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Archives: television
April 9, 2012
Watching the Internet: An Interview with Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo (Part Two)
I don't believe the Long Tail exists, neither socially nor economically. The Net has permitted the emergence of a certain unsatisfied demand, but it is very small. The physical barriers to analogue distribution are greater on the Net. Added to that, the most difficult barriers to break down are the social, cultural and psychological ones. For example, World Cinema in the United States: before it was not possible to see these films because they weren't distributed, but even with the Net, the viewing of them has not increased. This is spite of them being free in many cases (P2P or Megaloud). Some have imagined that user-generated content will eventually displace commercial media content (seeing this either in terms of a liberation or a decline). Yet, you seem to be suggesting that different kinds of content will co-exist on the web for the foreseeable future. In such a world, what mechanisms will need to exist to help viewers find content which is meaningful and pleasurable to them? It is a Utopia. I think that the UGC will grow considerably in the next few years, but will coexist with professional content. The new viewer will be omnivorous but we can't generalize, it is necessary to distinguish. A film is not the same as an application for an iPhone or a poem. There is content which will greatly develop but it is difficult to imagine that USG will substitute professional content. This needs a large investment of capital which needs to be translated into income or corporate earnings.
Small subscription payments and advertising cannot sustain the current investment in content. It's impossible. The content should be more attractive to people to the point where they are willing to pay. I think we should maintain the neutrality of the Net and wait for innovations from the users and the logical evolution of the social networks. Facebook and Google set the standard. New business models will also appear with low profits and prices which are more attractive to users. But, advertising investment in the internet is still small and, added to that, all advertising which exists on the Net is not going to finance content (yellow pages).Much of the book is spent describing some of the risks that television content producers face in the digital era, yet you also identify some advantages of operating across these media platforms. What are some of them? The risk for the content producers is the difficulty they have in making money from the internet. The use of the internet is on the rise and the income from it is not increasing at the same rate. The advantages come from the fact that the net is a cheap and efficient system of distribution. It can unite producers and consumers and thereby exclude the intermediaries from the supply chain. I sometimes dream about millions of consumers in the world who can pay a little to watch a hit film, an episode of a series or to read a newspaper at a price which is much lower that what they are paying today. For the rest it could be free. This would be a good business for the producers. It is economy of scale.Throughout, you seem skeptical of some of the claims made for collective intelligence emerging via networked communications. Where do your reservations come from? For me it is very difficult to understand the concept of collective intelligence. The example of Wikipedia is usually given, but the management of the information demands time for it's organization and structuring. A company can do this much more efficiently than an army of net surfers. I am also not convinced by the idea of giving our individual know-how for free for the benefit of the collective. At the root of it is work. Although I also believe in the free-time productivity of the net users. We will see over the next few years how this matter develops.What do you see as the biggest threats to the hopes for the web remaining a more participatory medium than previous forms of broadcasting? The interests of traditional companies: media, Hollywood etc. This is a medium that they do not control and from which they do not obtain sufficient profit. They lose more than they earn (those who read the press on paper Vs those who read it digitally, a cinema goer Vs a net viewer). The most successful companies on the net are those which do not have content: Google, Facebook, iTunes, Amazon etc. Companies will try to question the neutrality of and to limit the freedom which exists on the net. The signing of the ACTA agreement by different countries is a clear signal of the danger. They are also going to defend the current system of control of content, that's to say, conventional distribution via different methods (cinema, video, cable, etc.). They are reluctant to release content using the new global distributors such as iTunes, Netflix, Facebook or Microsoft with the XBOX etc. Another big threat for the internet as a participatory medium is the privacy control of personal information on social networks. Also, the collection of data regarding people's surfing habits which other companies are interested in, in order to target their marketing campaigns, as the press highlighted days ago.
April 6, 2012
Watching the Internet: An Interview with Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo (Part One)This summer, I am embarking on an extraordinary adventure -- a 20 city lecture tour of Europe. I have been long overdue paying a visit to the Continent, not having visited there since Convergence Culture has been translated into a host of different languages, and this will be my chance to visit academics, public intellectuals, cultural leaders, and transmedia producers, and learn more about the ways these various nations have responded to the shifts in the media landscape which my works describe. I am excited at the prospect of meeting many new thinkers there. I am still struggling to decide how to deal with this blog while on this exhausting journey but in the long run, it should allow me to bring more perspectives to you. Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo, a professor of Audiovisual Communications at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, will be one of my many hosts on this trip, and he shared with me the English translation of one of his recent books, Watching the Internet: The Future of TV?, which takes up many of the issues we like to discuss through this blog. I asked him if he would be willing to do an interview and share some of his takes on the intersection between old and new media as seen from his perspective, as a veteran of the old media industries and as someone deeply immersed in a Spanish context.
I think there are two distinct, though closely related tendencies. On the one hand there is a tendency towards social individualism which is referred to by Lipovetsky, and on the other hand there is that which refers to the experience of the media. I think the first is indisputable, at least in Europe. "Close relationships" have diminished considerably in recent years (going to church or to the cinema on Sundays, chatting on public transport, talking every day to the person who sells you your newspaper or to the one who serves you coffee in the neighbourhood where you live etc.. There is a great demand to escape from "social control" or anonymity. With regard to television or the cinema I think there is also a trend towards individualism. The concept of the family sitting together in front of the television has disappeared and groups of friends who go to the cinema are doing so less frequently. Others, myself among them, argue that television viewing has in fact become more "socialized" as people respond to and debate what they are watching through formal and informal social networks. Would you agree? Yes, I agree in general terms as people are talking, expressing their opinions, debating and sharing much more than in the past. However, I also believe that television audiences have become much more fragmented in the last few years. The mass audiences of the past are more divided. Broadcasting vs narrowcasting. New digital divides are being created (in their use of the net), economic and social (between the rich and poor), generational (young people, the middle aged and elderly) and cultural (technophobes and technofiles). Inside every group, however, a larger socialisation has appeared. For example, television is more "collectivised" and the dreamed of interactivity of the past is starting to become reality. You write, "The social functions once fulfilled by TV are in crisis, while new ones have yet to be defined." Does this imply that television is in crisis? Should a medium survive if it has outlived its social functions? In Europe, yes. The television of the masses which emerged during the previous century to inform, teach and entertain and was controlled by the State has died. All of the public television stations are in crisis and commercial television, though highly competitive, is losing audiences and advertising. Young people are now deciding how to do these three things. That form of television is changing at the hands of the internet. The logic of demand is changing to the logic of choice. It is the viewer who decides what he wants to see.Is the "new television" television, and if so, how do we define this medium? Is watching a television series on Hulu television? Is watching a web series? What about playing a game on our television set? What defines the nature of this medium -- the content, the delivery technology, our modes of consumption, its social functions? This new concept will be created by all of us. But for me, what defines television is the content. When we watch an HBO series, we are watching television. It doesn't matter what screen we are watching it on or the type of telecommunication (cable, satellite, ADSL etc) .The day the internet produces content, things will change. We will then have to invent new concepts. Hulu will always be a joint venture.......
This has more to do with what the statistics say than with my opinion. Spain is the leader in pirating and, traditionally, a culture of sharing has not existed, to the point of defrauding the tax office being well looked upon. The Spanish are individualists, in contrast to what is usually supposed. However, I believe that little by little the UGC is catching on among young people, but more slowly than in other countries.
Global television for big events (sports, news programmes etc) will continue for a time and will coexist with regional and national television. The Net will complement and start to integrate with television. The internet offers a fascinating complementary opportunity.
I don't believe so. The global mainstream will be North American. It will be difficult for them to break into China but they will manage it in the end. My position is very similar to that of Frédéric Martel. We are moving towards "standardised diversity". We are not faced with a value system that wants to impose itself on the world, rather a "hydra" of companies that feed off each other and know how to adapt themselves to circumstances. The power of the USA on the net and in the production of content makes me think this. Without doubt, styles and vanguards from other cultures will be incorporated, just as happened during the 20th Century. The size of the American national market will help to provide high production costs which will make it very difficult for other cultures to compete.
November 30, 2011
The Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day Two) Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)
New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike? Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech) Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK), Steve Coulson (Campfire), Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic), and Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)
Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment? Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California) Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron), Gary Goldberger (FableVision) and John Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Moderator: Johnathan Taplin (University of Southern California) Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB); Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News), Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College) and Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)
The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation? Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University) Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)
November 28, 2011
Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day One)A few weeks ago, I made the trip back to Cambridge, MA to participate in the fifth iteration of the Futures of Entertainment conference. This conference emerged from the work we did at MIT through the Convergence Culture Consortium. The goal of the conference is to provide a meeting ground for forward thinking people in the creative industries and academia to talk with each other about the trends that are impacting how entertainment is produced, circulated, and engaged with. Through the years, the conference has developed its own community, which includes alums of the Comparative Media Studies Program who see the conference as a kind of homecoming, other academics who have found it a unique space to engage with contemporary practices and issues, and industry leaders, many of them former speakers, who return because it offers them a chance to think beyond the established wisdom within their own companies. Our goal is to create a space where academics do not read papers and industry folks don't present prospectus-laden powerpoints or talk about "take-aways" and "deliverables," but people engage honestly, critically, openly about topics of shared interest. Read by these criteria, this year's event was arguably our most successful venture ever, ripe with sometimes heated debates about the nature of the "crowd" (and of the relations between artists and consumers within crowd sourcing models), about the struggles over privacy, piracy, and self identity which shape everything from our relations with location-based entertainment to children's media, about the ways that global perspectives complicate some of the assumptions shaping American media practices, and about the ways that grassroots control over circulation complicate established business models. On a personal level, I was deeply proud to see so many of the CMS alums in their new professional identities, showing that they have continued to grow in intellectual stature and cultural authority after leaving MIT, including Sam Ford who has taking over as the primary person in charge of the event and of our newly renamed Futures of Entertainment Consortium. I was delighted to see so many of my new friends from the west coast fly to Cambridge to join us for this year's event, including Ernest Wilson, the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism. Formally, Futures of Entertainment is the sister conference to Transmedia Hollywood, which we host here in Los Angeles, swapping years between USC and UCLA. But this was the year where the two families mingled with each other and the bridges between the two conferences were strengthened. By the way, I've gotten lots of questions about the next Transmedia Hollywood conference: there's not a lot of information to share yet, but it will be held on April 6 2012 at the USC Cinema School, if you want to save the date. Watch this blog for further announcements. Finally, I was deeply proud of the diversity we achieved in our programing this year, making further progress in a long struggle to get greater gender balance on our panels, and making a huge step forward in terms of bringing transnational perspectives into the mix. We welcome recommendations for speakers at our future events in general, but we especially welcome recommendations for female, minority, and international speakers. I am also proud that we continue to maintain a tradition of making webcasts of the conference available free to all. I am posting the videos of the Friday events today and next time, of the Saturday events. We will end the week with a focus on a special event on Global Creative Cities, and with some further reflections of our announcement of a new partnership with the City of Rio. Check out this very thoughtful response by Jonathan Gray to the conference's focus on "crowdsourcing" and collaborative production. While I was at MIT, I dropped by my old stomping grounds at the Comparative Media Studies Program and had brunch on Sunday with the newly arrived crop of Masters Students and some of the Program's Alums. What a smart group! After several years of regrouping, CMS has come back strong as ever, has maintained strong standards in terms of the quality and diversity of the community. I wish them all the best. Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.) William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)
How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green-co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media-share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference. Speakers: Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications) and Joshua Green (Undercurrent)
In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike? Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation) Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University), Seung Bak (Dramafever) and Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)
Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent? Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile) Panelists: Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil), Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland) and Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)
Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories (3:15-4:45 p.m.) Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University) Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Dan Street (Loku) and Andy Ellwood (Gowalla)
The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy? Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University) and Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)
October 24, 2011
Making My Peace with The Bicycle Girl: Reflections on The Walking Dead Web Series
Earlier this semester, I was asked by Scott Walker to be the guest speaker at the Los Angeles Transmedia Meetup, an event which brought together a roomful of artists and entrepreneurs who are invested in making the concept of "transmedia entertainment" into a reality. Today, I wanted to share with you the webcast version of this exchange. If this whets your appetite for further discussions of these issues, it's not too late to register to attend the Futures of Entertainment conference being hosted by MIT on November 11-12. I will be speaking there on a panel with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, the co-authors of our forthcoming book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society, and you can find more information here. In my opening remarks to the Transmedia group, I responded to the news that The Walking Dead was launching some webisodes in anticipation of their Second Season. My remarks were based on a news story I had seen that morning, which contained very little information about what was planned other than the news that it would center on "Bicycle Girl," a very memorable zombie character introduced in the series's opening episode. This news seemed to me a mixed blessing and as such, offered us a way to think about when and where transmedia extensions are appropriate or desirable. The discussion was a hypothetical one, a thought experiment, not intended as a criticism of the series producers, and I can now follow it up with some thoughts about the actual execution of the webisodes. On one level, the choice of "Bicycle Girl" as the focus is inspired. The character originates in Robert Kirkman's original graphic novel and despite appearing on only a few pages, remains a "haunting" figure. She is the first zombie we really get to know as an individual when Rick exits the hospital and his decision to, in effect, commit a mercy killing on this zombie punctures any easy divide between humans and zombies. I've long wanted to know more about this character and particularly I wanted to know whether there was any previous relationship between Rick and the human who had changed into this hideous monster. Clearly the producers also were fascinated with this figure since they devoted a video segment on The Walking Dead dvd release specifically to the making of this sequence.
1. She is an iconic figure. She's a character we remember. Her situation speaks to the larger themes and conflicts which structure The Walking Dead as a series. Often, transmedia extensions, for budget and contract reasons, end up working with secondary characters rather than the series leads. This is fine if the secondary characters are ones we care about, if they are ones who have a compelling role to play in the series. In fact, introducing alternative points of view on the action may be one of the most valuable contributions transmedia extensions can make. A series which did this right was The Wire, where they produced only a few highly memorable and meaningful webisodes, each focused around characters and character relationships which were meaningful and memorable in the context of the original series. Too often, producers work with who-ever is available and the results seems arbitrary and disappointing.
Why might it not be a good idea to return to the "Bicycle Girl" story? I have been finishing up an essay which explores the ways that The Walking Dead is and is not "faithful" to the original comic book series. In doing so, I argue that fans are ready to accept expansions and elaborations, even major changes in the continuity (especially those which allow them to explore other aspects of the character conflicts) as long as they are consistent with "the rules" (to borrow from Scream) which were established by Robert Kirkman. In this case, the "rules" are explicit; they emerged over time as Kirkman engaged with his fans through the letter column in the back of the comic. One of the core rules which Kirkman established was that we would never be given an explanation for why there are zombies and we are never going to go back and fill in the first 20 days of the zombie apocalypse. Here's one of the many times that Kirkman has explained his rationale: As far as the explanation for the zombies go, I think that aside from the zombies being in the book, this is a fairly realistic story, and that's what makes it work. The people do real things, and it's all very down to Earth...almost normal. ANY explanation would be borderline science fiction....and it would disrupt the normalness. In my mind, the story has moved on. I'm more interested in what happens next then what happened before that caused it all. Some in the original audience for my remarks assumed I was saying that there was a hole in Kirkman's construction that he was seeking to work around. I don't think so. I think this goes to what I call the active production of belief. I never much liked the phrase the suspension of disbelief, which seems to me far too passive to explain what happens when we consume a fiction. For me, belief is something that is achieved (not something simply accepted) and it is achieved through choices made both by the storyteller and the listener. In this case, Kirkman's impulses as a storyteller is that any explanation for the zombies would damage the credibility of the fiction he was constructing. This is not a problem with his story: it's a challenge in working with the zombie genre more generally, one all storytellers run up against, and especially a challenge of a version which strives for emotional realism in the ways Kirkman did. Given this particular "rule," which we might see as an informal contract between the producers and consumers, fans were understandably upset when the final episodes of last season took us to the Center for Disease Control and threatened to provide a "rational explanation" for the zombie attacks -- one grounded in the idea of contagion and epidemic. So, I was also defensive at the thought of telling the "Bicycle Girl" story which would mean going back to a time prior to Rick's awakening and thus increase the likelihood of the producer's trying to explain why there are zombies. As it turned out, I should not have worried. The producers of "Torn Apart" (as the Bicycle Girl webisode is called) were well aware of audience expectations around this issue and as a consequence, they take steps to avoid giving us anything substantive which might explain the outbreak. We get one dubious theory from a somewhat crazed neighbor that the zombie attacks might have been caused by "terrorists." We get a few snippets of news coverage before the power grid goes down and all communication gets cut off. We get the suggestions that whatever happened occurred very swiftly, allowing no time for people to prepare, and catching most of the population off-guard. None of this breaks the underlying logic of the "rule" even if it may push up against the letter. I spent a class session in my Transmedia Storytelling seminar walking episode through episode through "Torn Apart". The initial response was that the quality was not as high as was routinely achieved on the television series: the acting was more heavy handed, the scripting and camera work more obvious in calling out certain key plot points, and there was less time to fully explore the emotional consequences of certain moments of intensified drama. As we talked as a class, though, we came to a deeper understanding of how these aspects of amplification and simplification emerged from the specifics of production for the web. There were production constraints, in terms of budget and time, which made it hard to achieve the same quality in the web productions as could be achieved on the show itself, and this becomes an issue when what happens on the web is intended to be read as "part" of the television series, a problem which transmedia producers of all kinds will need to address. We discussed the similarities and differences from how these problems are confronted by student filmmakers (at USC film school and elsewhere) and exploitation filmmakers, both of whom dealt with limited time and money, and worked within short form as opposed to long form storytelling. And we discussed the very different interpretive frames consumers bring to such work, excusing imperfections in favor of ambitions in both cases, because we understand the constraints on what could be done. A second discussion centered around the compression which occurs here. The more closely we looked at the construction of this web series, the more impressed we were by how tightly integrated the details were. Every line, every plot point connected to something else, so that by the end, this was a very classically constructed story with many intensely melodramatic moments and with no loose ends. There are choices here the class debated, such as the decision to recenter or decenter key aspects of this story from the "Bicycle Girl" onto her ex-husband or other members of her family, or the relative arbitrariness of how the "Bicycle Girl" becomes a zombie, despite the elaborate back story with which we were presented (and whether this was consistent with the sense that anything could happen at any time that is part of the logic of The Walking Dead series as a whole.) The short length of these segments seems to suggest a prevailing industry logic that people only want to watch things on the web which are less than five minutes long (shorter depending on which web expert you talk with) but we can start to question this logic when more and more of us are watching full episodes or feature length movies on our computers through Hulu and iTunes. In the class setting, it quickly became tiresome to have to wade through a pre-roll commercial and credits before getting into the next chunk of the story, and in this case, all of the episodes were released on the same day which means that the serial process was perhaps wasted on this content. That said, part of what we were trying to discuss in class was the twin logics of seriality, which depend on chunking (the creation of meaningful bits which cohere in any given chapter) and dispersal (the shifting of interests and attention onto what is coming next through cliff-hangers and enigmas, both of which are well illustrated in the construction of this particular series). Some of the more interesting discussion centered around the placement of this episode in the overall flow of The Walking Dead series -- as a bridge between the first and second series. I often hear people talk about the nonlinear quality of transmedia, saying that the parts can be consumed in any order. This is technically true in the same sense that we can read any chapter in a book in any order we want, but we often choose to read the book in a desired sequence. Or we can read any book in a series we want, but again, most readers choose to follow the author's preferred order. Transmedia (at least as Hollywood currently practices it) has to be designed so that any given extension can function as a point of entry into the series and so that only the "mothership" is essential to the experience, but that does not mean that there is not considerable thought put into the timing with which different extensions are introduced into the franchise. In this case, there is a conscious decision to create something which refers back to the very first episode of The Walking Dead rather than following on from the end of season one, especially in the context of a series which has been sparing with flashbacks and which tends to have a strong forward momentum. We also felt that the focus here on children at risk connected very strongly to the core themes which surfaced in the opening episode of the second season, with certain moments in the webisode having direct parallels in the television episode many of us would watch shortly after. Beyond this, there is a nice balance in the webisodes between relying on information hardcore fans have acquired through watching the series (such as what happened in Atlanta or what they know at CDC, both plot points here which were already answered in the series) and creating something which could be an "attractor," a point of entry for first time viewers which might draw them into watching the series itself. There is a lot more that transmedia producers and consumers can learn from looking closely at this example: indeed, my hope is that we can move the conversation about transmedia from broad definitional debates to this kind of close reading, which helps us to learn what works and what doesn't in the current work being done in this space.
