El Otro en tanto que Otro.(SIGNIFICACIÓN)

The double possibility offered by the anthology form of narrowing and building appeals to another interesting concept: that of scalability. In order to discuss this complex, abstract concept

in the context of platform studies, I shall introduce a theoretical and methodological framework that I will develop further in the next chapter in application to the study of anthology series as databases. I start from the observation that, on digital platforms, anthology series generate lists, streams of content and ultimately organized databases, which operate as orienting maps for future recommendation and viewing. This anthological cycle activates starting from production and it it brought to the fore during the online distribution and consumption phase. In computer science, the notion of database has been discussed under several lenses, either considering archival and storage techniques, or the organizational structures (relational, networked) behind them. When translating this notion into Media Studies, Lev Manovich notes that “as a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative cre-ates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.” (Manovich 1999: 87) I argue that the antholo-gy functions as a mechanism of abstraction of narratives, by treating them as blocks of data and transferring them into a database system, thus bypassing the incompatibility stressed by Manovich between database and narratives. This is due to the fact that the anthology typically provides first and foremost a scheme, an abstract model, a form for conveying, organizing and displaying content, as I suggested earlier in this chapter (see paragraph 2.1).

Beyond the systemic perspective layered out by the metaphor of database-anthologies, on which I will return later on in the present dissertation, this term serves as a means for understand-ing certain properties that the anthology form shares with databases, and notably scalability, availability and elasticity. Structural scalability refers to the capability of a network, system or

process “to expand in a chosen dimension without major modifications to its architecture” and the overall “ability not only to function well in the rescaled situation, but to actually take full ad-vantage of it.” (Bondi 2000: 195) Given a growing amount of content, an anthology series can be defined scalable since it is able to handle and tolerate an increasing load of content thanks to its architectural characteristics. Structurally, anthologies can be subjected to vertical scaling and scaled up by adding resources - i.e. a new season can be added without changing the information architecture of the series. Scaling down would be equally possible - one could simply take away a season without affecting the remaining narrative content of the anthology -, but not desirable nor beneficial in terms of platform economy. Moreover, due to their fluid nature as previously dis-cussed, contemporary anthology series, in contrast with early anthology series, allow for horizon-tal scaling via the addition of nodes (i.e. another episode or season based on the same story) to the existing narrative ecosystem. In other words, stand-alone stories in anthology series can be expanded as we can see in the series Easy, which I already mentioned as an example of open-end anthology that groups episodes by adding more to the same plot without a formal ordering in the seasonal division (the same plot can be found in episodes from different seasons). The idea of organizing narrative content as per main themes, or around characters and situations contributes to this particular use of the anthology as a scalable object. Indeed, scalability can also be found in longer forms of serial storytelling, such as sit-coms, and yet such content cannot be scaled down as effectively as short serial forms, for their innate tendency to always postpone the ending (see paragraph 2.4.1.).

Anthology series favor in a way space scalability as well: given their short form, they can easily be moved to a range of different devices and platform environments, adapting to

transme-dia movements and dynamics of metransme-dia convergence if needed. Finally, time in anthology is an-other scalable element: the small-bite scheme, which can also be extended to a long marathon-viewing session, makes them so that they can easily adapt to personal marathon-viewing habits and time constraints on a reception level, given nowadays freedom in managing leisure time for watching specific television content at different hours and lengths. This implies a resilience and modularity of both form and content, as in the ability observed in the anthology form to face changes and upgrades in the media environment, without impacting users’ access to the database/narrative content. Together with numerical representation, automation, variability and transcoding, modu-larity is one of the five “principles of new media” identified by Lev Manovich “not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization.” (Manovich 2001:

27) In the context of a modular structure inherent to the World Wide Web, modularity is the key component of a digital, interactive environment. Anthology series implement the principles of modularity and variability by favoring their adaptation to a such a non-linear, fractal structure made of “collections of discrete samples.” and “self-sufficient modules” (Manovich 2001:

51-52). Such modules can act independently or together, with disparate outcomes in the way they can make culture and meaning.

Of course, when talking about actual databases in the computing or mathematical sense of the term, such properties assume measurable values, which are not identifiable as easily when discussing database in a Cultural Studies-oriented perspective. However, even if we were to adopt the database framework as a simple metaphor, it would be a coherent attempt to test not only the anthological model, but also the anthological extensibility (Doueihi 2009: 11) of certain televisual forms available on online libraries, in dialogue with both platform economy (Kenney

and Zysman 2016) and an economics of nostalgia. In fact, such attributes of anthologies, that is the way they are scalable, modular and variable in that their distinct elements can be combined and assembled while retaining independence, turn out to be similar in nature to those of structural computer programming standards of the 1970s (Manovich 2001: 31). In line with technological advancements that eventually led to the Semantic Web, a web of data, principles of scalability, modularity, variability therefore show that the anthology form serves the purpose, on the one hand, of organizing content and information in digital platforms, but also, on the other hand, of making sense of such content by actively affecting cultural production, distribution and memory.

If language and narratives already operate at scale, the anthology form in internet-distributed television thus helps boosting this scaling paradigm found on the internet at large and feed into broader mechanisms related to content indexing on online platforms.