For experience is […] a broadening and an identification, a passage from the particular to the universal, the experience [épreuve] of scission, of the finite, of the conditioned. It is voyage (Reise) and migration (Wanderung). Its essence is to throw the “same” into a dimension that will transform it. It is the movement of the “same” which, changing, finds itself to be “other.” (p. 44)

I thought of this passage when I read about the January 2nd deal to sell the U.S. cable station Current TV to the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera. I have a longstanding interest in how TV news translates foreign experience for viewers (see here and here): How do journalists explain to viewers how members of a foreign culture understand the world and their place in it? But what makes the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal interesting is it inverts that question: How might a foreign network explain Americans to themselves? Might Al Jazeera provide something like an “experience of the foreign” for Americans? What would that even look like?

A number of analysts have provided useful accounts of the deal and its implications. (Here’s what the New York Times had to say, and here’s the Columbia Journalism Review.) Current TV began in 2005, a creation of Al Gore’s. At first, it had a populist, DIY-inflected approach, and it solicited videos from viewers. It evolved in the following years, never finding much of an audience. Most recently, it tried to brand itself as a liberal news outlet, and in 2011, it hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. It fired him a year later, but the image stuck. When the Al Jazeera deal was announced, pundits on Fox News began to rave about links between liberals and Osama bin Laden, leading the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart to call the announcement the “first Fox boner alert of 2013.”

Al Jazeera, of course, is a network with a global reach that has so far failed to penetrate the US market. Al Jazeera English is currently available only in New York, Washington, DC, Burlington, VT, Toledo, OH, and Bristol, RI, for a total reach of just under 5 million viewers, although people can stream it online. What Al Jazeera gains in the deal with Current TV is not so much the network itself as access to its viewers. Current TV is available to about 40 million cable and satellite subscribers, although some cable operators dropped it after the deal with Al Jazeera was announced.

What makes the deal interesting to me is that Al Jazeera plans to launch Al Jazeera America instead of airing Al Jazeera English. Rather than focus on the majority world, as Al Jazeera English has done, Al Jazeera America will focus on domestic news, but from a perspective other than that of its major commercial competitors. As commentators like Danny Schechter argue, it could succeed precisely because it reaches viewers who don’t find themselves represented elsewhere:

An Al Jazeera America needs to plug in to and resonate with American sensibilities and our mix of opinion from A to Z, not just A to B. It needs to understand our country’s growing anger and frustration with such issues as inequality and dissatisfaction with posturing politicians of all political stripes.

In other words, Al Jazeera America’s “translation” might have a paradoxical effect: its “foreign” lens might bring into sharper relief distinctive (and distinctively) American perspectives that are absent from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even NPR.

Of course, I’m not sure Al Jazeera America is the right network or the only network to provide a foreign lens for Americans to examine themselves. And Matt Sienkiewicz is right to encourage a healthy skepticism where Al Jazeera’s claims are concerned. Nor am I so naive as to believe it will attract many viewers who aren’t already inclined to think outside of a “mainstream” American framework. But its potential to do something new will make it a very interesting network to watch.

* “Man” is the historically accurate term here — the Romantics were writing in the eighteenth century.

Occasionally media companies also organize these programs. Last week I attended Time Warner’s “College Professors Thought Leadership Seminar,” focused on media research, at their new Media Lab in New York City. Presenters included vice presidents of media research from Turner, HBO, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and Time.

Halfway through the program, our MC announced that much of the research material is “proprietary” and should not be “shared” publicly. His comment shows the tension within the media industry between promotion on the one hand, and control on the other. For TW, educational aims don’t square perfectly with competitive aims. Of course I feel no such conflict.

The presenters emphasized TW’s commitment to “innovation” and “unparalleled passion for storytelling.” But they confessed also to an interest in “bolstering the ecosystem,” which eventually emerged as their main objective. In fact TW’s chief innovative strategy is TV Everywhere, the plan to restrict online program access to subscribers to cable and satellite video services. And what recommends it to company executives is precisely its supposed ability to “extend an existing successful business model” and discourage “cord cutting” (i.e., canceling multichannel video subscriptions). The industry’s dogged, perhaps panicked, insistence that its business model will survive social and technological change was one of the most instructive features of the seminar.

The Turner VP presented studies from 2008 and 2010 “proving” that audiences will sit through as many ads in online video as in linear television (non-timeshifted viewing). In these studies, more ad interruptions did not lower the viewing rate. When I suggested these studies predated the rise of Netflix, an ad-free streaming option, this executive remained serene. Audiences won’t change, he insisted, and everybody in the industry is “happy” with the interrupting ad model. I am skeptical, however, that the audience will share the industry’s contentment.

The HBO representative bemoaned his company’s lack of access to customer information, which is held by multichannel video providers (cable operators, DBS, telcos). HBO depends on those providers for marketing HBO subscriptions and so is reluctant to break from that “ecosystem,” despite evidence that there may be a market for freestanding OTT (over-the-top or streaming) HBO GO subscriptions. That HBO is reluctant to break from its providers, despite being well positioned to compete with Netflix in the OTT “space,” indicates the depth of resistance in the cable industry to such a possibility.

Famed media researcher Betsy Frank presented a biometric study in which participants wore belts measuring heart rate and respiration, and glasses with tiny POV cameras. While the study demonstrated the fragmented attention spans of “digital natives,” it left open the question of whether sustained attentiveness is a consequence of the technology used or the maturity of the users. Every media shift has produced hand-wringing over youthful attention spans; is multi-platforming a new behavior or just a newly measurable behavior?

Warner Bros., one of the largest television program production companies, also syndicates programs to local broadcast stations and cable networks. Such programs include off-network shows, such as reruns of Friends and Big Bang Theory, and first-run shows, such as Ellen and TMZ. This presenter explained that “syndication” is an old media term: they have renamed themselves “WB Branded Networks” because they offer, along with the usual episodes and 30-second spots, the opportunity to integrate advertising into these programs using three strategies. When, say, clips of Big Bang characters eating hamburgers are wrapped around a commercial for Burger King, we have “contextualization.” When a week of episodes is “themed” around an advertiser, we have a “brand takeover.” When the ad is integrated directly into the program, we have “branded entertainment.” Ellen DeGeneres, for example, promoted Ore-Ida sweet potato fries during her talk show not only with an ironic, Arthur Godfrey-inspired pitch, but also with a tongue-in-cheek dance routine using dancers costumed as giant sweet potato fries:

Integrations are as old as broadcasting itself. The inspiration for the Ellen integration is probably this 1952 example for Old Gold cigarettes:

But the Ellen integration relies on irony to disarm audience resistance to the shill.

Much more can be said about TW’s seminar, but I hope I have inspired some readers to take advantage of these industry programs. While TW may expect educators to follow its “thought leadership,” in fact industry programs give us the opportunity to develop our own informed critiques of media industry strategies.