September 23, 2011
Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part One)Rhiannon Bury: My reservation is in part a discontent with labels and their effects. As others have already remarked, they serve to homogenize the heterogenous, to constrain and erase difference and to draw boundaries that mark out who is an insider and who is an outsider. To be fair, "acafan" gestures openly to its hybridity and instability as a category but as the discussion over the weeks has made clear, it has historical linkages to a particular set of fan practices that involves the production of secondary texts such as fanfic or vids. Despite fannish interests in a number of primary texts and a number of professional and personal relationships with fanfic writers and vidders, my highest level of non-academic participatory engagement has been reading and posting a few comments on Television Without Pity for Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) and Dexter. As much as I like the idea of making a vid, I just don't have the creative commitment to follow through. Drawing on queer studies and activist discourses while recognizing the dangers in doing so, I am mulling over another term that might be a better fit for me and perhaps others: fan-ally and, by extension, an acafan-ally. As previous contributions to the debate have indicated, being an acafan may be a fraught, complicated, even contradictory identification but its legibility and legitimacy must ultimately be determined by those who articulate it. I suspect a good number of those who identify as acafans are also on the margins of academia-- as women, as students, and/or as contingent, independent or untenured scholars. "Objective" criticisms and dismissals from those who do not identify as acafans but hold positions of authority can have a silencing effect, even if unintentional. The other issue I wish to touch on is the issue of self-defined acafans "sitting too close" (Jenkins, 1993). I agree to a point with Nancy Baym's statement that the inability of acafans to distance themselves critically "is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans." Part of this "failure" may be attributable to graduate degrees in the humanites not the social sciences. I had an MA in CompLit and was fortunate to have had a linguistic anthropologist on my thesis committee in addition to taking a qualitative methods course as part of my doctoral coursework. Working out of a critical paradigm, I strongly believe that the location of the researcher, not just training, affects knowledge production. Being an insider both enables and disables certain forms of knowledge production. The same is true for the outsider. Researchers who put themselves in the frame of the research are not being subjective; they are being responsible knowledge producers.
Matt Yockey:
September 16, 2011
Announcing Futures of Entertainment 5 ConferenceRegistration Open for Futures of Entertainment 5 We're excited to announce that registration has officially opened for our fifth Futures of Entertainment conference, which will begin on 11/11/11. The conference--which will run Nov. 11-12--will be held at the Kirsch Auditorium on the first floor of the Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, MA. Full details on the line-up as it stands is below. Registration is available here. Please keep in mind that seats are limited, so--if you plan to attend--register soon. The Futures of Entertainment conference brings together professionals from academia and the marketing and media industries to discuss how communication between media producers/brands and audiences are changing, and how the nature of storytelling is shifting in a digital era. On Friday, we will tackle some of the pressing questions and new innovations on the media horizon: new models of media creation and distribution--and challenges/questions related to participation--in a "spreadable media" landscape; new models aimed at representing fan interests in media production; innovations in crowdsourcing for content creation, funding, and distribution; the impact of location-based technologies and services; and privacy concerns raised by these developments. On Saturday, we will look at particular media industries to how these innovations are evolving: serialized storytelling; children's media; nonfiction storytelling; and music. The conference will run from 8:30 a.m. until 6:45 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with a reception scheduled for Friday evening. On Thursday evening, Nov. 10th, from 5-7, MIT will be hosting an "eve of FoE" Communications Forum event on "Cities and the Future of Entertainment" in the Bartos Theater in MIT's Wiesner Building. Cities and the Future of Entertainment. Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment?
Introduction:
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green--co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media--share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.
Collaboration? Emerging Models for Audiences to Participate in Entertainment Decision-Making. In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?
Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories. Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?
At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?
Saturday: Introduction:
The Futures of Serialized Storytelling. New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?
The Futures of Children's Media. Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?
The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling. Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have--and might--nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?
August 14, 2011
Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part One)Roberta Pearson: I'm looking forward to Alexis' 'provocation' since our preliminary exchanges indicate that we're ideal partners, coming at the issue of aca-fannishness from very different perspectives. In fact, it's the perspective and position of the various posters that I want to address first. The very title of Henry's blog together with this debate have so far led most participants to confessions concerning the kinds of acafans they are or are not and why. As Anne Kustritz pointed out, though, there's a danger here. "The aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding...." And as Henry said, "my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented." So far we've had discussions of myriad fandoms, including skating and Radiohead, with many people positioning themselves somewhat outside the core of the fan communities with which they affiliate. We've also had people positioning themselves outside a presumed core of acafans, which implicitly (and not so implicitly in some cases) means an active involvement in a fan community or at least a stake in transformational as opposed to affirmational fandom. I'd like to suggest that we can't begin to theorise the concept of acafan unless we first return to our theorisations of fan. Harrington says, "I am also, I suspect, a different kind of fan that most participants in this blog series. I'm definitely an "as-is" (not transformative) fan and for the most part my fandom is experienced privately not publicly." Campbell says that when reading some fan studies, he has the "distinct impression that if I don't don a Star Trek uniform, attend Sci-Fi conventions, invest a significant amount of my time memorizing minutia surrounding each episode and reading fan fiction, then I cannot claim to be a Star Trek fan. Apparently, enjoying the series, collecting some Star Trek memorabilia, and discussing the series with friends who also enjoy the show is not enough to be a "fan."" And now time for a bit of personal confession and positioning. I certainly consider myself a fan, particularly with my core fandoms of Trek and Sherlock Holmes. Re the former, I've written a couple of fanfics, just to see how it was done, but the first and only time I went to a con, the sight of people dressed in Starfleet uniforms struck me as either risible or horrifying. Re the latter, I've written Sherlockian scholarship, was for a period in my life actively involved in the Sherlockian community and still count some members of that community among my dearest and oldest friends. But with Harrington I'm much more an affirmational than a transformative fan and experience most of my fandom in private; thus by some accounts I'm probably not a fan despite my self-declaration as such. Here we have two possible dimensions of fandom: affirmational versus transformational and private versus public (or perhaps text versus community). In a recent essay that I wrote for Kristina Busse's and Louisa Stein's collection on the BBC Sherlock, I suggested another dimension, distinguishing between those who are fans of a specific text/cultural icon and those who are fans of fandom itself, the shared protocols of fandom on sites such as LiveJournal permitting fans to move easily from one fandom to another. The relationship of these various kinds of fans to texts, to the industries that produce them and to fan communities are distinctly different and worthy of exploration. And until we do this we cannot begin to distinguish among the different kinds of aca-fans. And of course once we've charted the fan bit of the term, we must also chart the aca bit, defining the individual's relationship to the academy. We can then differentiate for example, between a non-tenure track transformational fan of fandom and a tenured affirmational fan of particular texts or cultural icons (the category into which I would put myself), along with the factors of power and privilege that come with these distinctions. Continuing with self-positioning, I have to confess (and among this crowd it feels very much like a confession, although one I've made before and in print) that I'm a fan of lots of high culture, ranging from Shakespeare to Bach. I would argue that many in the humanities who engage in "serious scholarship" around these cultural icons are also fans. As Henry says here, "as writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries." Here's the classic Bourdieu-ian binary: passionate engagement with popular culture and distanced appreciation of high culture. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, those who love Bach or Shakespeare are just as passionate as those who love skating or Radio Head, and this extends to those who engage in "serious scholarship." Above I've suggested refining the concept of the aca-fan; here I suggest broadening it to include those within the humanities who research particular texts or icons. Anyone who has been in the company of Shakespeareans for example, recognizes the easy familiarity and in-group conversation of the fan, as people reference various plays and characters. Why should those of us who (also) study popular culture and engage in much the same activities, feel inferior to acafans of high culture? These high culture acafans have always felt fully confident in their judgments as authorized tastemakers, fully confident that is until the culture wars that enshrined relativism and challenged academic authority. As someone who began her academic career amidst this furore and fully imbibed the concept of cultural relativism, I've never felt confident in imposing my own tastes upon my students nor in unproblematically declaring that something I like is 'good'. My initial training as a social scientist, which involved the notions of objectivity that others have referenced here, probably also made it harder for me to engage either in aesthetic analysis or aesthetic judgments. From my preliminary exchanges with Francesca Coppa, originally scheduled to be my partner in this debate, I have the impression that the younger generation of academics feels much less reticent about this and happy to grab the tastemaking power that comes with an academic position. And even I am now happier to declare something "good," or at least to interrogate the factors that might make something "good," as my co-author and I are doing in a chapter of our book about Star Trek and Television. But does being an acafan always mean that one loves the object that one studies? And yet another confession - as well as being a fan of texts I'm a fan of the industries that produce them. This industry fandom was practically forced upon me as a fan of Star Trek during its first airing, as news of low ratings and imminent cancellation continually circulated. In order to understand this, my adolescent self had to acquire some grasp of network operations, even if only through the not so reliable medium of TV Guide. Now that production studies has emerged as the dominant paradigm within television studies, I return to worries about objectivity and what it means to study the beloved object and to have access to those who produce it. Can we/should we maintain a critical distance? I said above that when I first saw someone in Starfleet uniform at a con, I hovered between horror and laughter. The next time I saw someone in Starfleet uniform, was on the Paramount studio lot during the filming of Star Trek Nemesis. When Brent Spiner and Marina Sirtis appeared fully decked out in their characters' costumes, scholarly objectivity disappeared in a haze of excitement: I was for a moment completely fan without a trace of aca, indeed, living the fan's perfect daydream. But loving something doesn't mean always being affirmational: affirmational fans are perfectly capable of insightful criticism. And fans of course are themselves often insightful industry analysts, for the same reasons that I was forced to be as an adolescent; they want to know what brings their beloved object into being and how long it might survive. I think it's important that fans, academics and aca-fans all have some knowledge of the industries that produce the texts that generate the majority of fandoms. Therefore, I disagree with Kristina when she says, "As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do." However, I do think that acafans who do production studies do need to engage in constant self-reflexivity about their relationships to industry and to producers.
Alexis Lothian: Alexis Lothian is completing her dissertation in the English department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on queer time, speculative fiction, and fan communities' transformative modes of digital analysis and critique. She is a founding member of the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures and has presented and published on science fiction literature and film and on fan video, including contributions to dossiers in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Her website is http://queergeektheory.org. Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has written about Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and other cultural icons. She has written some Sherlockian scholarship and even produced a Trek fanfic or two for private circulation, but considers herself primarily an 'affirmational' fan whose academic interests are more in the industry than in fandom.
July 25, 2011
Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Three)This is the final installment of my interiew with Brian David Johnson. Sorry for the delay in posting. I had some difficulty with email access during Comic-Con.
You talk in the book about "ubiquitous television." Many readers will not know this concept, so can you explain what it means and how it represents a significant shift from our current relationship to content? Ubiquitous TV is built off the idea of ubiquitous computing. This was a concept pioneered by Mark Weiser while he was at Xerox PARC. Weiser saw computing existing in three stages: Stage one was the old mainframe computer. These were the computer the size of an entire room. The second stage of computing was the personal computer. This is the Mac or PC that we all know and love. One could argue that there is a core tension between the idea of media as "personalized" and the idea of media as "socialized," something we consume through networks (whether old school broadcast or new school digital/social). This is not a new tension, but it seems hard for advocates for new models of television to keep both aspects in their heads at the same time. How do these two pulls impact the design of the next generation of television-related technologies? You couldn't be more right. It has been hard for people to keep both of these concepts in their heads at the same time. But for me I approach it differently. For me I think about what consumers and people are telling us. Because ultimately it's about what they want and people have no problem managing these two ideas at the same time. The reason why it's easy for them is because they want it both ways. As we start to think about how to design for both the personalized state as well as the socialized state, I think we need to remember that for consumers both of these states are still TV. In the business of entertainment and even in the business of thinking and writing about entertainment, we like to create categories and systems for understanding what's happening in the modern media landscape. This certainly is important as we need to have these discussions but even as we discuss and debate we have to remember that for consumers they don't think this way. They are not thinking about the business or cultural implications of media. People are simply enjoying it as a part of their lives. Much early writing on digital media implied that the era of mass media would be displaced by an era of niche media, yet there remains an ongoing engagement with our shared experience of broadcast media which has allowed television to weather the storm. What factors have allowed television to withstand competition from the net and the web? I love the old ideas of where TV was going to go. People always said that it would all be personal; that mainstream broadcast media would shrivel and die. No longer would large corporation dictate to the people what they should watch. It would be a wild and wooly collection of intensely personal niche channels that would change and adapt to the needs and desires of people. Well yeah that's cool but it didn't happen exactly like that. It turns out people love mainstream broadcast TV. People all over the world love watching American Idol or Pop Idol or Indian Idol... And there's nothing wrong with this. Consumers love personalization and they also love watching Idol live. This is not hard for them to understand. Part of the frustration of print publishing about emerging media practices is that the book is always out of date before it reaches the reader. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book? Ah yes! At the end of Screen Future I wrote that I figured that by the time people read the book there would be a whole host of issues and technologies that were outdated.
July 20, 2011
Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Two)
That's a tough one because TV, like any good system or organism, has survived for so long because it adapts. This is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the history of TV. TV as a collection of technical innovations, business models, story structures, cultural indicators and motivators is in a constant state of change. I could give you the long list most of us take for granted: Black and white to color. Sponsored shows to the 30 sec spot. The big three broadcasters to cable and satellite. TiVo! The complex web of broadcasters and affiliates. The birth and refining and reimaging of the half hour sit com. The sit com or more pointedly the American sit com is really strange and deeply interesting...but I'm gushing You argue that a fundamental change occurred when the computer changed television into data. How so? How is this shift experienced by the everyday television consumer? I should start off by saying that this fundamental shift to TV from digital to data has not happened yet on a broad scale. It's certainly coming. Some folks I've talked to peg 2015 as a possible date from this but I'm thinking now for mass consumption it might be a bit longer. At the moment the average consumer isn't experiencing the world that I described...yet. But behind the scenes it's certainly happening and happening right now. At Intel I've seen some really smart work in this area three years ago. I write about it in my book that we have been doing work in the fields of video analytics and computer vision. In a way you can think of it as computers warning TV. How do computers watch TV? What computers what TV what do they see and how do they see it? Some are arguing that television is moving from an appointment-based medium to an engagement-based one. What roles will new technologies play in supporting and sustaining our engagement with television? Oh this is an easy one. You are throwing me a softball here Henry. Technology, the very technology we have been discussing has brought about the transformation of entertainment from a broadcast model or an appointment based TV experience to a more personated and engaged TV experience. Technology did this. No question. In the early days of the DVR is way ReplayTV and Tivo. Heck even to a very limited extent the VCR.
The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.
July 18, 2011
Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part One)Shortly after I arrived at USC, Brian David Johnson from Intel came to the office to interview me for a book he was developing on the future of screens and entertainment. I was giddy from having taught the first session of my Transmedia Entertainment class, and we had a great exchange about the relations between consumers and technology and how it might impact our future relations to television and other entertainment media. The interview was included in Johnson's book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, which was released last year. Johnson's book combines interviews with key thinkers about media's future from both academia and industry with his own reflections on recent technological developments being developed at labs and what their long term implications may be. After years of teaching at MIT, I am often skeptical of work on media which starts from a technologist's perspective since they rarely factor in the social and cultural dimensions of media. Johnson is a notable exception -- a deep thinker who groks the interface between technology and culture, who may work for industry but also understands the consumer perspective on why we love television and what we want to get out of watching our favorite series. So, I recommend his book to anyone who wants to expand their thinking and learn about the visions of screen futures which are driving technological development at Intel and a range of other companies. Johnson was nice enough to sign on to let me reverse the microphone, so to speak, and do an interview for this blog. Over the next few installments, Johnson will share some of his current thinking. Here, he talks about television in relation to such trends as ubiquitous computing and social media, and shares some of the factors which drove him to produce this book. Here's Johnson's official bio which should give you a clearer sense of where he is coming from: The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.
I love that quote! I have tremendous respect for Asimov not only as a science fiction writer and a thinker but also as a person who brought science and conversations about science into the mainstream. When I was writing Screen Future I actually had two books always within reach. The first was Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law - his collection of lectures and the second was a collection of Asimov essays The Planet that Wasn't. Asimov was such a good writer, easy to understand and quite funny - that people had no problem reading about the intricacies of planetary motion or the theoretical planet of Vulcan. Both Feynman and Asimov were passionate communicators and conversationalists. Feynman was known as the great explainer, while Asimov was the great popularize of science.. You describe yourself as a "Consumer Experience Architect." What does this entail? What kinds of expertise and insight shape your models of the consumer experience? What factors are shifting the consumer experience of television? Are the changes being driven by shifts in technology, in business practice, or in social and cultural expectations? I'm going to give the answer that I give to my engineering colleagues. But I have to warn you that they hate this answer. So I kind of like giving it to them. The answer to your question is....yes. The answer is yes. All of the above. The changes in consumers experience with TV are due to all of the factors you mentioned. Let's look at each one and see if we don't uncover some more.
July 1, 2011
Now Available: Transmedia Hollywood 2 VideosDue to technical difficulties, we've been delayed in sharing with you the videos from our April Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, jointly sponsored by the cinema schools at USC and UCLA, and hosted this year at UCLA. We hope to be back next April at USC with a whole new line up of speakers and topics, which we are just now starting to plan. In the meantime, check out some of these sessions, which should give the ever expanding Transmedia community plenty to chew on this summer. As for myself, I'm flying down to Rio, even as we speak. Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Denise Mann Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC. (Some of my comments here got me into trouble at the time and I hope to post something here soon which explores the issue I raise here about the role of radical intertextuality within the same medium.) Transmedia Hollywood 2, Visual Culture & Design: Henry Jenkins Opening Comments from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox -- Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially. Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers -- aka "transmedia producers" -- charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities. The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida. Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes. Moderator: Denise Mann Panelists:
TH2 Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms? Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures? How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination? Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?
TH2 Panel 2: "We're Looking for Characters" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo. Game On!: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators? A similar revolution is taking place in the post-network television industry as creators form alliances with network marketers in an effort to reach out to engaged fans. Many of the cutting-edge creative team at Smallville forged this path in the wilderness, creating innovative on-line campaigns that they later took to Heroes. Fans avidly pursue TV creators who incorporate an arsenal of visual design elements derived from films, comic books, games, web-series, and theme park rides in the series proper and in the online worlds. Experimenting with ways to reinvent an aging medium and buoyed by a WGA strike that assigned derivative content to showrunners, the question remains whether these creators won the battle but lost the war as more and more network dot.coms have asserted control over the online interactive entertainment space. Do web-series like Dr. Horrible and The Guild represent the next frontier for enterprising creators or can creative personnel learn to play within the confines of the corporate playground? We will ask creators from both industries -- gaming and television--to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their interactive properties and immersive entertainment experiences. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand by wearing logo T-shirts, deciphering glyphs, or joining mysterious organizations such as Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls, and then sharing clues, codes, and supporting content across a virtual community. These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging transmedia worlds. Moderator: Denise Mann
TH2 Panel 3: "Game On!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.
