Flow/Fracture

Flow is undoubtedly an important aspect of our current construction of "television"; the sequence of seemingly unrelated events, each thrown one after another with no space marking the separation of the two events, nothing holding them apart, nothing that allows each segment to stand on its own in televisual form, or events interrupting and cutting into other events (such as commercials placed in breaks between scenes of a television show or segments of a newscast). But the flow is only one element of the current televisual landscape, as it only takes into account time, that is, the way segments are located in relation to one another temporally. It does not take into account the instantaneous, the nature of a single segment, or more specifically, a single moment/image within that segment.
But what interests me about the instantaneous image does not lie in any sort of wholeness or purity; it is rather that, like the continuity of television, the single image (for the purposes of this argument, the image referred to here (the complete image projected by a television screen, whose boundaries are the edges of the box) will be from here on out referred to as "screen") is fractured into multiple. Each screen contains multiple images, multiple frames and boundaries that take up separate sections of the screen and are meant to convey separate sets of information. Yet, unlike flow, the fact that all these images are being throw at us at a single moment in time means that we cannot attempt to separate the groups of information and process them separately; we must either read a connection between each individual fracture or process them separately of one another.
The coverage of 9/11 provides a very simple example, yet one that is incredibly important to understanding television: the display of a station logo, a sort of "watermark," while "live" footage of "breaking news" plays behind. This "watermark" is the most common fracture; almost any program watched on a network or cable station will be broken by the station logo displayed transparently in one of the corners of the screen. It prevents you from ignoring the economic foundation of the television industry; no matter what you watch, you're always choosing one particular network, one brand over the others. The "watermark" serves both as a way to impose the myth of network branding upon the viewers, and also "mark" recorded video, clearly identifying bootleg copies and holding them captive within the framework of television; there is no way to access the "pure" program (without, of course, buying a copy of the work from the same company, which, by forcing you to repurchase media, forces you to give in to the myth of the network brand in the extend of the capitalistic system such that the watermark is no longer necessary).
There is one other fracture present at the beginning of the 9/11 footage: that of the headline: "BREAKING NEWS: WORLD TRADE CENTERS COLLAPSE". This element refers directly to the "live" image being displayed on screen, and both provides an interpretation and understanding for those already watching as well as immediately informing those just tuning in the nature of the situation being covered. While both these roles/acts seem different, there is one key similarity: the giving of interpretative powers from the audience to the network. While this first headline portrays something very factually, the headline eventually transforms into "AMERICA UNDER ATTACK", with the lines boxing off the fracture transforming into an American flag waving in the wind. In this case, the headline has been transformed by the network's ideology; it has been mythologized; it alters and transforms the viewer's interpretation of the "live." While this mythologizing does not fully stem from the network (in this case, the revelation of the terrorist nature of the attacks had become apparent, and the government had released briefs and reports detailing the attacks as mythologizing them as such), the power of the fracture to alter the interpretation of the live is something that is clearly dangerous. While I do not mean to insinuate that the 9/11 attacks were not, in fact, an "attack on America" (I'm not a 'truther' and do not take 'truthers' incredibly seriously), I am very against the Patriot Act, which was passed in the aftermath of 9/11 and was very much helped by some of the mythologizing that occured on the day itself, and am also against the Iraq War, which the Bush administration was able to force authorization of partially through the creation of a myth surrounding Iraq with the manipulation of fracturing and flow. The destruction/restruction of said methods is nowhere near as clear cut as the alternative cinemas of multiple writers, due to the determinance of the capitalist system in the creation and commodification of televisual networks; while some cable channels are able to offer alternative representations and interpretations of the news (see Current), they have nowhere near the same reach as mainstream networks. Also, even networks like Current, as well as "Internet television," seem to depend upon use of fracturing and flow to convey information, holding the same possibilities as mainstream television news.