radio play, a series, a blog post or a film. Since the medium itself and the media narrative cannot be separated, the communication clichés of the medium, its role in society and its target group need to be examined. Technical media have a mediating function, and since the printing of books, all narratives communicated through external media are communicated through an interface. Since media are the means of information flow, including the transmission of narratives, the question arises as to what extent the interface influences the content. Do changing media really affect human culture and information transmission as McLuhan claimed? From the point of view of communication theory, one of the most fundamental questions is whether narrative-based knowledge transfer was orally or literally determined in each period. Theories based on cultural and technological approaches to history show a chronological arc from the