The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions. We might think of such stories as hyper-serials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms. So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristotelian unities of time and space? Moderator: Henry Jenkins Panelists:
TH2 Panel 4: "It's About Time!" from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.
June 23, 2011
Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part Two (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)Erica Rand: Karen, I'm really struck by your passage: "My writing of slash fan fiction must be subsumed under the rubric of interpretation; how else to explain the overwhelming pleasure of the (writing of the derivative) text, without resorting to "it was confusing and I hated it! So I fixed it!" I hate to sound so simplistic but is it partly liking to do a different kind of writing? I've recently gotten the chance to reprise a previous sideline of queer sex advice columnist. I just love the different style of it. But I see what you're saying about how for you, fan fiction has a bit of the same function as critique. Also, is there also something about people's relationship to being "an academic"? Little anecdote: I was just at a workshop on teaching first year seminars and the person leading it did the icebreaker of having us discuss in small groups an incident in college where we first identified as scholars. (Not my idea of an icebreaker, which I think of as more like, "Name a cheesy song you would stay in the car to listen to if it came on the radio.") Anyway, it made me realize that I don't think of myself as a scholar. I think of myself as a nerd because I think superb punctuation is hot and like to watch number patterns emerge on my odometer--although not so much since the numbers don't turn mechanically. But scholars, they work down the hall from me; a crazy disconnect like describing the family weirdness of one's siblings as if one didn't come from the same family. Karen Hellekson: Henry Jenkins: Karen raises some important questions about the discipline specificity of the acafan position, which is one of the real value of having such a diverse set of contributors in this exchange. In Literary Studies, fan-scholars have had to overcome the affective fallacy, which has historically rendered our emotional responses to literary texts mute and irrelevant. By contrast, in film and media studies, almost all writing starts from some kind of theory of spectatorship, whether media is understood as propaganda, art or popular culture. There are times that I think films would not exist if they were not projected to a viewer just as a tree falling in the forest would not make any sound if there was no one around to hear it. Even our formalist theories, or at least the version I was trained in, starts with the issue of defamiliarization, which assumes a viewer who is shocked or startled out of their habitual norms of viewing by some element in the text. The question is whether your theory of spectatorship starts from the attempt to accurately capture your own emotional response to the work or whether you are, in my book, speculating about someone else's emotional responses. And the danger is that when you start speculating about someone else's feelings, you end up imagining that someone else as more vulnerable, gullible, and susceptible to influence than you see yourself, and that's why media studies was so pathologizing in its construction of fans in the absence of the acafan move. So much of the dread of popular culture from the academic perspective is precisely that it demands our emotional engagement as compared to the more distanced viewership imagined to be the domain of high culture (whether distanciation is imagined as a political position a la Brecht or a class-based posture a la Bourdieu). You cannot write about soap operas or melodramas without a theory of tears, about horror without a theory of fear and dread, about Hitchcock without a theory of suspense, or comedy without a theory of laughter. And again, work which writes about someone else's feelings is apt to distort the nature of what it is describing in relation to popular culture, to be dismissive and simplistic. Of course, one hopes that such a theory goes beyond your ""It was confusing and I hated it!" and the real test of the acafan perspective is not where it starts, but where it ends up. Even on the level of its affective grounding, I would argue that the goal is to be more complex and sophisticated in describing our emotional responses and what sparks them within the work (or its context). And that points us towards some of the issues Erica raises, which I want to address more fully next time. For the moment, let me note that for me, a theory of fandom minimally tries to capture both fascination and frustration, both of which seem to be present in the best fan writing, whether fanfic which writes beyond the ending or Meta which challenges the ideological construction of a beloved text. Look at some of the responses I've run in my blog to the ending of Smallville -- the best of which have been critiques of gender politics or simply genre expectations which start from an impassioned and by no means uncritical perspective but which build out a fuller description of what provokes it. For me, perhaps the most nuanced and challenging acafan posture to achieve is one of ambivalence, which is not at all "wishy-washy" but rather tries to deal with deep and conflicting responses to the work. A hallmark of ambivalence in cultural critique would be Laura Kipnis's extraordinary essay about Hustler -- which offends her and fascinates her and she's trying to work through this conflicted response. I can imagine this being part of what Erica is trying to capture in her work on figure skating (or at least seems to be part of what I am reading from her provocation here).
Erica Rand: Karen, I love the point you took from my comment about finding theorizing that matters all around us. But actually, I meant something related to what Henry wrote about how important it is to promote avoiding presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know? Most obvious when reading student essays about how "society feels" or how raunchy music videos threaten to corrupt one's younger sister (always the sisters, somehow), but, as Henry notes, underlying a lot of work and whole fields, certainly the one I was trained in, art history. And yes, to respond to Henry's comment just above Karen's, that ambivalence is part of what I'm trying to get to. Except with skating, it's different than I'm used to. Not so much like loving pop songs with sexist lyrics, but in addition to that, a layer of deeply felt contradiction in the practice. For example, in figure skating I've found my own femininity, as I understand it, alternately fed, trashed, and unrecognizable as femininity under figure skating's dominant codes of femininity, partly because queer femme dyke codes don't work with them. (Thus I might stand out as unfeminine for being the only female in our annual recital who chose to wear pants for her solo--gasp--and the pants is what people notice not the sparkly tight low-cut top that reads out differently, I think, if your underlying opposition is femme/butch (where showing/hiding protrusions might be a big gender marker) as opposed to a model locating an ideal in that ballerina(or ballerina/slut) look. So I keep being slammed, hurt, judged--in a hugely educational, productive way--by being smacked up against standards I don't meet despite finding my pleasures in what I perceive to be living inside their essence. Somehow despite going on and on, in course after course ("legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive . . . ." as the sometimes tedium of repeating basics is represented in the movie Election), about gender being complicated, vexed, painful, a story even if not centrally with trans content, being in the middle of it made a big difference. The sports studies version of acafan maybe. Separate: I want to go back to something I brought up earlier about whether there is an acafan pleasure in adopting modes and voices for different contexts. I bring it up because I'm a bit hooked on this bit of weirdness: This season's Bachelorette is from Maine, and the Portland Press Herald, every Tuesday, has a FRONT PAGE article, at least below the crease, recapping the previous night's show as if it were a sports or news event. Tuesday the 14th, from Ray Routhier's article: 'The Bachelorette': Trip to Thailand helps mend a broken heart: A restaurant owner named Constantine helps Ashley Hebert put Bentley behind her":
I'm very taken with what we might call this news-o-fan production (maybe without the hyphens when the term catches on). It's not quite the same as the now taken for granted celebrity news as news, because the author seems to be a guy trying on gendered writing and interests in ways that interest me.
Karen Hellekson: Erica notes that she wants to avoid promoting "presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know?" I agree that it doesn't take a professional critic to create valid interpretation. Professional critics have nothing on fans and their meta. Fans talking among themselves have some of the densest and richest text-based and self-referential analyses I've ever seen. I still remember the fabulous conversation about the TV show Leverage at the first Muskrat Jamboree fan con ("Hardison!"), and sitting on a panel about Margaret Atwood at Toronto Trek that had a great Q&A. Both experiences were like attending a really awesome English class, with excited students and detailed text-based analyses. Fan jargon may be different, but the analysis is fundamentally the same. In both worlds, my pronouncements are just as valid as anybody else's. Science fiction critic Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder, famously defined SF thus: "Science fiction . . . means what we point to when we say it." Part of this definition refers to the impossibility of adequately defining SF. But an important part of this is the self, pointing and making a declaration. So it is with the fan, and with the scholar: we self-define. Erica's good questions of means to whom? and how do you know? are answerable within the context of the conversation. It means to me and it means the object of study as defined in my text, and it also means to the audience of the text. I know because I studied it and thought about it. It has less to do with credentials and more to do with common agreement of appropriate modes of analysis: supporting ideas with text; placing the text within its context; juxtaposing modes to effect; perhaps constructing a critique within an established mode of theory. Fans and academics have different versions of these strategies, with fan fiction, fan videos, altered artwork, meta, and critical analysis all requiring community-valid construction and support. I realize that Erica's real point here is that we must question what is at stake when such pronouncements are made. Fans analyze for the love of the source text; they may also analyze for some personal self-valorizing notions of thinkiness, networking, and credibility. (This isn't meant negatively. Many fans perform meta as their primary fannish activity.) Academics analyze basically for cultural capital, to be exchanged for jobs, publications, promotions, tenure. Both fans and academics may have authority, but it has a much-needed tangibility for academics in a way not necessarily relevant for fans. But analysis is not more pure because done for love and not profit; it is not more authoritative when done by a scholar and not a fan. Henry points out in his Response 2 how the term acafan might be used as a pretext for navigating this binary that can result in an uncomfortable (because excessive) sharing. Yet it is polite to acknowledge your debts (to fans; to spouses). Likewise, it is common, even required in scientific writing, to acknowledge limitations that may affect understanding (as a person of a certain gender; as a person of a certain sexuality). Part of the problem is the difficulty in studying something that you're a part of. It's a Schroedinger's cat kind of thing, where the viewer always affects the thing being viewed, except it works vice versa too. Analysis leads to self-analysis, knowledge of imbrication in taste, class, authority, power, gender, and affect. That is as it should be. It may be too much for the term acafan to carry such a heavy load, to meld together disparate practices and communities. All we can do is stand where we stand; point to what we point to; and call it like we see it. I think that's enough.
BIOS Karen Hellekson (http://karenhellekson.com) is a freelance copyeditor who lives in Maine. For her posts, she looked up the words name tag, kneejerk, exegesis, and imbrication. She studied with James Gunn and at the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Involved in face-to-face fandom from 1982 to 1996 and then online fandom since 2001, she writes slash and runs a fan fiction archive. Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who... Erica Rand teaches in Women and Gender Studies and in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College. Her most recent big project, which brings the aca, the fan, and a lot of ice time to sports studies, currently titled Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice (Duke U. Press), is forthcoming in 2012. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism, Radical Teacher and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine (submit, submit, submit) , and shares the Salacious Advisor job, in print and on the blog.
June 16, 2011
How Do You End a Cult Series?: Fans RespondI asked for your thoughts about how cult series should end and in particular your expectations and responses about the resolution of Smallville. Here are your responses: Hello: I watched Smallville at the beginning and kind of faded out when Jonathan died. I left it alone for a couple of years and picked it back up again in season 8. I've since watched all the episodes in order and truly love the series for so many reasons. The messages were so positive, family was important, good, truth, justice and all the things that we seem to be lacking or maybe I should say we're trying to uncover again. I thought the end of the series was excellent. I truly was not disappointed other than learning it took another seven years for Clark to marry Lois. I'm not a comic book fan so I don't know what's happening in that reality. As far as Chloe goes, my impression was she was happily married to Oliver, she's a mother and she's still involved in the Justice League albeit in a role that keeps her anonymous for her protection and the team's. Given her propensity to stick by Clark no matter what, I can't imagine Chloe doing anything else with her life. It would have been nice for them to work Lana in there somehow. I wanted to know what happened to her but I wasn't disappointed per se. Hope this is what you were looking for. I'm just so grateful not to have a St. Elsewhere or Dallas kind of ending. As it was done, Smallville and Superman live on. Happy writing! Kim Kloes
Hi Allison I have been watching Smallville since my dad had me watch it with him which was "Justice" in season 6 as my starting episode. It was awsome and I have loved your character ever since. And just between u and me I think chloe was more fun with Oliver then Jimmy. Besides the Finale what episode do u think u liked the most of the ones u were in for season 10? For ur role I think the best was probably "Masquerade with Desaad" but u looked like u had a lot of fun with "Fortune." What kinda props did u take home when the season ended? Did kristen and erica not like each other that much because after season 5 they actually (and i looked back) had only 6 scenes together in 2 whole seasons. Or was it the writers who did that? Im sorry if this is a little akward and u dont have to answer but i always wanted to know was it akward that u and tom knew each other for 9 years and u guys did a naked scene together in season 9 in "Escape"? With Silver Banshee? I think thats enough questions and I loved Smallville and I will always love it. I also was happy with Chloes ending being a recruiter of heros, a mom, and still a reporter. Your character always developed in fun ways and whats good is that it never changed it just kept adding on. Thanks, Justin your Smallville fan
My 1st response is about the show: The most awesome part about it is that, because of it's origins of Comic books, it already had it's core fan base; Those that weren't comic book geeks are more abstract/contemporary viewers.
Wow, you are a brave person, opening up your inbox to comments from a horde of Sci-Fi fans :) I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in, so I'll keep my comments brief. I'll lead off my comments by pointing out that there's obviously no way they could have satisfied everyone with the finale, especially with a Canadian TV show budget. If you did everything all of the fans wanted, you'd spend a hundred million dollars, which was clearly not in the cards. I also note that many folks appear to be quite satisfied with the finale. For my part, though, I found the finale to be monumentally unsatisfying, but not for the reasons that are being cited by many. My only expectation was that I expected the producers handling the finale to deliver a cohesive, meaningful story that wrapped up the TV series, its characters, and its plotlines during their last outing, and it is in this basic storytelling respect that it really came up short. The best example of this fact is the way in which the Lois and Clark wedding was handled. The fact that Lois and her relationship with Clark was so important to his destiny was one of the truly innovative and memorable things about this season and a really novel, welcome addition of the Superman mythos; the storyline and accompanying great performances by the two actors really enhanced the show. They ultimately built up the wedding into one of the prime narrative drivers of the season, to the point where it took up half of the time in the series's final episode. The Lois and Clark wedding was, of course, also heavily hyped by the network. If you spend that much time building up to something, you have raised audience expectations to the point where you really, really, need to cohesively deliver a satisfying resolution onscreen. Instead, the wedding gets interrupted at the halfway point to the show, we get to the end of the final episode, there's a brief 7-year flash forward sequence, and the two main characters still aren't married. As a viewer, my response to that moment was roughly: "WHAT?!!! Are you kidding me? All that buildup and this is what we get?" The fact that the ending of the show establishes that they are still trying to get married is really just a bad storytelling decision. It rudely snaps the viewer out of the story. This ending raises a host of uncomfortable questions that the viewer really shouldn't have been induced to ask, since they completely ruin the "suspension of disbelief" that is absolutely required for a show with an (admittedly zany) premise like this one. Questions like: Why didn't they just finish the wedding in the parking lot with the minister 7 years before? Why did it take so long for them to try to get married again? More importantly, why haven't Superman and Lois Lane, of all people, not been able to find a day--or heck, even an hour--in seven years to finish their 90% done wedding, which had been portrayed as immensely important to them both for an entire season? You make time for what's important, and waiting seven years is very much out of character for them. The Lois character in particular goes from "never accepting defeat" just two episodes prior to apparently blithely accepting defeat in the case where her own wedding doesn't get finished. Bottom line: the whole thing just defies belief, and having a prime narrative focus of the series be handled in this fashion really makes no sense. What makes it even more frustrating is that there are any number of ways this plotline could have been handled more satisfyingly; I for one would have been A-OK if that last scene had just established that they were were married offscreen at some nebulous point beforehand, which would have been shockingly easy to do (a simple "Hello, Mrs. Kent" would have worked just fine...). Instead, although we did get lots of wedding-related character moments and the ending clearly shows that the two characters are still together, the viewers categorically did not get a satisfying onscreen narrative conclusion to the season-long wedding plotline. You spend that much time building up to something, you have to deliver, and they did not. It would be interesting to hear about the thinking that went into this decision; to a completely average TV viewer such as myself, it is absolutely befuddling, and I just felt insulted by the way that the wedding plotline was handled. It felt like my time had been wasted for an entire season. Now, I don't know if the non-wedding was mandated by the studio or was a misguided effort to leave the viewer "wanting more", but no matter whose responsibility it is, it was a huge mistake to end that plotline (and the show) in such a nonsensical and unsatisfying manner, especially when handling it in a more straightforward and crowd-pleasing way would have been just as easy and let them tell the same story. The completely illogical conclusion to the wedding plotline is emblematic of other, similar problems in the finale, like (for example) the bizarre Chloe-and-the-comic book framing story that gives away Clark's identity already noted by many, as well as the fact that (despite two seasons of some pretty thick foreshadowing) we never get to see Lois name Superman and reveal him to the world, a fairly important and defining moment for both characters. In the cosmic scheme of things, of course, it doesn't really matter. Griping about the final episode is of course a symbolic gesture at this point since the show is over, we'll never see the actors in these roles ever again, and everyone (myself included) is moving on. But, that's just why I think some people remain frustrated. The producers apparently took the position "We don't need to show [insert really important Smallville character milestone here] on our TV show, since we all know from [insert comic book or movie here] that it will eventually happen!". Well, that's just lazy. As a fan of the TV show, I wanted to see these iconic story moments with "our" versions of these characters, and that's what the viewers really didn't get. I had always held off buying the Smallville DVDs, because I knew there would inevitably be a big box set at the end of the series, and I knew that for me the payoff from the destination (the finale) had to be worth making the journey. Let's face it, this show had some real clunkers along the way. Unfortunately, the final episode (and in particular, that final scene, where the two main characters are inexplicably not married after a whole season of buildup) was such a let down that I'm not going to waste my time and hard-earned money on the DVDs in order to relive a journey that has such an unsatisfying destination. Which is kind of a shame. Thanks again for the opportunity to offer an opinion! I don't mind if you utilize the preceding paragraphs for public consumption, but I would request that my identity remain anonymous. Cheers, I am a huge Smallville, Superman fan and have been from day one. I am also involved heavily in the online fandom on various sites including Twitter and Kryptonsite forums so I have a very good idea of how the Finale of Smallville was perceived. Generally, I've only come across a small minority who didn't enjoy the finale for various reasons and unfortunately these people are also the most vocal. I wish I could write a logic piece analyzing bit by bit how the writers broke the contract with the audience they established in the pilot. I'm a writer myself (in Spanish, English is not my first language as you probably can tell in my bad grammar) and I studied for years creative writing, plot points, chekhov guns, the journey of the hero and the heroine....so many other treaties about the art of writing and if the writers really think they did their job I pity any new fans that engage into their projects because they lack basic storytelling skills. But I can't. I'm still mourning. The connection the first five years created with this characters and me was strong and powerful, and it was downhill from them on and in the end they just destroyed it, to a point that all I can feel is rage thinking about it. I wish I could be more rational about it, is just a TV show that no one will remember in 10 years (maybe because of the horrible ending), but I can't. I was in love with Smallville. I usually call it my only abusive relationship, always believing the promise that the good times will come back and kept coming back for more mistreatment almost every week, like a beating husband that brings you flowers and promises not to hurt you again and you forgive because you are in love, but then the beatings continue coming and in the end you end up dead. This is what Smallville did to me. It killed my faith on TV series. I will say I haven't seen any other series and I don't plan to, I can't have faith again. Heroes started great and also ended in a mess, and the perfect TV series Pushing Daisies was canceled. There are many other great series that also suffered the same faith so is obvious that TV shows are stale like Hollywood movies are becoming now with nothing new or original just rehash, unlikeable characters and bad writing that they cannot see it for the life of themselves. I really hope the producers of Smallville are really happy about being part of the many problems I have with TV that lead me to quit it altogether. For as much as they say this is the planned ending for the last 10 years I would love to see the original planned ended script or layout, I'm pretty sure it was totally different. As for my kids I will be buying DVD of good TV shows of the past for them to actually enjoy watching good stories. Star Trek TNG for example, also finished in its own terms and their ending was perfect, IMO. It got closure for all the characters, gave us a glimpse of the future that was logical for them in most ways and opened new possibilities, organically integrating even the special guests....just perfection in writing. But new TV shows and cable networks can keep airing bad written shows and Reality TV 24/7 if they want to. This viewer, that was willing to purchase the special 10 seasons package of Smallville if only the ending would had been...decent, Is going to take her disposable income and investing on good stories and people that are willing to actually do their homework and keep their promises, YMMV as usual. Thanks again for the chance and who knows I might be able to write something proper in the future, at this point I just can't. Ana Bastow
Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone (whether fan or professional) who took the time to share with me your thoughts on Smallville's ending or on the ending of cult series more generally. There were many different and sometimes conflicting perspectives expressed here, and it's worth remembering the range of production contingencies and restrictions which also figure into this process.
