ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we argue for an updated and materialist understanding of the concept flow as a means for examining how mobile media function to create free subjects amenable to neoliberal configurations of governance and capital. Raymond Williams first described flow in his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974/2003) as the televisual techniques used to maintain audiences’ attention to the television screen, at times for several consecutive hours. Williams was trying to understand how disparate television content (news, sports, movies, commercial advertisements, public service announcements, game shows, etc.) were made to seamlessly flow together almost as if working in narrative unison. This approach was ground breaking and Television has been said to be “the founding text of television studies” (Gripsrud, quoted in Williams 1974/2003), which reoriented scholarship away from “the content of television programs” toward “the shaping effect of television’s technological structures” (Turner, quoted in Williams, 1974/2003). Obviously, within these technological structures the flow of television content did matter, but content was merely an element in the complex of societal, technological, economic, and cultural forces that had integrated broadcasting into a new way of living that was both more private and more mobile. Over the past 35 years flow has been fruitfully applied periodically in television studies (Boddy, 2004, 2011; Hay, 2003; Kackman et al., 2011), the online journal FlowTV has taken its name from the concept (flowtv.org), and it has been given new meaning in the world of computer gaming and internet architecture where users are said to go into “flow-states” which keep them immersed in various sorts of virtual environments. In all of these accounts, flow acts as a metaphor of movement in which audiences are mentally or cognitively moved through media content, while their bodies remain fixed in space.
