Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Kaitlin Forcier, Assistant Professor, English, “Stream, Flow, River: The Endless Visual Pleasures of Amazon Prime”

This talk offers a media theory of streaming platforms through an examination of Amazon Prime. Embedded within a retail environment, much like the multiplex cinemas attached to shopping malls in millenial America, Prime Video is in some ways a continuation of the longstanding association between the transporting spectacle of window shopping and the pleasures of television or cinema. Yet with streaming video, televisual flow - as Raymond Williams described the continuous stream of television programming - is transformed. The popular notion of affective flow - a state of interactive absorption described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - has been embraced by contemporary interface designers and platforms such as Amazon. This talk considers the ways in which the intertwining of circulation, absorption, and moving images on the Amazon streaming platform diverges from its now-defunct predecessors: television and the shopping mall. Inextricable from the online retailer’s “all-you-can-eat” express shipping service, Amazon Prime Video is emblematic of how streaming platforms structure media consumption as endless.

Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. An interdisciplinary media theorist, she researches and teaches on the visual culture of the digital age. Her first book project, “The Infinite Aesthetic,” analyzes iteration and endlessness in digital media and art, from the 1960s to today, as it intersects with the expansionist logics of new modes of capitalism. Her research has appeared in The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Afterimage, and Media-N. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley.

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