June 11, 2011
Going Beyond the Ending: A Wrap UpThis week, this blog has been using the debate about Smallville's ending to raise some larger questions about how cult series ends and how producers might deal with fans who are disappointed or frustrated or enraged or betrayed or... with the outcomes. Seeking to place this debate in a larger context, I reached out to Flourish Klink,who graduated with a Masters from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (where I was her proud mentor) and now, alongside teaching at MIT, works as the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, advising this transmedia company about fan relations and participatory culture. She always has interesting things to say about the interplay between producers and fans, so I wanted to give her a chance to weigh in on this discussion. Cult series always seem more satisfying to fans in the middle than at the end. How do you think producers should deal with the expectations which have built up over the run of the series? Are there classic mistakes which producers make in trying to respond to fan frustration with the ending of a program? One of the most important aspects of dealing with expectations is to be honest about the situation, the possibilities, and the fact that not everybody is happy. One of the most classic mistakes that producers make is to become very defensive about their own work, suggesting that the way the show (or book, or...) ended is the only way it could have ended. Obviously, producers and writers and actors get just as wrapped up in their own long-running projects as fans do, so sometimes they become very certain that they're doing the right thing!
What franchises do you think have done the best job in resolving the competing expectations that surround the final episode of a favorite series? Even though lots of fans disliked the final season, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a very good job - and it did a good job of using multiple shows and multiple media to let fans choose what view of the universe they wanted to take. Fans can choose to only watch Buffy - or also watch Angel - or also read the Season 8 comic books. Depending on what they chose to do, what they choose to consider their own personal "head canon," they can enjoy their own ideas about the series. What's more, whether you liked or disliked the final episode of BTVS, nobody was able to say that it wasn't climactic. BTVS somehow managed to have an apocalypse every season and still raise the stakes every season. If that's possible, no other show has an excuse for not having a climactic final episode! For those who want to have a better understanding of how one can be a fan, even a very loyal fan, and actively seek to write around or think around disappointing elements in the original series, I'd recommend checking out my chapter on Beauty and the Beast in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Here was a series that many, though not all, fans thought took a wrong turn which violated the genre contract the producers had made with their viewers and many chose to disavow an entire series and proceed with the fandom as though it had never existed as part of the canon. Now, I want to share two letters I received from other fans who wanted to share their thoughts on the ending of cult series. I would be happy to see more such letters at hjenkins@usc.edu and will publish more if they come. Do let me know if you intend your letter for publication.
From Eugenia:
Sometime during Season 3, I had decided that there were three types of resolutions to this series. These were:
1. Everyone dies According to the laws of narrativium and story logic [1], this was the most likely resolution. Hints, or what other writers call "foreshadowing", in this direction were themes such as humanity wasn't fit to survive and children didn't come into their own until their parents were eliminated. Minor plots centered on schisms in the population leading to violence, characters suffering fatigue both mentally and physically, and characters becoming addicted to mind-altering substances. Logically these actions would have led to depleting resources to the point the fleet would be unable to defend or sustain itself. 2. Most of the main characters survive Given Moore and Eick's manifesto [2] which described their "re-imagining" as "Naturalistic Science Fiction" and which stated, "Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series", something resembling an optimistic ending was the least likely resolution. After several seasons of "gritty realism", bleakness, and despair, the reversion to something resembling a traditional ending where the "good" guys win would be tantamount to an admission of failure of their "re-imagined" series. Rationalizations of following the original series are mere excuses. Moore and Eick never felt obligated to follow anything in the original series beyond the title, the character names (even then demoted to "call signs" or last names), and the general design of the eponymous spaceship. It's absurd to even bring up Galactica: 1980 to justify the ending; that series wasn't titled Galactica: 148,000 BC. In light of the "critical acclaim" of the series in the first two seasons, this conclusion to the series was possible if Moore and Eick sought to reinstate their favoured position with the critical intelligentsia. The typical ingredients of postmodern works are evident in the series: style over substance, juxtaposition of different elements, references to past works, combination of the "lowbrow" and "highbrow", ambiguity, nihilism, and self-awareness of the artificial contrivance involved in creating the "work". Frequently accompanying postmodern literature or art is the author's stated intention to make it "difficult" for the reader or viewer. Not only difficult in interpreting it, but also even reading or looking at it due to the revolting subject matter. These traits were evident in the series with its use of documentary (cinema-verite) camera work, the "re-imaging" of a "cheesy, 1970's TV show" into something "complex" with "layers of meaning", the disjointed narrative which frequently shifted time frames leaving gaps in the storyline, the monotone colour scheme of the costumes and sets making it difficult to distinguish characters, and viewers constantly being referred to deleted scenes and podcasts to fill in the gaps. Adding to the difficulty in understanding the storyline was demanding the viewer to shift frames of reference in quick succession. At times it was space opera, at others it was contemporary drama, and at still other times abstract symbolism. A frequent trait in postmodern literature is the author making an appearance in the story itself, so Moore's cameo in the final scenes was not unexpected. What is claimed as sophisticated and erudite is merely confusing as the postmodern approach repeatedly disrupts the "suspension of disbelief" which narrative fiction relies on. The conclusions of such works are often self-referential or circular in that they return to the beginning.
Basically the conclusion was a traditional "happy" ending in which most of the main characters survive and a quick addendum of the postmodern self-referential with a few final swipes at the original series. Moore and Eick just couldn't resist making the "Guardians" (old-school Cylon centurions) all on the "evil" side and obliterated. They just couldn't resist pitching the whole fleet into the sun accompanied by the original 1978 series title music played at the tempo of a dirge [3]. They just couldn't resist one last potshot regarding the original Baltar's beheading/non-beheading [4]. WHY IT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME It contradicted the underlying assumption of the science fiction genre. Underneath the spaceships, lasers, funny-looking makeup, etc. is the ideal that the scientific method enables progress through a greater understanding of the physical world. As such, it allows humanity to determine its own destiny by surviving threats of extermination from disease, natural disasters, and predators. The finale succumbed to the romantic notion of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature by giving up material possessions, advanced technology, and accumulated knowledge. In essence, these Colonials sentenced their direct descendants to ignorance and a minimal existence. This is the antithesis of the science fiction genre's foundation. The series conclusion reveals that the "optimism" that Moore and Eick criticized as unrealistic in Star Trek was actually a lack of understanding on their part of the values inherent in the scientific method and Western civilization. The cyclical "what has happened before, will happen again" typifies Eastern traditions. Destiny is preordained meaning when it come right down to it, an individual or civilization having no "free will". References to the "Head" people as angels who are acting in accordance with God's instructions is actually in direct opposition to the original series "Beings of Light". The "Beings of Light" represented the possibility of humanity's evolution to a higher state yet they could not "interfere with freedom of choice [5]", unlike the "re-imagined" series "Head" people who directly interfered and acted in the capacity of fate or destiny. Various comments regarding comparisons of the original series to the "re-imagined" series indicate that some viewers weren't paying attention or were not able to recognize recurring themes without a character pontificating at length. When the original series mentioned that Kobol's [6] civilization migrated and abandoned technology, it stated: "And when they settled the Colonies, they turned on the very technology that could have saved them had they used it properly [7]". This theme is later alluded to in dialogue referring to the Cylons as "a race of beings who allowed themselves to be overcome by their own technology [8]". Technology wasn't considered evil in and of itself, but that it could be misused either intentionally or through over-reliance. The original series connected the themes of "free will" and the use of technology. These themes are intertwined in the episode "War of the Gods" and complement the surface mythic storyline. In being seduced by technology, there is the danger of losing one's humanity or soul. To retain "free will", and thus humanity, it was deemed necessary to maintain family, community, and knowledge through religious, educational, political, and military structures. To submit blindly to another power is to lose "free will" and the ability to determine one's future. This point was again visited in the episode "Experiment in Terra" with the words: "I came from a world where the people believed the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery. And that strength -- strength alone -- can support freedom [9]". [1] The force that holds the story together as defined by Terry Pratchett.
June 10, 2011
How Should Cult Series End?: A ReponseLast time, I posed the question of how to end a series which has attracted a passionate and committed fan following -- using Smallville as our central example. Today, I wanted to give some of the people associated with the series a chance to respond and share some of their perspectives on trying to close out Smallville's tenth and final year as a television series. Specifically, I asked them to reflect on how they closed off the Chloe Sullivan storyline which some fans had come to see as emblematic of what it means to be a professional women in the early 21st century. As I mentioned last time, I am grateful to Mark Warshaw of the Alchemists for his help in arranging for these responses. The first comes from Kelly Souders, an alum of USC's Graduate Screenwriting Program, who joined the Smallville team, with her creative partner Brian Peterson as staff writers and finished their ninth and final season on the show as Executive Producers and showrunners. Kelly's frank and intelligent discussion of the challenges of constructing and managing transmedia characters was a highlight of this year's Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, as you will see when we release the videos of that event through this blog late next week. What are some of the challenges you face in trying to bring about closure to something as long-form as a cult television series like Smallville? Honestly, "challenges" is a polite way to put it. Trying to sum up a decade of stories and characters, trying to sum up that season's arc, trying to give people as much as they can (knowing even a major feature film couldn't do it and they aren't following a nine day shoot and many other tv constraints) is pretty much... impossible. But, the benefit of a ten year show is that the people that are there after so long are there because they are passionate. And everyone gave 150%. Given the diverse investment fans make in such series, what steps can producers take to live up to their expectations?
Some fans have expressed concern that the ending of Smallville effectively has "undone" some of the character development from the rest of the series, for example closing off Chloe's career ambitions. How would you respond to these concerns?
This second response comes from Allison Mack, the actress who played the part of Chloe Sullivan, and has now moved on to do stage work: I want to begin this response by stating how moved and honored I am to know that a piece of work I was involved in creating over the last decade has inspired such passion, commitment and support. I believe our ability to have deep emotional experiences is what makes life worth living. Knowing that I was and am a small part of inspiring this type of experience is more gratifying than I can express. Thank you. I would love to hear what you are thinking. As I did with the discussion of committed relationships and Castle, I am going to suggest you send your responses to me directly via e-mail at hjenkins@usc.edu so you don't have to face the headache of my spam catcher. I will post as many responses as I can through the blog proper. Please be clear if you are sending this personally to me or want to see it published. So, if you are a Smallville fan, what did you think about how the series ended and how might you like to see the series extended in new directions, as Mack suggests here? And if you are not a fan of Smallville, share your thoughts about the endings of other cult series. Which ones were handled the best? Which were handled the worst? What steps can producers take in responding to fan disappointments around the series? What would you like to tell "The Powers That Be" about how cult series should end? Next time, I will share some closing thoughts and we will hear from Flourish Klink, a former student of mine who is now Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, and perhaps from some of you.
June 8, 2011
When Bad Things Happen to Good Series, or How Should Cult Series End?The May 20th issue of Entertainment Weekly included a list of what they saw as the most controversial television series finales; they included Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Saint Elsewhere, and Newhart. The piece was timely since as I was reading it, I was hearing of some of the controversies surrounding several of the cult television series which concluded this season. Reader Polly Robinson shared with me an interesting set of developments around Stargate:Universe getting canceled. I wrote some time ago about the ways Stargate fans worldwide had lobbied to keep this franchise in production. In this case, the much publicized Universe extension had been canceled by the SyFy Network after only two seasons and dedicated fans wanted an explanation. Craig Engler, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Syfy Digital, went on the GateWorld blog to offer an explanation, offering some interesting behind the scenes insights into how cable networks make decisions about how long and in what ways to prolong struggling series. Not every fan was satisfied by Engler's answers, but most appreciated his efforts to help them understand what had happened. About the same time, I received an email from Margaret J. Bates, a longtime Smallville fan, who was disappointed with some of the narrative choices made in that series final episodes. Bates had been part of an effort featured on this blog to produce a television commercial paying tribute to the character of Chloe Sullivan, though she wanted me to be clear that the opinions she expressed were her own and not necessarily a reflection of that movement as a whole. I asked her to frame her concerns in a way that I could share them with you via this blog and this is what she had to say:
Craig Byrne, webmaster of KryptonSite and author of five Smallville licensed companion books, offered this account of fan response to the final episode: I think the general response to the finale of Smallville is dependent on what the viewer signed up to see. There are people who were elated that their favorite characters ended the series together, and there were people who celebrated the fact that after ten years, Clark Kent has become Superman. There is some negative reaction - some have complained about the computer-generated Superman and lack of full-on Superman from Tom Welling, and others didn't care for having Lex Luthor forget everything - but there is a strong feeling that the show at the very least was able to go into a series finale and conclude itself rather than having the network make the decision for them. Inspired by what GateWorld had done to help fans get some closure on the ending of their series, I reached out to contacts I had with the Smallville production team via Mark Warshaw of The Alchemists, who had developed some of the original transmedia content around the series. Through his help, we've been able to talk with several folks associated with the program, and their responses will run next time. I should be clear that I have only seen a limited number of episodes of Smallville and so am not taking my own position on this, but since I was in a situation to help clarify things between the producers and the fans, I am offering this website as a channel of communication. I welcome your feedback on the conclusion of Smallville or of other cult series, and will run a special reader's response post, if I hear back from enough people. Send your comments directly to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and signal if they are intended for publication.
May 19, 2011
Learning from Hollywood: Voices from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center ConferenceI spent the first part of the week participating in a conference, hosted by the USC Cinema School and organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Learning from Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite an Education Revolution?" This was the kind of event that warms my radically undisciplined heart and mind -- a gathering of people from many different backgrounds (educators and academics, media industry people from both the commercial and public media worlds, activists and nonprofits, foundations, librarians and curators) to talk about the potential intersection between education and entertainment. In the course of the two days, we heard a lot about the value of stories and storytelling to incite the imagination, to provoke curiosity, to convey our collective memories and wisdom, and to inspire more acts of creativity. This was perhaps best brought alive for me through a performance by The Story Pirates -- a group of actors, improv comedians, and otherwise kooky and creative people, who go into schools around the country, help young people construct their own stories, and then incorporate them into their performances. In this case, they brought a class of Latino/a elementary schools with them, both performing one young man's previously written stories, and soliciting elements from the kids for a story performed live on the spot. My own remarks at the conference centered on what the practices and logics of participatory culture might bring to the paradigm of "entertainment education" which I have been learning a lot about since coming to USC. Under the classic version of this model, experts consult with script writers to get information about health or social concerns integrated into the fictional programs and sometimes to get tags or bumpers which help link viewers to the groups working on these issues. I really respect the commitment behind such work and know that it does make a difference for many people. But increasingly, I've wondered what would happen if these same projects got taken up by the fan communities around the show, if the messages were not simply embedded in the program but designed to be acted upon in more creative and public ways. I used the example of what's happened around Harry Potter to describe a movement from inspiring reading to inspiring writing to inspiring activism, remarks which build upon the work my Civicpaths research group has been doing for the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations. Scott Traylor from 360KID, who I knew from back at MIT, was nice enough to capture my remarks and those of several other speakers via his cellphone camera and has given me permission to share some of these segments with you through this blog. Thanks, Scott. So, this first bit is my talk on Harry Potter and the potential of a more participatory model of entertainment education. Scott also captured some of the highlights from a panel on Monday night on "Storytelling and the Art of Engagement," hosted by Betty Cohen, the former President of the Cartoon Network and the Lifetime Network, and including film producers Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) and Doug Wick (Gladiator, Memoirs of a Gesha) and television producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock from the Sun), sharing their insights on Hollywood's craft and speaking about their desire to see the work that they do more fully incorporated into both formal and informal education. Getting these kinds of glimpses into the behind the scenes production processes is one of the great joys of living so close to Hollywood. Here are two highlights Scott captured -- showing Carsey talking about the need to "respect the audience"... And Wick talking about how he draws inspiration from the work of Bruno Bettelheim: The event was also a place for demonstrations by some top digital designers and developers, including this segment on Sifteos by a Media Lab alum Jeevan Kalanithi. On Tuesday morning, we heard from Linda Burch from Common Sense Media and Frank Gilliam, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, talking about the challenges of overcoming existing frames parents and teachers have for thinking about the relations between digital media and schooling. Scott captured Gilliam's remarks, which offer some real insights into how and why some of the messaging around digital media and learning may be falling on deaf ears. Unfortunately, Scott had to fly back to Boston so we do not have some of the other highpoints of the conference, such as a presentation by Participant Media's John Schreiber on their Waiting for Superman documentary;
All told, my head is exploding from new insights and beyond that, new connections, many of which I hope to build upon through this blog in the weeks ahead. Special thanks to Cooney Center Director Michael Levine who has helped pull together this phenomenal event.
