Residues of the Televisual Family: Technological Allegory in the U.S. Family Drama, 2001–2023

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between media-technological change and transforming ideals of the family in the United States after 2001. Through technological allegories—storylines in which media technologies are narratively and stylistically central at various textual scales—contemporary family dramas make legible an abstract phenomenon: the residually televisual family. The residually televisual family refers to the social process whereby television declines and digital media ascends as the paradigmatic socio-technological context for the construction of family relationships and family norms. Fictional and nonfictional representations across media (print, television, and the Internet) and discourses (the media industries, television criticism, reportage, and policy) depict emergent and later dominant digital media technologies as assuming this authority over the conventionalization of family values. I argue this ultimately stems from the rise of pointcasting—a paradigm of audience address in which the industries algorithmically customize media content and advertisements to individuals modeled from web and application behavioral data, splicing up network TV/broadcasting’s audience, the national mass, and multichannel TV/narrowcasting’s audience, the market segment. Moreover, these dramas create relations of causation and correlation between such digital technological change and the family form. Specifically, contemporary family dramas on U.S. television suggest that digital media cause forms of social dysfunction at the levels of coupled intimacy, family togetherness, and national unity. By contrast, these dramas depict televisual media as holding the family, its metonyms, and metaphors in a sense of togetherness in televisual spaces like the living room. In this way, recent family dramas offer variations on an extensive ideological project in contemporary representation wherein television is assumed to be pro-familial and new media anti-social. Ultimately, these family dramas contribute to cultural understandings of the stakes of medium specificity today. If convergent media like smartphones remove the historically sedimented boundaries between media (i.e., television is seeing at a distance, and telephony is speaking at a distance), and if this removal of barriers between media is seen to cause dysfunction in the couple, family, and nation’s intimacies, then medium specificity does not pertain solely to what technological or aesthetic affordances define a medium. Medium specificity also entails how media technologies generate and sustain social relationships.