Research Report- 1. Theoretical context

With my project I'm examining the ways people use television and other potentially passive screen media. I don't mean to make cinema wholly distinct but for the purposes of my project any screen media in mass home and personal consumption I'm basically classifying under television. Cinema is defined not just by what you watch but how and where you see it, it's an active process to go out and see it. This idea doesn't extend to interactive media such as use of the internet and games either, purely for media where there's an already existing line of thought surrounding our passive or engaged status as an audiance. There is of course a existing perspective of what screen media can do, Alfred Hitchcock said "Watching a well-made film we don't sit by as spectators, we participate".

To explore this I turned to the use of the gaze and Laura Mulvey's exploration of Freud's ideas around Scopophilia. Mulvey's focus is on both the temporary loss of ego as watching the screen causes the viewer to forget themselves, as well as the pleasure derived from watching others. I'm looking to examine how on screen viewers also lose themselves in the act of watching and gain pleasure from it.  The act of losing yourself both embeds you as active in relation to the narratives presented and also potentially removes you from active critical judgment, it removes your distance from what you are watching by substituting pleasure. Is the active/passive debate as simple as we think?

As time has passed we've seen the benefits of this participation, as films and television play an important part in inspiring their own evolution, but in doing so build on each other instead of reality. References to classic cinema aren't just small in-jokes like a Charleton Heston movie playing in the background of 2011's Planet of the Apes, they're inherent to the way modern film and television occur. Even cutting edge television like Community or Black Mirror makes use of references both explicitly in the script and through aspects such as casting choices or style. Modern screen culture is essentially almost entirely self-referential, and the result is what Baudrillard referred to as hyperreality.