April 12, 2011
Responses to My Rant about House, Castle, and White CollarMy blog post last week ranting about how television deals with committed relationship clearly hit a responsive chord with lots of readers and has generated more response than anything I've posted here in a long, long time. Not only have we had active comments posted on the blog, I've also been receiving messages via e-mail, Tweets, Facebook updates, and in person comments. Today, I wanted to share some of the e-mail responses I've received so far, hoping to generate even more reflection out there on these issues. Please, if you want to add anything and have trouble with the Spam Filter on the blog proper, send me e-mails at hjenkins@usc.edu, and do signal that you intend the comments for publication here. So far, the series most often cited as having a great husband-wife relationship is Friday Night Lights, which I have not seen, but may give a chance based on this level of intense fan excitement. Mr, Jenkins, Hi The whole conversation about what constitutes a good relationship or a bad one and how some show runners are awesome at portraying every kind of relationship, while others are only good at some, is something I love discussing, so here goes:- For me a show that always did well with relationships was Friday Night Lights. The central couple of Tami and Eric Taylor were possibly the most realistic portrayal of a married couple I've seen on tv. They had been married for years and knew each other inside out. They did that silent communication thing (FNL were actually really good at letting silences work for them in general), they supported each other when their daughter, Julie, tired to play one against the other. They had silly arguments, they had more serious arguments but never was their love for each other in questions. The writers didn't feel the need to have anything sensational happen within their marriage - no OMG secrets, no affairs, nothing like that. And they were one of the most compelling couples on TV because they were written WELL. Kind of like all the reasons you cited for liking Elizabeth and Peter on White Collar, who I also love. I think that's the thing the writers and Nathan Fillion need to remember - if it's well written it will engage the viewer and they'll still want to see what happens next. The problem is it's the badly written relationships that stick in people's minds, creating the idea that as soon as two people finally get it together they become boring. It's the writing and the fact that writers don't necessarily know what they are going to do after the initial get together that creates a problem. For example: Sarah and Chuck's relationship evolved and moved on once they got together, but it's never been boring. In fact, talking about Chuck, it reminds me of something that really annoys me - when shows will do anything ANYTHING to keep their main couple apart - to the point where it becomes a joke, it no longer comes about organically from the story, but it's just the writers wondering what they can do now to keep them apart and it becomes boring and annoying. A show that did really badly with relationships was Stargate Altantis. The one that really sticks in my head is the Rodney McKay/Katie Brown fiasco. The two characters went from awkwardly liking each other to McKay proposing. It was ridiculous. McKay never spent any time with Katie and they seemed to find looking at each other, casually touching each other or giving each other chaste kisses really embarrassing. It was baffling that the writers thought that the viewers would buy into the idea that Katie and Rodney were in an actual, grown-up relationship. Then there was McKay's relationship with Keller that seemed to come out of nowhere - at least on McKay's part, and again had him spending little to no time (that the viewer saw or heard about) with the woman he professed to love. Those are not writers who should ever try to depict honest to god grown-up relationships. I would love to tell certain show runners that you can't just throw a relationship at the viewers and expect them to like it. It needs lead-up, we need to see it happening (or at least be able to look back and see it happening). Also, make sure you don't take time away from the aspects of the show that viewers like, just to be able to include the romance, we kind of hate that. Along the same vain, don't forsake friendships and other relationships that have been portrayed for seasons for a romance that the viewers are going to be less invested in. If you bring in a new character, we resent them, if it's a regular character we resent that the others are being screwed. And if you bring two regular characters together - and it wasn't signposted from the beginning - you are going to have to put up with the fans who hate character A and character B being together. I'd also like to tell show runners of certain kinds of shows that, really, romance isn't for them. Something like NCIS, for example. I watch that for the team interactions. I don't care about their romantic entanglements. The only one I'm okay with is Abby/McGee because that was something that existed from the moment McGee appeared and somehow the writers have managed to make sure that it doesn't take over the show and it's always done subtly and rather cutely. Compare that to Ziva and Tony, where you often feel like you're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer - also, thinking about Ziva and Tony, if you're actors don't have chemistry when possibly moving towards a romantic relationship, drop it. It's painful to watch. When romance comes into shows that I don't equate with romance, I tend to stop watching them. I stopped watching CS:NY after the 3rd season because the writers focused WAY too much on Danny and Lyndsay and I found it boring. And one final thing: show runners, you don't need romantic relationships in shows just to attract women. We like shows with little to no romance just fine and you tend to piss us off if you suggest that a show suddenly has romance in it to 'appeal to women'. Stop. Just, stop it. One of the reasons I like Nikita: the women don't spend their time angsting over guys or talking about them all the time. I hadn't realised that this had got so long, so I think I'm going to stop now *g*
Hi Henry-
But yeah, I agree totally with what you said about White Collar, because I adore the relationships and maturity in that show. \o/
Hello Professor Jenkins! Just read your fantastic Castle post. You say it's less aca, more fan - but with fan writing that has insight like that, who even needs academics? :p You end the post with " But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?" But do you specifically mean romantic relationships specifically, or any bond between characters? Because as you rightly point out, while the elements of the plot, the contrivances of the genre, may hook us in and keep us curious, it is always the characters and their emotional attachments to each other that led the viewer forge a connection. Even with something Lost, one of the most successful recent shows to have people coming back for "OMG what's next!", it's eduring appeal, I'd argue, was based on character attachment. Conversely, did Heroes become dull because of contrived plots? Or because we know longer much cared for its characters. Of course, none of what I am writing is I think even remotely novel. I'll echo everyone on Friday Night Lights. The relationship between First Lady and President was quite interesting on The West Wing. I don't think I've ever paused to reflect on The Good Wife, in part because though I enjoy the show immensely, it rarely bears close scrutiny. And a really fantastic show in all ways, including a wickedly incisive on again off again romance, is the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. It's a metatextual dramedy about a Shakespeare Festival in small town Ontario, where the slightly mad artistic director is haunted by the ghost of the previous artistic director, as they direct Hamlet in the first season, MacBeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. After The Wire, almost certainly the best work of Television I've ever encountered. Two surprisingly interesting relationship dynamics are in very male dominated show. The first is Californication. You'd think the premise of bad boy artist fuck-up who sleeps around would wear thing after four seasons, and yet amazing, it is still compelling. And his absolutely love for Karen is really something. The relationship is completely FUBAR, and yet it's amazing how much they care about each other, and how we care for them. It's as if Hank Moody exerts on us as viewers the same sort of charm he does on women - we know he's an asshole, part of us just wants to get inside him (metaphorically, in the viewers case). Second, a surprisingly interesting relationship is Ari Gold and his wife on Entourage. Now, it's not particularly realistic - nothing on the show is - and maybe ways, it's less about them as a couple but how it shows a different perspective to Ari. Even so, it's evolved into something very different than much of the show (and indeed, Ari's marriage is a crucial issue at the end of the most recent season). And in terms of Castle specifically - yes, I think we'll get there. As it's much more than romantic tension, there have been so many missed connections of confessions of love. I agree with the poster's analysis of bones, that they "will they/won't they" will tire eventually. I think they are playing it out nicely, though occasionally it's torture as a fan. Think of the scene where they finally kiss - and yet, "nothing" evolves from that. Of course, any romantic entanglement between the two will have its own comedic pitfalls. I find it highly unlikely they would stay together without breaking up at least once. But so far, much like Californication, they have managed to stretch a charming premise way past it's usual expiry date, so I give them faith. I think for it to be most engaging, the doctor boyfriend needs to be an actual on screen character as much as he is tallked about. Even with limited screen time, Castle's flames have left way more of a mark than Becket's long term boyfriend. And as well edited as that "closure" video was....Blah! If I want some that sappy, I'll watch Fillion's old soaps. Michael Carens-Nedelsky
Dear Henry, I, myself, have been a Castle enthusiast since the show first premiered two years ago, and I always tell people that the best thing about it and the reason why I personally believe it to be the best show on television is because of the writing. Mr. Andrew Marlowe, also a USC alumnus, has truly mastered every ounce of the show--from its characters to its relationships--and what I admire about him most is that he has given us a show that actually feels real. Unlike House, you can fully invest in these characters and the relationships that they have with each other, and at the end of each new episode, you turn off your television feeling as though you're a part of something bigger. For this and many other reasons, I could not agree with you more in believing that Castle is just the show to break the mold of the "unrealistic" TV relationships. In fact, I have become so taken with Castle that I have begun writing about it for a website called BuddyTV.com. As their exclusive Castle Fan Columnist, I volunteer my time every Monday to write recaps of the latest episodes, and although it is often a very time-consuming process, I couldn't enjoy it more because I am being given such a great opportunity to promote a show that I love. In fact, through the power of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter, I was even fortunate enough to have three of the stars of the show (Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, and Jon Huertas) read one of my articles. I guess all in all, however, what I am really trying to say, Mr. Jenkins, is that I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to highlight some of Castle's best features and in turn support what I believe to be the best show ever on television. Hi Dr. Jenkins, Dear Prof. Jenkins: Hello! I'm a longtime reader who loved your post on television's allergy to committed relationships, and wanted to add a few thoughts: - Another shining example from a surprising source: The Vampire Diaries's Stefan and Elena, who have been together 32 episodes and counting. They're high schoolers, but by CW standards, staying together for more than a season = practically married. It's to the writers' credit that the obstacles they've faced as a couple have been much more compelling than the "we're so different and this can never be!!" hand-wringing they went through beforehand, and it highlights a common thread that I think runs throughout the shows that have pulled off successful relationships: respect for stability and loyalty. Elena and Stefan are largely portrayed as a sensible and well-adjusted people, which doesn't preclude disagreements, but eliminates the need to rely on interpersonal conflict to drive the plot. The town's machinations keep them busy enough. I get the sense the writers want them to stay together because there's such a rich story to be mined there, and thus have avoided the willful misunderstandings/distrust/stupidity that have been used to break up other pairings. Stefan and Elena - along with Friday Night Lights's Eric and Tami Taylor, which I'd agree with other posters is the gold standard - run contrary to the conventional wisdom that relationships that hook viewers aren't synonymous with what we want in real life. My corner of fandom would love to life-swap with the Taylors. Give me domesticity any day, At the same time, I'll acknowledge Beatrice Belli's point that "will they/won't they" works really, really, ridiculously well - so well, in fact, that I'd guess it's one of the elements of a show that's most likely to turn casual viewers into spoiler-seeking, fic-reading, content-producing fans, and writers may be more confident in their abilities to maintain their audience's interest that way - and with good reason, since pulse-pounding depictions of domestic life are so rare and exert a different emotional pull. Not to justify writers' fears, but I think there is something uniquely engaging about UST that's hard to replicate; the tension doesn't go away once characters get together, but it comes packaged in a different form by nature, one where the attraction is no longer so hard-won. I'd be interested in hearing from people whose investment in a TV pairing grew after the protagonists got together after a looooong buildup. Then again, maybe the situation is so dire there wouldn't be any good examples, and that's the problem in the first place! - I don't watch House, but through fandom osmosis I'd suspect that the writers have taken pains over the years to compound House and Cuddy's respective dysfunctions to keep them apart, which has now backfired in the form of reverting to tired patterns. Your point about showrunners resisting change is well-taken; however, I think what's turned me off of more shows is post-hookup characters becoming unrecognizable. The world's best chemistry can't make up for a lack of caring. I loved Jim and Pam up until season three of The Office, and my losing interest in the show had nothing to do with their getting together. I just didn't like them anymore, separately or together: the once-endearing appreciation society of whispers and pranks they had formed to make through the workday now just seemed petty and mean-spirited, and Pam got flattened into Jim's appendage. That and the plots were about 100x less funny. Same with Chuck and Sarah - I've read praise of how the writers have handled their evolving relationship, but by the time Sarah had been reduced to Chuck's damsel in distress to make it happen, I wanted out. More than anything I wish writers understood that viewers become invested not only in the idea of a relationship, but also in the separate identities two characters bring to the table, their friendships and partnerships with other characters....and the plots that frame all these interactions! I'd rather have writers focus on developing a stable male/female friendship dynamic grounded in respect before plying their audience with romantic tension. Honestly, I'm not sure whether half of the will they/won't they couples on my current shows even like each other. There's one: Leslie and Ben on Parks & Rec. Your description of Castle and Beckett also applies to them: "They clearly are two people who have fun together...and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity." What I love to see in a committed relationship isn't all that different from a great friendship. - I've never seen a full ep of Castle, but I have a few good friends who love it, and for their sake, television's, and yours, I hope Castle and Beckett achieve that elusive balance: happy but not complacent; steady but not predictable; and not too late in the show's run, when the cases remain fresh and interesting and a worthy canvas for the characters. If I could give the writers any advice, it would be to invest in some good plotting, because the intrigue of a tight mystery does wonders to supplant the tension that fades when the stakes are low. The characters are what keep me watching a show, but too often it seems like showrunners are only willing to take a big step late in the game, when the storylines and dialogue are no longer at their best. I think the long-range format is one of TV's greatest strengths, but I often wonder whether we'd be better off with short-run, UK-style series that allow for more thoughtful planning and a surer sense of direction. But your post makes me hopeful this show will use the format to its advantage, and if Castle manages to combine an ongoing committed relationship with smart cases, I will buy the DVDs so fast I'll leave skid marks. Thanks for opening up the floor to such a great question! I loved reading the responses, and I hope it's all right mine rambled on for so long. Your work helped convince me to pursue graduate studies in media studies, so it means a lot that you took the time to read this. From one fan to another: thank you! Best,
April 6, 2011
A Rant About Television's Difficulty in Representing Committed RelationshipsTwo things collided over the past week for me as a loyal television viewer and I want to get them off my chest. I give fair warning that this is going to be a bit of a rant. There's almost no aca here and a hell of a lot of fan. The first is that after watching House M.D. with some great pleasure for seven seasons, I am more and more facing the grim reality that it has more or less jumped the shark this season thanks to its frustrating and ill-conceived representation of the on-again, off-again love affair between House and Cuddy. The second is that I have been more or less inhaling Castle for the past month or so, watching several episodes a night in true "can't eat just one" spirit, having somehow failed to discover it until its third season, and much of what has fueled my passion for this series has been its sophisticated handling of the relationships (all of them in their varied forms and contexts) between the central characters. If you also have not discovered Castle, here's a first season preview which does a good job of spilling out the basic premise.
The contrast between the two series came to a head for me when I read the profile of Castle star Nathan Fillion in the March 25 issue of Entertainment Weekly, a cover story which correctly declared Fillion "Geek God," and which included a side bar asking Castle's two leads whether they think Castle and Beckett should "date or wait." The responses broke down rather predictably along gender lines, with Stana Katic, who plays Beckett, rooting for the two characters to "take it to the next level" and Nathan Fillion worrying that doing so will take much of the passion and tension out of the series. Here's what they each had to say:
And yes, I know what Fillion's worried about -- he's worried about seeing something like what has happened to House this season. But the problem with House is not that House and Cuddy are in a relationship. The problem is that the writers do not have a clue how to depict a relationship between House and Cuddy in a way which shows any kind of emotional maturity, any kind of psychological depth, and any kind of personal growth. I often suspect that Hollywood's inability to depict relationships that grow over time has everything to do with the divorce rate in the entertainment capital, very little to do with the constraints of the medium (given how well television depicts the unfolding of interpersonal relationships over time) and even less to do with the desire of fans. (One of the things to pay attention to is how many of the "commitment" episodes for television series are written by a small handful of writers who have consistently ruined every couple they touched.) From my experience, fandom is all about the relationships between characters, and fans are capable of pulling out insights into those relationships from the most subtle touch, the most nuanced reaction shots, and stitch them together through their stories and videos into stories which show how relationships can grow and unfold over time. Here, for example, a fan re-edits footage from the series to imagine a different kind of relationship between the protagonists.
I've been married for more than thirty years to the same woman (well, actually, neither of us remains the same person from one moment to the next and that's part of what makes marriage such a grand adventure.) My wife remains my best friend, my playmate, my mentor and confident, my sharpest critic and my biggest fan, and living together keeps me constantly on my toes. This is the kind of relationship which we rarely see on television, again because contemporary writers seem incapable of writing such relationships -- could it be because they are twenty-somethings still recovering from their first major breakup? If I go back to older Hollywood movies, I can see the kinds of relationships I am looking for -- all you have to do is watch any movie which couples Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey or even better, my personal favorite pairing, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Watch how their relationship grows across the full run of The Thin Man series, even, though, gasp, they are together from their very first scenes. There's nothing dull, predictable, passionless, or static about their interactions. It doesn't fall back on House's cynical assumption that people are ultimately incapable of change and thus doomed to disappoint each other. Part of what gives me confidence that Castle is not going to fall into the traps that House has is that the series itself has shown a close attention to the nuances of character interaction from its first season forward. Certainly, Castle and Beckett have grown closer to each other episode by episode and the writers have been imaginative at finding new ways to deepen their bonds with each other. They clearly are two people who have fun together, which for me is the number one requirement for a meaningful and committed relationship, and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity. The series loves to show them pitching ideas back and forth, often completing each other's intelligence, and they take delight in showing the two very adult characters nevertheless playing with each other, teasing each other with hints of secrets not yet disclosed. But it isn't just the intense chemistry between the two performers -- and the obvious passion between the two characters which everyone but they seem prepared to acknowledge -- that gives me faith for the future of the relationship. It is also that the series does a great job of depicting other kinds of relationships -- friendships and partnerships such as the one between Ryan and Esposito, mentorships such as the one between Captain Montgomery and Beckett, the father-daughter relationship between Castle and Alexis, the mother-son relationship between Castle and Martha, and even the complexities of relationships which unfold in a single relationships. They recently sprang on us a romance between Esposito and Parish that retrospectively seemed to have been hiding in plain sight all along. There's a powerful sense here that relationships do not just involve the partners but also extend across a larger social network which has a stake in each member's happiness. And in each of these relationships, at each stage of development, there are hints that the characters involved are more than the sum of their relationships. They are still capable of surprising each other, they have both a history and a future together. This is what keeps me as a fan watching a series long past the point where the genre formulas shaping the stories have become predictable. So, why should the writers or cast worry about their ability to keep the relationship interesting once they move beyond the first blushes of courtship, given that the relationship so far has been so much deeper than teasing the audience about will they or want they? Given the range and complexity of these relationships, there are surely many different dimensions of the life between Castle and Beckett the writers can pull out, many different things they can learn from and about each other, and many ways that their relationship can be implicated in the mysteries they solve. Of all of the shows currently on television, I think Castle has the best potential to show me the kind of committed couple that I long to see, and I am not alone as the broad range of fan videos and fan stories about these characters suggest. There's something else which gives me hope that Castle might achieve this kind of representation of dating and married life - the other great couple currently on genre television, Elizabeth and Peter Burke on White Collar, another series currently on my Tivo, although alas, due to USA Network's short seasons, there's a painfully long wait before I'll see any new episodes. White Collar is another fannish show which lives and dies on the basis of character entanglements, entanglements which again go well beyond romance. Here's a segment from a recent Paley Center event where a woman of the audience asks the program stars and producers about the intense bonds between the series male protagonists, Neal and Peter, and gets some interesting insights in return.
And there's another whole thesis to be written about Neal's other great friendships with his long-time partner, Mozzie, and with his sophisticated landlady, June, played by the great Diane Carroll. And I've been enjoying watching the sexy partnerships between Neal and his sometimes paramours, Alex and Sara. But above all, what I love about White Collar is its depictions of the domestic life between Peter and Elizabeth. Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen) doesn't get a lot of screen time: she may only be in a scene or two per episode, and due to the actress's maternity leave, she missed out a good chunk of the first half of the season, but when they are together, there is a playfulness and mutual respect which from where I sit show the signs of a happily married couple. They know each other well. They call each other out on their nonsense. But there's no question that they would do anything for each other. Elizabeth is smart and she's intelligent, not always the same thing; she's got her own thoughts and her own life; she's not a simple appendage of her husband. And it is precisely because their relationship is complex and unpredictable and constantly evolving that it becomes a catalyst shaping the interactions with the other characters. Witness the Paley Center audience member's acknowledgment that part of what strengthens the friendship between Neal and Peter is that Peter is seeking Neal's advice on how to be a better husband. Here's a fan video which does a great job in conveying some of what I value about White Collar's depiction of their marriage, again by cobbling together little bits that show a much bigger picture.
So, let me turn the floor over to my readers now. What do you see as the best representations of committed relationships on American television? Which couples demonstrate the capacity for trust and growth which has been sadly lacking on this season's House? What advice would you give to the showrunners at Castle about how they might intensify the relationship between Castle and Beckett without lowering the tension or diminishing audience engagement? I know the comments function on this blog is more or less broken due to the intense spam protection I've had to put on here. So, if you don't want to fight with the submission process, send me e-mail directly at hjenkins@usc.edu and I will make sure it goes up on this site. But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?
January 26, 2011
"Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part One)Wired contributing editor Frank Rose is releasing a new book this month which will be of interest to many of my regular readers -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. It is a highly readable, deeply engaging account of shifts in the entertainment industry which have paved to way for more expansive, immersive, interactive forms of fun. He's talked to key players -- from Will Wright and Jeff Gomez to James Cameron and George Lucas -- and brings back their thinking about the changing media landscape. As he wrote me, "at various points in my career I've focused on technology and at other times on entertainment, but when I joined Wired in 1999 I started writing about both together." Rose has been exploring some of the key concepts from the book through his blog as he's been working through the project. I suspect when I teach my transmedia storytelling class again at the USC Cinema School next fall, this book will be on the syllabus, since it manages to condense down many of the key conversations being held around these much discussed topic into language which is accessible and urgent. When I first heard of his concept of "deep media," during a talk Rose gave at South by Southwest, I was intrigued by its relationship with what I've called transmedia entertainment. And in fact, I've been asked about the relationship many times and didn't really know what to say. So, naturally, given a chance to interview Rose for the blog, that's where I started. It sounds like his own thoughts on the relationship have evolved over time and in interesting ways. As the interview continues, we talk about world-building, the relationship between games and stories, the interweaving of marketing and storytelling, and the impact of 9/11 on interactive entertainment. You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?
Throughout the book, it seems you see these creative changes towards a more immersive and expansive entertainment form being fueled by the emergence of games. Why do you think computer and video games have been such a "disruptive" influence on traditional practice in other entertainment sectors?
Another key idea running through the book is the idea that entertainment is now designed to be engaged by collectives, often of the kinds that form in and through social network sites. What are some of the consequences of perceiving audiences as collectives of people who interact with each other and with the producers rather than as aggregates of isolated eyeballs?
December 10, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Four): Why Fans MatterThe final section of The Survival of Soap Opera focuses on the evolution of fan community practices online, on various soap opera fan experiences/demographics, and on relations between the soap opera industry and its fans. Below, a variety of the contributors to this section answer questions about the relationships fans have with the soap operas they watch and with one another. Tom Casiello is a current member of the writing team for The Young and the Restless, a former associate head writer for One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives, and a two-time Daytime Emmy Award-winning writer with As the World Turns who has written about the genre at his blog, Damn the Man! Save the Empire. Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies who writes on media, fandom, and copyright. As editor of the collection, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also wrote an essay in the collection, entitled "Soaps for Tomorrow: Media Fans Making Online Drama from Celebrity Gossip. C. Lee Harrington is professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University is co-author of the book Soap Fans and who has written on the soap opera genre since the late 1980s for publications including The Journal of Aging Studies, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Transformative Works and Cultures. As one of the book's co-editors, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also co-authored a piece for the book with Denise Brothers, entitled "Constructing the Older Audience: Age and Aging in Soaps." Roger Newcomb is the Editor-in-Chief of soap opera news site We Love Soaps, the producer of two Internet radio soap operas, and executive producer and co-writer of the film Manhattanites. His essay in the book is entitled "As the World Turns' Luke and Noah and Fan Activism." Radha O'Meara is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in screen studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who has published her work in Screwball Television: Gilmore Girls and in the Austrian journal Metro. Her essay in the book is entitled "The 'Missing Years': How Local Programming Ruptured Days of Our Lives in Australia." Julie Porter is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who is webmaster of soap opera site talk!talk!. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Hanging on by a Common Thread." QueenEve is the pseudonym of a career professional and soap opera fan who has moderated and/or founded several popular soap communities online. The collection features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with QueenEve focusing on fan activity around and against soaps. How has the relationship between U.S. soap operas and their fans evolved over time? Tom Casiello: I honestly think the relationship between the soaps and the fans hasn't changed nearly as much as others believe. (I also think we have to be very careful not to group them all together as "the soap operas." There are currently six U.S. daytime soaps on the air, all of which should have their own individual identity, wherin their fans expect different things from each show.) At its core, the audience still wants stories and characters they can connect with on a human level, mixed with the element of fantasy and escapism they've come to expect. They want to know the characters they've loved their whole lives, whom they've watched grow and evolve, are in capable, trustworthy hands...and they will continue to live on in their homes daily. While audience demograhics may shift, and trends will come and go, strong, long-term serialized storytelling with heart is all the fans have ever wanted. Roger Newcomb: Obviously, from radio soap operas to present-day television and internet soaps, the way fans view or listen to their soaps has changed tremendously. The relationship the soaps have with fans has evolved as well. Even 30 years ago, the main feedback mechanisms were snail mail and telephone feedback lines. In 2010, fans can email the shows and their networks, and many times the stars themselves. The shows also have Facebook and Twitters accounts to solicit immediate feedback from fans, and the actors themselves directly interact with fans in a more personal way through social networking. It is not clear whether this increased and immediate interaction has impacted storylines or story direction. QueenEve: I think it used to be a far more personal relationship shared between female multi-generational family members and the soap opera. Over time, with the growth of soap magazines covering more than just "the stories," suddenly we knew about the actors playing the characters and the writers writing the show, making it a little less personal. We learned about the relationships between the actors playing the parts (marriages, divorces, and kids), entirely separate from their parts, and the experience expanded beyond one among just you, your mother, and the story. Then, with the internet, it became even less intimate and much more of a group activity with other viewers. So, what had been something between female members of a family and the soap eventually involved the actors, the writers, the media, and other viewers who may not have viewed the show and characters as you and your family did. The other side of that is that the "family" element has sort of dropped out, and it is no longer a multi-generational female experience. Some of that is the changing role of women in society, but a large part of it is that soaps have backed away from telling multi-generational female stories in search of the almighty 18-49 demo, and the audience loss has reflected that. So, I think it went from a highly personal and intimate experience to a more expansive but impersonal experience such that viewers don't have the investment they once did. What changes have we seen in recent years in how fans of U.S. daytime dramas connect with one another? Tom Casiello: The Internet for one - for the first time in history, it's much easier for those with the same interests to connect instantaneously, on a level playing field. Who they are in their lives, where they come from, their education - it's irrelevant on the Web. Here, they are all equal fans, and that has not only helped organize a stronger group effort in their campaigns but also created a world of discussion to bounce their ideas and opinions off of each other in what is hopefully a moderated environment. Abigail De Kosnik: The most striking fan activity that the Web, and online communities, have brought about (in my view) is that "fans make their own fun," as one of our contributors, Web site moderator "QueenEve," stated. Since fans have started communicating online, they have basically produced their own virtual soap operas - spreading spoilers and dissecting upcoming plots, posting speculations about what's going to happen next as well as (often very thoughtful) analyses of what happened recently on their favorite shows, in addition to gossiping about behind-the-scenes rumors (Which co-stars won't work together? Why did the Exec Producer fire that actor? When is that former writer coming back to this show?). There's also been a level of drama in the wars between fan bases that matches that of the heightened conflicts depicted on soap operas. The animosity that warring fan bases have borne toward one another has been awesome in its fierceness, and, while I don't want to minimize the fact that some people's feelings have probably been deeply hurt by these acrimonious exchanges, I must say that there's an element of watching or participating in soap fans battle online that is immensely engaging and entertaining. I have taken part in some of these "bitchfests" myself (and it's not always fans vs. other fans; it's also fans vs. the shows or the networks or particular storylines), and I'll always remember those impassioned campaigns as really interesting, exciting times of my life. There's something about the dedication and commitment that soap fans have for their shows that really infused the online fan experience with an intensity that many other Internet fan groups lack. It comes, I think, from the fact that, when the Web became a big part of soap fans' lives, many fans had already been engaged with these soap story worlds for years - in many cases, fans' involvement predated the Internet by decades. The Web, which permits for a really wide range of discussions and actions that can be micro-interventions or can go on for months or years, almost seems like it was specifically built as a platform for soap fans, who have decades' worth of information and insight to discuss. C. Lee Harrington: While soap viewers were among the first groups to migrate to the Net recreationally, as Nancy Baym discussed in Tune In, Log On, they were slower to create the type of user-generated content currently associated with media fandom, in part because the frequency (daily) and longevity (the average age of US soaps is 40 years) of the "primary"' text created less need for viewers to fill narrative gaps in between episodes or installments. Over the past few years, soap fans have become increasingly engaged in vlogs, video-sharing, fan fiction, podcasts, and mash-ups, while much of soap fans' energy remains devoted to the ongoing daily criticism, discussion, and fan activism which takes place in online forums and the blogosphere. Roger Newcomb: Fans are connecting on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and continue to interact on various message boards. The fans seem to be more tech-savvy these days, so the number of message boards and Facebook pages has grown by leaps and bounds. In some ways, this has splintered the online audience, with more websites and social network sites dedicated to particular actors, characters, or soap couples. We Love Soaps TV receives almost 10 percent of our hits from Twitter and, in many cases, from fans who tweet and re-tweet our features. Twitter has become the fastest way of spreading information about soaps around the web. Julie Porter: Be careful what you wish for! To me, that's the warning label that should be placed on the desire to raise viewership at any cost. The race for ratings - and ad revenue - has had an unintended consequence along the way: a decrease of conflict in storyline. The intense competition for audience share gives soap viewers a powerful amount of clout in determining how stories are resolved - and, generally, they want favorite characters to be happy, and want to see their characters' conflicts resolved. But is that what they really want? Accelerated storytelling satisfies the short-term viewer but weakens the long-term story. Conflict makes for anxiety, but quick resolutions make for an awfully boring soap, long-term. Once, it might have taken three years to resolve a complex story in a big reveal. That's storytelling. But, these days, if the focus groups say to wrap it up - well, it gets wrapped up quickly, and there's short-term satisfaction but a lot of opportunity for story and character development is lost. Faster-paced storytelling throws characters into a revolving door of reaction; the storyline rules, but deep character development is almost nil. And so the viewer who wanted a quick resolution also quickly loses interest. The willingness of networks to give focus groups and online campaigns a strong role in the decision process also leads to a bad end: It places creative control in the hands of executive management rather than writers, and fan feedback becomes the tail that wags the dog. The soap that has evolved into a marketing tool isn't nearly as satisfying as one that does what soaps were intended to do: explore the feelings and lives of people, and their ups and downs. QueenEve: I think, in the past, you might have a discussion with a neighbor or friend about the soap or the "girls" in the dorm, but fandom was fairly generic. Now, with the internet, you have both a gathering place and a divisive means of organization. That is, people generally check in on the internet to find fans of the characters or couples they like, to the exclusion of a more general audience. It has led to "board wars" in the past, between couple fans especially. The Sonny & Brenda versus Jax & Brenda fans of the 90s on General Hospital was a good representation of that, as were the Robin & Jason fans versus the Carly & Jason fans. So, on the one hand, the internet allowed fans to find each other on the internet and connect while, on the other hand, it leads to divisive and heated fights. How do the teams who make these shows take into account the fans' feedback and mindset, from your perspective? Abigail De Kosnik: I know for a fact that the shows do pay attention to soap fans' feedback, to some extent. The contributors to our book who work in the soap industry verified this, and I have heard soap actors often tell fans who want to see changes on their favorite shows that they must write or call in to the network to voice their opinions. One of my e-mails to ABC, urging them to portray professional women - the female nurses, doctors, lawyers - in a more positive light on General Hospital, got quoted almost verbatim by ABC Daytime exec Brian Frons in an interview he did with one of the soap magazines back in 2003. But, on the other hand, I think many fans, and I am one of them, are frustrated by the fact that, although the Internet permits for a much greater flow of feedback from soap viewers to soaps' producers, the shows don't seem to be able to take effective action in response. Several of our industry contributors have told us that, with soaps, time is a huge factor in this - of course, feedback on a storyline comes in well after months of that story are written and shot - but, also, I wonder if the case of soap operas, in which we see this enormous wave of feedback going to TV shows and not that much difference being made, just illustrates the fact that television is a creative industry and, probably on any television program, whether daytime or prime time or a miniseries, the writers just can't care too much about what the audience thinks about a particular storyline or character. I mean, Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner doesn't think about what fans want, or what they've liked about past episodes, when he puts a new season of Mad Men together, except in the most general way (I think he once mentioned that one reason for an increase in child character Sally Draper's air time was that many viewers relate to Sally the most, she's their "way in" to the show, since they were about Sally's age in Mad Men's time period.). So, maybe the frustration of soap fans is just indicative of the fact that online participation isn't a guarantee that "the people" can influence the power centers that much. The Web gives an illusion of what others have called "participatory democracy," but just sending a bunch of e-mails obviously isn't the way to change the minds of the minority who are the decision-makers. However, I do think that there are probably ways to use online connectivity to influence power centers, both in soap operas and in other arenas, like politics. And maybe soap fans can pioneer ways to use digital technologies to share feedback that really creates change, and then political fans and organizations can learn from those tactics!!! C. Lee Harrington: From what I can tell, soap opera creators have waffled back and forth on this. The production team rightfully knows a projected story arc in ways viewers do not, and there is a longstanding perspective of "trust us to tell a good story," even when viewers are rejecting what they are seeing daily onscreen. The flip side of that is that, with the instantaneous feedback that the internet allows, production teams (or perhaps network honchos) can get too engaged with daily (or minute-by-minute) viewer reaction and respond accordingly, to the long-term detriment of the narrative. The heated debates about the usage of focus groups in...when did that start in daytime? Late 1990s?...preceded the current tension between short and long-term narrative and industry goals. Roger Newcomb: I personally think, for the most part, the fan feedback online is disregarded. When there is a huge outrage over something (like the abrupt end of the Kyle and Fish storyline on One Life to Live), the shows and networks take notice, but, even then, it doesn't necessarily change the outcome. In general, there are so many opposing views from fans on storylines that it is difficult to know which is the majority. I've also directly heard from writers and producers of daytime soaps that they believe the online audience does not necessarily reflect the perspective of the total viewing audience, even when the online audience number in thousands, a greater number than a supposedly statistically sound Nielsen sample. QueenEve: From my experience, they couldn't care less about fans' feedback and mindset unless it feeds their agenda and own personal likes and dislikes. Occassionally, the feedback is strong enough that it can change things, but I have seen more often them using the feedback as a means not to change things but rather to force a story even more firmly down the fans' throats. That is, if some new character is not going over with the fans but the show is highly invested, we'll see even more of the character, and we will get overkill of stories trying to make this character more sympathetic and hearing other well loved characters "pimp" and "prop" the new character endlessly. How has the trend of an aging soap opera audience impacted the soap opera industry in the U.S.? Tom Casiello: The networks continue to look for new ways to entice younger viewers to their shows, as they've always felt (with good reason) that these shows survive when passed down from generation to generation. However, I do believe we are seeing the first signs of a possible shift in that thinking. Those audience members over fifty are consuming far more than their counterparts from half a century ago did. Consumers with more income in older demographics are proving to be just as valuable as younger demographics. The key is to find a way to welcome new viewers into the fold while trying not to alienate older viewers...and it's a struggle all the soaps have faced for the last fifteen to twenty years, more so than ever as the generation gap grows wider. C. Lee Harrington: As my chapter with Denise Brothers suggests, the aging of soap opera audiences had a major impact. The age of all television viewers is going up (as the global population ages), and soap viewership is no exception to this trend. However, the core demographic remains 18-49 year old women, which means soap viewers are rapidly aging out of network priorities. This is visibilized on-screen in terms of which actors/characters are prioritized (with vets moved to window-dressing or dropped from contract to recurring status), as well as the story content itself. The older viewers and actors we spoke with for our study are keenly aware of this trend and believe the genre is suffering for it. If soaps do not respond more fully to the aging of its viewership, an older demographic that is more economically powerful than the industry apparently appreciates, the genre will be in even more trouble than it is now. Roger Newcomb:Obviously, the aging soap audience is one of the contributors to the decrease in viewers. As longtime fans have passed, they weren't replaced by new fans of the genre. Even though the average age of soap viewers is the mid-50s, the shows have continued to focus on younger characters to a large degree. But there have been some shifts in the past year. Days of Our Lives features more over-50 contract actors today than ever in the history of the show. One Life to Live has recently shifted the focus to the veteran actors on the canvas. There seems to be a better mix between younger and older characters, and this may be due to the networks finally realizing who their audience is. QueenEve: Not at all. The shows keep trying to write for an audience that isn't there -- 18 - 34 -- and are losing the "aging audience" that they simply do not value. It's insane really, because it's not just the soap opera audience that has aged -- it's all of society now that the baby boomers are aging. Why that audience isn't valued is a mystery to me. What "surplus audiences" outside the target demographic should soap opera producers be paying attention to? What can they learn from these audiences? Tom Casiello: Diversity is a major issue daytime needs to address. This isn't just a Caucasian versus African-American issue. In a perfect world, these shows would also represent Latino characters, Asian characters, Jewish characters, homosexuals/bisexuals; there's no end to the types of characters these shows should involve in their long-term stories--while always striving to find a balance between honesty and stereotyping, walking that fine line between truth and cliche. All of these demographics can play vital roles in front-burner stories and can present just as many interesting character dilemmas as a middle-aged, Caucasian, heterosexual character can...probably with an added layer of nuance, an original perspective that puts an entirely new spin on the storyline. C. Lee Harrington: As I noted above, I believe older viewers should be repositioned from "surplus" to "core," given demographic projections. To engage the US viewing population as fully as possible, soaps would benefit from greater diversity in characters and storytelling overall--more LBGTQ characters, more characters of color and immigrant characters, more characters of lower socio-economic classes etc. There are genre-specific risks to this, of course (I have published several articles on the generic challenges that gay and lesbian characters/stories present to daytime), but narratives that better reflect the US population as a whole may engage a wider audience. I also echo Radha O'Meara's call below for greater attunement to audiences in other parts of the world, given the still-central role that serial narratives play in global import/export patterns. As Denise Bielby and I wrote in Global TV (2008), The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful has been particularly smart in writing narratives for multiple geographic/cultural audiences, avoiding lengthy on-screen legal trials and certain types of humorous stories that may be perplexing to non-Americans, for example. I'm not sure the extent to which other programs are following suit, but, if not, they should. Roger Newcomb: The soaps have targeted women 18-49 and 18-34 for decades. Men make up 20-25% of the total viewing audience, but you do not see commercials for men on any of these shows. African-Americans also make up a large portion of the audience, but characterizations of African-Americans are few and far between on daytime soap operas. Gay audiences, targeted by networks like Bravo, would have been a potential goldmine for soaps, but, with the cancelation of As The World Turns, there is only one regular gay character on daytime now--Bianca on All My Children. Targeting various niche groups would seem to be a more lucrative alternative for soaps than the current one-size-fits-all model. QueenEve: I think the soaps should go back to the beginning and start writing compelling stories about characters of all ages and stop writing for the "sweeps explosions." I think people like the soap opera genre. If they didn't, the genre's serial aspects would not have been adopted by primetime TV and be so successful there. It's ironic because, as soap operas tried to be more like primetime with big explosions, fights, special effects, and adventure, they became less successful. While, as primetime became more like soap operas with ongoing stories that build throughout a season (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, ER, etc.) they became more successful. Daytime soaps are bleeding viewers not because the soap opera genre is dying but because it is being executed so poorly, compared with primetime TV. People want a better product. Radha O'Meara: I'm most interested in international surplus audiences for US soap operas, and my contribution to the collection was about the Australian audience for Days of Our Lives. I think that the focus on US audiences for US productions is particularly strong, commercially and critically. If producers and creators give more serious consideration to international soap audiences, they might learn from different strategies and priorities in scheduling, episode duration, and attracting niche audiences, including young people. This might help them to attract greater audiences globally and domestically. I find the strong focus on domestic distribution and audiences for US soap operas in American media studies a little troubling. Although US scholars are cognizant of international distribution and audiences, they seem to maintain a strong emphasis on the US as the principal audience. From an antipodean perspective, it seems American media studies could be more open to the implications of plural global audiences. Given that many soap operas have long histories with international audiences, there is a wealth of experience and data on which to draw. The broadcast of US soap operas in international markets can highlight the potential of alternatives for scheduling and attracting niche audiences. For example, the most popular US daytime soap opera in Australia is The Bold and the Beautiful. It is broadcast on weekdays on the Ten network in the 4.30 p.m. timeslot. This has allowed the show to garner a significant number of young viewers, who watch it after coming home from the day at primary or high school. Since loyalty to soaps can be so enduring, this early attachment can lead to a lifelong connection. I began watching the show regularly after coming home from high school several decades ago and still enjoy it. I suspect The Bold and the Beautiful's half-hour format is a significant part of its appeal as the highest-rated U.S. daytime soap in Australia, and indeed the world. This is a contrast to many other US daytime soaps which run for an hour, and particularly those which are screened in Australia (Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital). The half-hour format might be more appealing to Australian viewers, as Australian viewers are more accustomed to popular half-hour soaps made in Australia and Britain, such as Neighbours, Home and Away, Coronation Street, EastEnders. Throughout the long history of US soap operas, program duration has consistently expanded. Early radio and television soaps often ran for 15 minutes, including a single commercial break, but most television soaps expanded in the 1950s to half-hour and later to full hour programs. A few even tried 90 minutes daily. In today's fast-paced world, perhaps US soaps could experiment with episodes of shorter duration. Rather than cancelling soaps with falling ratings, US producers might consider what shorter episodes could do for both international and domestic audiences. Producers and scholars should consider what makes particular soap operas popular in different regions and the implications this has for definitions of soap opera as a commercially successful genre. Soap opera in the US is much more clearly defined by US programs and by local emphasis on the scheduling and audience distinction between daytime and primetime. These distinctions are much less significant for international viewers. Many Australian soap fans follow daytime and primetime US, UK, and Australian soaps. Despite obvious differences, they often have no trouble grouping them together as soap operas, which share common family traits. In fact, Australian audiences are often unaware of the "original" features used to define programs in the US: US daytime soaps have been broadcast here at midnight, and primetime soaps have been broadcast during the day; daily soaps have been broadcast weekly or bi-weekly, and weekly soaps have been broadcast daily. This means that producers and scholars can learn more about what audiences seek in soaps by exploring broader definitions of the genre and its audiences. According to Christine Geraghty, Australian soaps have influenced British soaps to integrate more male characters, young characters, and "masculine" storylines over the past few decades (Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, Polity 1991). Perhaps US soaps might also consider such changes. In my contribution to the collection, I wrote about an unusual rupture in soap opera broadcasting. After screening episodes of NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives in a continuous sequence for over thirty years, in 2004, Australia's Nine Network skipped approximately one thousand episodes. The Nine Network continued to broadcast the program daily, but most Australian viewers missed four years' worth of episodes. An interesting tension arose from this fissure between those who understood the Australian audience as a component of a global, homogenous audience for Days of Our Lives centered on the US, and those who understood the Australian audience as a unique, local experience. Scholars and producers should both consider their positions on this tension. Similarly, this rupture of Days of our Lives for Australian audiences raised questions about the nature of soap audiences' enduring commitment to particular programs. It highlighted how significant parts of the audience seemed to value their own history with and experience of the program more highly than a wider, communal experience. This deeply personal connection is something that producers presumably want to foster, and new distribution methods may impact on these experiences in even more divergent ways. These are some of the lessons US soap opera producers can learn from international audiences, and they may even help them maintain their domestic audiences.
December 9, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Three): New Trends In Production and DistributionThe third section of the The Survival of Soap Opera examines how soap operas have been experimenting with both production and distribution, from new ways of taping and editing soaps to the use of transmedia storytelling. Below, several of the contributors to this part of the book answer some questions about these new trends for daytime dramas. Ernest Alba is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin whose previous work on soap operas can be found at MIT CMS: The American Soap Opera and through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. He co-authored a piece for the book with Bernard Timberg, entitled "'The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap Opera' Revisited: The Case of General Hospital. Patrick Erwin is a freelance writer and journalist who has written for the soap opera genre for Marlena De Lacroix's site and at his blog, A Thousand Other Worlds. His essay in the collection is entitled "Guiding Light: Relevance and Renewal in a Changing Genre." Racquel Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Irvine and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Radio-Television-Film Master's program whose research into the soap opera genre includes reception studies of online and offline fan communities and industry history. Her essay in the collection is entitled "From Daytime to Night Shift: Examining the ABC Daytime/SOAPnet Primetime Spin-off Experiment." Erick Yates Green is an assistant professor of media production in the School of Communication at East Carolina University and a director and cinematographer. His piece in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Production Process of Soap Operas Today." Deborah Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University, where her research focuses on television as a complicated collocation of culture, aesthetics, commerce, and politics. Her essay in the book is entitled "It's Not All Talk: Editing and Storytelling in As the World Turns." Elana Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about soap operas in her book Wallowing in Sex as well as in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Flow TV and in the anthologies Beyond Prime Time and Convergence Media History. Her piece in the collection is entitled "'What the hell does TIIC mean?' Online Content and the Struggle to Save the Soaps." Emma Webb is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas whose work focuses on fan influence and online message boards, including multiple academic projects on U.S. daytime soaps and soap opera fans. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on the Creative Decision-Making Process for Fans." What do you feel have been some of the most successful or compelling experiments in telling soap opera stories, or distributing that content, in the past few years in the U.S.? Patrick Erwin: I do think that the Guiding Light experiment I describe in the book was compelling and important. I've said before that it's a case of "the operation was a success, but the patient died." It may have been too much change for an existing show that had a very defined visual palette. But I believe it was incredibly important in terms of defining what's possible. As we move increasing towards narrowcasting on TV and the Web, programming will need to be made on a more economic scale. Racquel Gonzales: Two experiments I found promising and expanding the possibilities of the medium were the SOAPnet Night Shift series (as I've explored in my contribution to the book) and the popular, nostalgic past episode blocks featured on SOAPnet and most recently on ABC (though their "past" episodes hardly delve into the so-called "golden era" of soap history). These two share a key element crucial for contemporary resonance with audiences: acknowledgment and embrace of a rich soap past. Soap fans, more than any other TV viewer, can have years and even decades of memories with the same storylines, characters, fictional families, and fictional locations. So much soap viewing pleasure comes from those historical and memory ties between the audiences and the soap themselves and our ability to make those complex narrative connections with the texts. When the soap industry can bring about these moments of remembrance, even in experimental ways like the Night Shift spinoff, they can tap into a shared history of viewing and a soap viewer's memory of watching. Of course, this can always create a backlash where, for instance, viewers watching a General Hospital episode from 1996 on SOAPnet lament the good ol' days in comparison with current GH! Erick Yates Green: The innovative webisode series entitled What If that was aired on ABC.com and SOAPnet.com that brought together central characters from different and established soap operas is innovative. Like previous webseries Imaginary Bitches, Family Dinner, Gotham, and Venice, What If was developed as a series (in this case, 10 webisodes) and was originally aired on July 12, 2010. You can find additional information on the series here and here. Like feature films and TV primetime broadcasting, the world of soap operas distribution is VERY dynamic in our contemporary media playing field. What If, at least, is dealing with the divergent media distribution venues not only with programming that goes first to the web as well as broadcast, BUT, interestingly, as they experiment with divergent distribution, they also experiment with bringing together characters from their different primary shows into an experimental melodramatic melting pot as well. Deborah Jaramillo: I ran into a great Mexican telenovela this summer on Univision, which, as I sadly noticed at NCA, mass communication scholars continue to forget is a U.S. broadcast network. One of the most amazing things about this novela, Soy Tu Dueña (I Am Your Owner), was that it actually broke into the top 25 broadcast programs in the late summer of 2010. And Univision has recently been beating the English-language broadcast networks in the competition for 18-34 year-olds. Soy Tu Dueña would never have appeared on my radar had it not been for the World Cup in May. Even though the audience for the Mundial is probably more male then female, Univision still promoted the hell out of Soy Tu Dueña during the matches. Soy Tu Dueña features an all-star cast, including Lucero, who sings the title song with Joan Sebastian, and Silvia Piñal, a veteran of Buñuel films ("la primera actriz," the credits boast). Soy Tu Dueña is actually a remake of La Dueña, produced by Televisa in 1995. This was the complete package--pre-sold product, big stars, an excellent theme song--that rode on the coattails of the biggest sports event in the world. Sports...not exactly novela territory. It was a great experiment, and it worked. Elana Levine: I've seen a few particularly compelling experiments in recent years. One is What have been the biggest failures? Ernest Alba: I recently gave a lecture to a classroom of 50 undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin based on the essay by Bernard Timberg and myself in The Survival of Soap Opera. During the discussion, I discovered a few surprising things about young people and their relationship to soap opera - primarily that they think they know all about soap operas, don't like it based on what they know, and they have several misconceptions about them. Based on the discussion of soap opera in that class, I would say that the biggest story is of the failure of soap opera to communicate its value as entertainment to a young audience. When I posed to them the question, "What are some associations we have with soap people who watch soap operas?" I received several different responses: "Old people," "My grandma and my grandma's friends watch it," "Anyone that has free time during the day watches soaps," and my favorite: "Lonely people watch soaps." This class of mostly freshman students associate soap opera not with their parents but with their grandparents! One student related that she watched them with her mother who watched them to learn English. It is clear that young people associate soap opera with people that they perceive as being diametrically opposed to them in their viewing habits and lifestyles.
Furthermore, it seems that they are confused about what soap opera is and how it can be an enjoyable experience. They seem to believe that soap opera is a less realistic form of storytelling than other television formats, like the primetime drama or the reality show. One student made the audacious claim that House M.D. is a soap opera. Immediately a cacophony of protests rose from the class. The way they distinguished their conceptions of soap opera from House was that House had better acting, less exaggerated plots, Hugh Laurie (a single, strong male lead), more comedy, and other things to draw you in as opposed to "sappy" and "exaggerated" drama. The student finally threw up her hands in defeat and said, "Apparently, a lot of people like House and don't want it to be associated with soap opera." Despite their acknowledgement of the fakeness of television drama in soap operas, they are unwilling to associate their dislike of "fakeness" with their favorite shows, which are also clearly scripted, staged, and unrealistic depictions of reality. It is this attitude of defining soap opera primarily as that which is antithetical to anything they value that allows them to participate in the tradition of denigrating soap opera as a form of entertainment. If there is one thing that gives me hope, it is that only two students raised their hands when I asked who had never watched an episode of a soap opera. A full quarter (about 13 or 14 people) raised their hands when I asked if they'd regularly watched a soap opera at some point. One student listed four or five soaps she watched regularly when she was younger. The students know that soap opera exists and some understand it quite thoroughly, but many hold common misconceptions about soap opera because it doesn't play a role in their life and plays a role in the life of people they don't consider their peers. They use those misconceptions to further dissuade themselves from watching soap operas. Patrick Erwin: For me, I think the change in narrative from a more character-based narrative to more of a traditional soap/action adventure hybrid is the biggest failure of the last decade. Even when GH had the Luke and Laura/Ice Princess type of stories, they worked because the narrative was still rooted in the reality of what happened to those people. Soaps have alienated their existing audience and demographic by chasing the youth demographic and have implemented closed-ended storylines that buy short-term attention at the expense of long term fan investment. Racquel Gonzales: It is difficult to pin these down in a bullet point style, but, broadly, the soap industry has been disconnected with the desires of its audience for a while, and that gap has only gotten wider against the many TV and network changes throughout the 1990s and 2000s. On a very basic level, there are numerous cringeworthy experiments and sensational storylines whose aims were to entice new viewers and keep long-time viewers interested, but their results generated disinterest and audience ire. As a soap fan and scholar, the most disappointing and frustrating failures have been those manipulations of soap history and viewers' investments for quick fixes on ratings because the soap audience investment in these various often fantastic storylines depend on character continuity, recognizable relational ties, and simply a day-to-day viewing that makes sense. Deborah Jaramillo: With regard to As The World Turns, I was very disappointed with the quicker pace and the elliptical editing that made my program resemble an hour-long drama rather than a soap. I am not against formal experimentation in any genre--my piece in the anthology elaborates on this theme--but much of the pacing and editing decisions seemed to stem from an atmosphere of panic and not from artistry. I constantly complain to my students (especially when they started to get impatient with Lost several seasons back) that no one knows how to appreciate the beauty of serialized programming because no one watches soaps anymore. So many people deride television viewers' short attention spans, but watching an old-school soap opera was a daily exercise in patience. We've lost those conventions that make us wait and anticipate. We've lost process in favor of product, and this has contributed to a spoiled audience. Elana Levine: As my essay discusses, I think ABC's character blogs revealed a poor understanding of fans' investment in soaps. Because these blogs did not do much to expand or delve into the thoughts and experiences of their character-authors and so rigidly reproduced the preferred meanings of current storylines, they revealed themselves as baldly promotional efforts, with no real interest in exploring show history or character depth. Emma Webb: The first is not distributing free content online earlier. ABC didn't begin to distribute their soaps this way until 2009, even after they had been making prime-time shows available this way for over a year, and even though many of the networks had been partnering with Hulu since it's inception in 2007. The second is the lack of investment in production of soaps. As Sara Bibel points out in her chapter in the book, as the ad revenue for each soap has gone down, costing-cutting measures like eliminating breakdown writers and the actors' rehearsal time (so that each show can speed taping). This has resulted in a change in what I believe is most critical to soaps: the stories. The stories that now show up on screen often have continuity issues, focus on new characters that the audience does not know (as unknown new actors are significantly cheaper to feature than veteran actors that the audience does know), and actors (based on what has been said at personal appearances) are often confused about the direction of the story and their character's motivation. It is a downward spiral. It appears, based on the rating trends, that, as soaps cut more costs, the quality of each soap goes down, and more viewers tune out, resulting in less ad revenue and more cost cutting. What lessons can we learn from both these successes and these failures? Ernest Alba:While I find it encouraging that soap operas like General Hospital and Young and the Restless still have strong ratings, I find it discouraging that old warhorses like Guiding Light and As the World Turns have been cancelled. The biggest failures of soap opera from my perspective are that they have failed to capture a new young audience. It is clear that many students are able to pinpoint some of the strengths of soap opera - emotion, drama, and multi-character narrative structures - but they perceive them as weaknesses. Still, other strengths - longevity of characters and complexity in family structure - are mysteries to them. In our essay for the book, Bernard Timberg discusses the ways in which the camera rhetoric in soaps conveys meaning to an audience. These camera movements and ways of editing and framing a scene are unique to soaps in that they are not the same ones used in serial dramas and do not convey the same meanings. In the way meaning is constructed by the camera, we have argued that soap operas have changed little. But, if the potential audience has changed so much that they are unable to decode the meanings in soaps, it might be time to change the way in which soap opera is filmed and edited so that new audiences who are used to reality shows and documentary-style filmmaking can decode the camera's rhetoric and, if not understand the intended meaning of the narrative, at least understand the intended meaning of the shot. Some experimentation in this vein has obviously already taken place in several soaps, but the traditional way of filming and editing still dominates. My one suggestion is that we must look/research to ensure that audiences still understand how to decode the stylistic conventions of soap opera filmmaking or begin to encode meaning visually in a different way. Patrick Erwin: I think it's important that serialized storytelling return to basics, whether it's classic TV soaps or new Web soaps. The audience may be smaller, and I don't think we've quite figured out the equation that can make money on the Web, but, again, we need to move from broadcasting to narrowcasting, and soaps need to learn not to try to be everything to everyone....but rather be who they were, and are, proudly. Racquel Gonzales: It is a difficult road to anticipate the current and future viewing audience, a road soaps have been on since they began on radio. And thinking about what does or doesn't work right now in soaps really sparks wider questions about contemporary TV viewing in general, especially since seriality has been embraced as a potential element of current "quality TV." Deborah Jaramillo: If soap operas are on their way out--if everyone involved in As The World Turns knew the clock was ticking--why mess with the formula? Why try to attract an audience that isn't going to come? Why not go back to your roots and just celebrate the genre, the form? This is not to say that all changes in soaps happened recently--all genres are static and dynamic--but, if you're going to pander to an audience, pander to the one that's stuck with you across generations. Elana Levine: The first lesson would be the importance of story, of the writing. The second season of Night Shift worked because it was well written by someone (Sri Rao) who understood the rhythms and appeals of soap narrative and who respected and drew from GH history. This seems an obvious set of principles on which to base soap writing, but, too often these days, the insular community of soap writers ends up failing to take advantage of these core generic traits. The disappointments of the ABC character blogs further enforce this point. I believe that these platforms did not provide the kind of attention to history and the pleasures of soap narrative that they might have, and thus they turned off rather than drew in many viewers. How has transmedia storytelling impacted the U.S. soap opera (or not)? Racquel Gonzales: Soaps have been exploring transmedia storytelling for quite a while, particularly in print, with different characters' "diaries" being made available in book form. While these avenues provide alternate revenues, they also create more fragments for audiences to piece together for storyline continuity. Elana Levine: I don't think transmedia storytelling has had an important role in US daytime soap opera thus far. Most attempts along these lines have been pretty obviously promotional and not particularly interested in expanding or further developing the story worlds in any substantive ways. Perhaps the current format of US daytime soaps demands so much of both the production staff (churning out so many episodes so quickly) and of viewers (watching five broadcast hours a week in most cases) that there is little time or interest in expanding those story worlds in additional ways. Emma Webb: I think one of the failures of soaps has been the inability to successfully integrate transmedia storytelling into their shows. There have been attempts (as with Robin's blog on General Hospital, as described by Elana Levine), and characters writing books (for example, As the World Turns' Katie Peretti "writing" Oakdale Confidential), but they don't appear to have been successful. This may have been because, as Levine points out in her chapter, often times there is the temptation to move the character's motivation and thoughts from the screen to another other media outlet, leaving viewers frustrated and confused at a character's on screen motivation rather than providing an alternate entry point for lapsed or new viewers. However, while soaps' attempts at transmedia storytelling does not appear to have been successful, fans' attempts at transmedia seems to be more so. For example, in 2005, As the World Turns paired the characters of Lucy and Dusty together, and, in an attempt to help educate potentially new or lapsed viewers, many fans created video synopses of the two characters' history and storyline together. These videos provided an entry point for those viewers who had not been watching the show. And this type of video could provide a way for lapsed or returning viewers to get a recap of a character's storyline which could make it easier to catch-up. How have alternate distribution outlets changed the way fans find and share U.S. soap opera content? Racquel Gonzales: YouTube has been an amazing tool to bring together shared viewing memories, though I'm not sure the networks themselves appreciate the site like soap viewers. Moreover, in uploading old VHS recordings of soap edits on YT, soap fans have created an invaluable archival resource for fellow soap viewers and soap scholars. The medium makes it impossible to provide a simple DVD set of a soap. Just imagine how many discs would be required to just capture a month of One Life to Live from 1988. On YT, some of these episodes have been made available by fans for fans, while the comments section provides (as I've said previously) a shared space of viewing memory. Debrorah Jaramillo: I'm going to continue with the topic of the Mexican novela on U.S. television, not to be stubborn, but because it presents an interesting complication with regard to transmedia fandom. Unless a novela is an original production of a network like Univision, it is being aired in the U.S. after it has completed its run in its country of origin (or it simply could be delayed by a few weeks). In both cases, it becomes nearly impossible to engage with the novela within the transmedia landscape. I'm terrified to search for Soy Tu Dueña online because I don't know if it has actually completed its run in Mexico. I don't want to know what happens, and I don't want to run across fan commentary. My relationship with this novela is completely untouched by the internet and even print magazines. I feel like I'm watching this in the 1980s, even though the image is in beautiful HD. Emma Webb: Making soaps available online (either through the network's website, YouTube, or other sites) has been the biggest change to the way that fans share soap opera content in the last few years. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this also means that fans don't need to set their DVRs or watch the show's broadcast in order to keep up with their favorite soap opera. Another interesting development is that, when the content is considered to be bad or uninteresting by a group of fans, fans often ask their fellow fans if "today was worth watching?" And there are alternatives for fans who don't want to sit down and watch an entire episode. If a fan thinks that their favorite soaps are boring but still wish to see select scenes, they can easily go to YouTube and watch the scenes that interest them in what is often 10 minutes or less. With these new distribution outlets, it's even easier for a fan to catch-up if they have become a lapsed viewer. Fans can easily go back and find key moments from a variety of sources. However, this also means that, because this content is available online, fans' attention to detail about individual characters seems to have become more heightened. So, as soaps struggle with diminishing production values as they cut their budgets, the fans are even more likely to notice the slip in production values.
December 8, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Two):The History and Legacy of Serialized TelevisionThe second section of The Survival of Soap Opera looks at the deep history of the stories and characters on U.S. soap operas and the unique ways this genre draws on a show's backstory (or, in some cases, does not make good use of such history). This part of the book includes multiple reflections on the similarities and differences between serialized primetime genres and daytime serials. Below, several of the contributors to this section answer some questions about how contemporary U.S. soaps relate to their backstories. Kay Alden is co-head writer of The Bold and the Beautiful, a former consultant for ABC Daytime, and the former head writer for The Young and the Restless, a show for which she wrote from 1974 to 2006 and won four Daytime Emmys and two Writers Guild of America awards. The book includes a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Alden about what makes the soap opera genre unique. Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communication, a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (where he conducted Master's thesis work on soaps and taught a course on the genre), and an instructor with the Popular Culture Studies program at Western Kentucky University (where he is teaching a class on soaps) who has published work on the genre for Fast Company, Portfolio, and Transformative Works and Cultures. Ford co-authored the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." He also wrote an essay for the collection, entitled "Growing Old Together: Following As the World Turns' Tom Hughes through the Years." Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera critic and active member of the online soap opera fan community who has written for Soap Opera Weekly and currently writes on the genre at her Red Room member blog. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas." J.A. Metzler is a lifelong soap opera viewer who runs a boutique marketing and communications consultancy and formerly participated in a daytime writer development program. His essay in the collection is entitled "Did the 2007 Writers Strike Save Daytime's Highest-Rated Drama?" Christine Scodari is a professor of communication and multimedia studies and a women's studies associate at Florida Atlantic University who has written numerous pieces of scholarship on issues of gender and age in soap operas, including her book Serial Monogamy. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Of Soap Operas, Space Operas, and Television's Rocky Romance with the Feminine Form." Why is the history of U.S. soap operas so vital to their continued survival? Sam Ford: U.S. soap operas may be one of the most hyper-serialized forms of storytelling in history, but it certainly does not "own" serialization. As many essays in our book point out, there are many ways in which primetime television and other types of storytelling are often "doing serialization" better than daytime serial dramas these days. Yet what sets the U.S. soap opera model apart not only from primetime serialized television shows these days but also from telenovelas and other adaptations of the soap opera genre is their history. As soap operas look to compete in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, the industry's answer is often to adapt what they have to offer to what it seems audiences want: thus, we hear discussion about the MTV-ization of our culture or else reality television's effect on audience expectations, and many people in the soap opera industry start thinking and talking about how soap operas need to adapt to these changes. My response is quite the opposite: that soap operas have to stick to their major points of differentiation in storytelling style, even as they change with the social stories of the times. In short, rather than trying to tell their stories more quickly to compete with primetime serialization, soap operas have to think about what primetime cannot do. Primetime shows can do CGI better than daytime dramas because they have bigger budgets. Primetime has a better chance to do location shoots these days. What primetime can't do is tell stories with characters who people have been following for decades, with such complex backstories and generations of fans who have grown up watching these shows. As soap operas concentrate on quick-fixes to jump start the genre instead of leaning on the history that sets the genre apart, these shows run the risk of distancing themselves from their very points of differentiation. For instance, my work has concentrated on the now-cancelled As the World Turns, a show that maintained one of its core families for its entire 54-year run and had multiple actors who had been in the same role for up to five decades. My essay in this collection focuses on the character of Tom Hughes, who audiences watched from birth in 1961 to the show's cancellation in 2010. No other form of entertainment can accomplish that sort of storytelling, and the rich history and complexity such storytelling drives cannot be duplicated elsewhere on television. (I've made the argument elsewhere that narrative worlds like the super hero universes of Marvel and DC, the pro wrestling narrative world, or the "real" worlds of various sports leagues or political news might rival the "immersive story worlds" of soap operas in their longevity and depth.) In our collection, Jason Mittell's piece points out the many ways in which primetime serialized television differs from daytime soaps, rejecting the notions of many who feel that complex primetime television narratives are a direct descendant of U.S. soaps. And, elsewhere, Jason writes about complex primetime television shows as having a high degree of "drillability," with dense texts that have multiple layers of meaning to unpack. Soap operas achieve complexity as well, but--to Jason's point--in a much different way than primetime shows. Rather than a (relatively) small number of episodes that are quite dense, soap operas achieve their complexity through accretion--by telling the daily stories of characters over the course of decades and thus relying on collaboration with their audiences in comparing any current moment in the text with the deep history of those characters. Primetime television shows cannot provide those pleasures, and yet daytime soap operas very rarely take full advantage of the types of stories only they can tell. Have you seen examples of today's soap operas in the U.S. taking advantage of their histories in powerful ways that you believe exemplify what the soap opera genre is supposed to do? Sam Ford: There were certainly elements of the end of As the World Turns which played on the rich history of those characters and the show. In particular, bringing back longtime show favorite Dr. John Dixon after several years of absence from Oakdale was a fantastic nod toward fans, as was featuring several of the show's most enduring faces more prominently in the show's final months. Meanwhile, while I didn't watch it myself, I heard many great things about Days of Our Lives' treatment of the death of show matriarch Alice Horton in 2010 after portrayer Frances Reid's death. J.A. Metzler's piece in our book highlights The Young and the Restless' renewed focus on longtime character Katherine Chancellor as a sign of how that show gained some traction by recalibrating its focus through the writer's strike, and The Bold and the Beautiful writer Kay Alden writes in her piece about how that show has retained focus on four central characters from its premiere to the current day. These examples are stark reminders to fans of why they still watch soap operas in particular and the pleasures that soap operas provide that cannot be found elsewhere. My suspicion would be that it is these moments, periods, eras, and elements which keep millions of U.S. viewers still dedicated to a genre that is clearly in decline. Why do these soap operas ignore or not properly make use of that rich history? Sam Ford: Writers too often see the history of soap opera story worlds as a point of risk rather than a strength, especially as writing teams move from one show to another and thus have decades of history to catch up on. That leads to new writing regimes bringing in new characters and downplaying those characters they are afraid they can't write so well. Rather than seeing fans' desire for continuity as a way to engage with them and draw them in, it's seen as a negative: to avoid fan complaining, writers just stay away from history they don't know that well. I've had head writers of shows complain to me in the past about how difficult it can be to come on board a new show and try to catch up on storylines of years gone by, especially now that these shows have several decades of history. Much of the problem has to do with resources: many shows don't have digitized or easily accessible archives to review history and, even if they do, there is so much history to catch up on, and writers are expected to write 260 original episodes each year. So, if you aren't already steeped in the history of the show you write for, it's extremely hard to get caught up. In my mind, that means knowledge of and history with the franchise should be a requirement for being hired to write for a soap, but it's typically not. J.A. Metzler: As ratings for all soap operas have eroded over time, I think that soap producers and writers have sought to find alternate ways to build a viewing audience. I think many producers/writers have been trying to "recreate the wheel" instead of relying upon the tenets that have long made serialized storytelling popular: character consistency; evolution of a character or set of characters over time; and a certain feeling of familiarity that comes with "visiting" with these characters on a regular basis. I think too many have tinkered with the older, more tested formula, ignoring their shows' rich history and consistency in order to try and evolve to a new formula driven by a faster-paced, plot-based type of storytelling with a revolving door of younger, unfamiliar characters, in the hopes of engaging a new audience of viewers who they believe have a limited attention span for slower-evolving stories based on character and continuity. In what ways are contemporary U.S. soap operas failing to use their history in compelling ways? Lynn Liccardo: There was great excitement among As the World Turns fans when word leaked out that Julianne Moore would be briefly reprising her breakout role of Frannie Hughes. Her appearance was to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Frannie's father and step-mother (and aunt), Bob and Kim Hughes, which coincided with the show's 54th, and final, anniversary this past April 2nd. As it happens, on April 2nd, I was in St. Louis, presenting my essay for The Survival of Soap Opera, on the Capitalizing on History panel at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. You just cannot plan that kind of irony. Had I not known of Moore's appearance two episodes hence, and, had I not seen a clip somewhere online of her lifting a glass to toast her parents, the April 1st episode might have given me false hope for how the show would close out its 54-year run. The episode opens with Kim and Bob celebrating their anniversary over champagne at the Lakeview. Kim gives Bob a framed photograph of their cabin, which she had redecorated. She tells him that she's made sure that his schedule was clear so the two of them could spend a long weekend together. But Bob's schedule had changed, and he wants to postpone their getaway. With the conflict in place, the stage was set for the kind of story that could have - make that should have - been the linchpin for the show's final months. Instead, it was all over in three short episodes that barely scratched the historical and emotional surface before all was resolved. While ATWT had used the short-arc format extensively in 2008-9, after the show's cancelation was announced in December 2009, the writers had returned to soaps' more traditional narrative structure. Why the show chose the short-arc for Kim and Bob's anniversary reveals great deal about TPTB's attitudes towards both longtime fans and the show's history. Before I get into why, a little bit of background about the couple. Bob Hughes was a young boy when ATWT began in 1956. He may well have been the first character to be SORASed (soap opera rapid aging syndrome) when Don Hastings took over the role in 1960. Kathryn Hays began playing Kim Sullivan (Reynolds, Dixon, Stewart, Andropoulous, Hughes) in 1972. The admitted doppelganger of ATWT's creator, Irna Phillips, Kim proceeded to seduce Bob, who was married to her sister (Frannie's late mother, Jennifer). For more than a decade, Kim and Bob suffered the consequences of their indiscretion. But, by 1985, the couple was deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to marry and assume the role of tent pole characters previously occupied by Bob's parents, Nancy and Chris. In recent years, ATWT had abandoned its traditional intergenerational storytelling in favor of more isolated storylines (see here). So the flashbacks interspersed in the second episode of the arc filled in the backstory for newer viewers. For this longtime fan, it was an exercise in ambivalence: while I was delighted to see the show's glorious past, those flashbacks were also a bitter reminder of just how much had been lost. The emotional depth so apparent in the flashbacks stood in stark contrast to the superficial, even trivial, manner in which Kim and Bob's story was playing out. There were no good guys or bad guys here. Both characters' points-of-view were valid and easily understood. Bob was reluctant to give up his profession and concerned about the legacy he would leave; Kim, worried about the serious health issues both had dealt with the previous year and tired of playing second fiddle to Bob's career, wanted to spend more time with her husband. In fact, the tension between Kim and Bob mirrored aspects of the tension between Bob's protègè, Reid Oliver, and legacy character Luke Snyder as the two embarked upon their short-lived relationship. This brings up another issue. When fans complain about soaps' lack of intergenerational storytelling, TPTB often point to the budget restrictions that limit the number of actors per episode. Okay. But Kim and Bob were on fairly often in the final months, so the actors were already getting paid. However, with Kim and Bob's problems so quickly resolved, the characters' only purpose was to prop Reid and Luke and their son Chris. Tom was right when he said of his father and Kim, "If they can't make it, what hope is there for the rest of us?" How much richer the story would have been if all the couples trying to find their way back to each other could have learned from Kim and Bob's troubles. And the conversations: Kim with her niece, Barbara, and daughter-in-law, Margo; Bob with his sons Tom and Chris and grandson Casey. The old rivalries referenced: Bob's first wife and Tom's mother, Lisa, and the impact being a child of divorce had on Tom, for instance, or Bob's affair with Susan Stewart, the mother of Casey's girlfriend, Alison. All of that could have been spread out and fully examined over the show's final months. Instead, some of the interactions reduced characters to farce: both Lisa and Susan trying to seduce Bob as a test to prove that he really loves Kim. Really? Now, of course, maybe if this had been a facet as the story evolved the course of several months... Not to belabor my almost morbid fascination with Executive Producer Christopher Goutman's psyche, but I have to say that, like the train wreck that killed Reid Oliver; the first time Luke and his first love, Noah, made love, and the death of the show's matriarch, Nancy Hughes, there was a perfunctory quality - even patronizing, and almost spiteful - about how Kim and Bob's story was shoehorned into these three episodes. It was almost as though Goutman was taunting longtime fans: "Look how we remember the show's history, and, yes, we actually do remember how to lay out this kind of story and write these kinds of scenes; but three episodes is all you're going to get. So, be satisfied, and don't complain." And, for the most part, that was exactly the response from fans and the soap media. Other than a few laments about the story's brevity, I don't recall see any critical comments on the boards. It seems that fans have been conditioned not just to accept these crumbs, but to be grateful for them - even if TPTB make a mockery of the show's history in the process. Kim and Bob's truncated story was a far cry from how ATWT's sister show, Guiding Light, closed out its 72-year run in 2009 with the marriage of Vanessa and Billy Lewis. Both were long characters, to be sure, but not nearly as deeply-woven in Springfield's canvas as Kim and Bob were in Oakdale's. And, while, as a couple, Vanessa and Billy had their fans, theirs was not a manifest destiny. In fact, there were a few on the boards who would have preferred that Vanessa remarry another former husband, Matt Reardon. But Kim and Bob were forever. Funny story: I came across the questionnaire I filled out for C. Lee Harrington and Denise Brothers' essay for the book, "Age and Aging in Soaps." Here's what I wrote back in 2007: "What I'd really like to see is a former love come into the life of a vet...(but) I'm not interested in seeing a marriage - Tom-Margo, Bob-Kim - threatened." While I'm sure I meant it at the time, I would have so loved for As the World Turns to have ended its 54 years showing Kim and Bob fully confronting their conflicts, secure in the knowledge that they would, indeed, resolve them. What is the relationship between these soap opera and other forms of serialized television drama in the U.S., such as reality television or primetime scripted dramas? Kay Alden: When reality TV descended upon us, unlike some others, I did not view this development as the harbinger of the death of the soap opera. Instead, I argued that the sudden popularity of such programming increased the likelihood of the survival of the soap opera, in that these reality shows inherently draw their support from the innate human desire to know "what happens next," which is our stock in trade in soapdom. I believed at that time that the enormous popularity of the reality shows would not sustain because of the lack of knowledge the audience has of the characters, unlike in soap opera, where viewers have known these characters often for many years. I believed that this type of programming is inherently formulaic, and, between that fact and the lack of well-known, well-drawn characters, I did not believe that reality TV, over time, could compete with what we do in daytime television via the scripted medium. I did hope, however, that seeing a new public interested in this type of serialized drama might somehow transfer to a new, younger demographic available for daytime serials. Regrettably, such transference has not occurred. It is interesting to note that, in many reality programs, more attention is now placed on the characters - who these people are whose lives have been brought together for the duration of the program; who will form alliances; who will be the successful manipulators? Reality TV has learned the lesson well, that in order to succeed, an audience needs to care about the characters involved. Choosing the cast of Dancing with the Stars has now become a significant facet of the show, as producers hope to cement viewer involvement with their "characters" even before the season actually begins. Survivor promotes the characters in their upcoming season as the primary draw for viewers to tune in. Thus, I maintain, reality TV has learned what we must always remember in our soap opera world: daytime drama is a character-based medium. It is the characters, far more than clever plot twists, which keep viewers tuning in again and again. In reality TV, the plots are simple. The drama is the contest: who will win the game. But the relationships among the characters, the friends and foes that develop, the alliances, the manipulations...these are the facets that keep viewers involved. Now, the question is: what can we learn from this new venue that has so successfully entered our realm and captivated the viewing public? Immediacy, surprise, fresh plot twists...all these are important. On The Bold and the Beautiful, we have recently tried to find ways of adding more of the "reality" perspective, with our real-life shows among the homeless of Los Angeles and subsequent additional reality segments we will be featuring on the show. But, above all, we in soap operas must continue to concentrate on our well loved and well understood characters. This is where we in daytime drama have the supreme advantage, with shows that have been coming into viewers' homes for years and characters our audiences know and love. In the quest to reach out and garner new audience, let us always remember that it is our beloved characters which provide our first and foremost draw for loyal viewership. Christine Scodari: I've seen it dozens of times, whether I'm casually perusing online forums devoted to primetime dramas or systematically investigating them for my research. "Why must every show have a romance?" a fan queries. Another chimes in, "I'm tired of them shipping the male and female leads." Then, almost like clockwork, there's the rub: "This is not a soap opera!" Not only do such exchanges refer to something essential (but not unique!) to the soap opera genre (developing romantic relationships or, in fanspeak, "ships" between ongoing characters) but implicitly to another ingredient that makes the first one possible and, perhaps, probable--serialization. Before 1978, when Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991) debuted, there had only been a couple of short-lived soaps in prime time. Except for these and one or two series in which the leads were married from the start, there were no developing romances between ongoing characters in U.S. primetime dramas during network television's first three decades. Prior to the 1980s, nighttime dramatic series were structurally episodic, and save for maintaining the basic premise, setting, and slate of regular characters (anthologies, of course, didn't even have these), each episode was its own mini-movie. Guest players entered and left the canvas within the hour, including villains and objects of affection for the primarily male heroes. Thanks to an amnesia-inducing reset button, whatever guest characters the regulars loved, or fought, or mourned in the previous episode would conveniently be forgotten the following week. Star Trek's (NBC, 1967-1969) Captain Kirk may have had his disposable girl-on-every-planet, but, while Della Street pined for the title character in the legal drama Perry Mason (CBS, 1957-1966) and Miss Kitty Russell eyed Marshall Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955-1975), these long-suffering regulars never got to first base. The show most credited with ushering in the hybridized, serial-episodic primetime drama and the related phenomenon of developing romances between ongoing characters is Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-1987). However, neither it nor its many imitators are true soap operas. As Thompson notes in From "Hill Street Blues" to "ER": Television's Second Golden Age (1996), Hill Street's creators were ordered by the network to insert at least one plot each episode that would begin and end within the hour. And that they did, usually by bringing one or more professional storylines to closure while attenuating the personal ones. Such series were showered with Emmys and lauded as innovative and gutsy for their long-term character arcs and sink-in-your-teeth acting, with nary a nod to the much-denigrated genre that actually pioneered such storylines (albeit in low-budget fashion). Since then, mushrooming media options and accompanying audience fragmentation have made serial and serial-episodic primetime dramas into riskier investments for the major commercial networks. Viewers who miss a week or two of complex plotting become frustrated and often drop off. As a result, such series fare worse in both first-run and syndication than episodic, procedural dramas such as those associated with the "Law and Order" and "CSI" franchises. Daytime soap opera viewership has, logically, declined for many of the same reasons. The new model for serial-episodic drama series in prime time is one that is more episodic than serial. Its epitome is CBS's The Good Wife (2009-present), in which a long-term arc anchored in attorney Alicia's troubled relationship with her politico husband and flirtation with a partner at her law firm very sparsely peppers each installment, while the "A" plot of each episode is one open and quickly shut legal case. Meanwhile, daytime dramas languish as their numbers dwindle, their business model insufficient to address today's realities. In a spate of experimentation to see what, if any, primetime traits might be emulated in order to improve its prospects, daytime has lately dabbled in storylines sampling every dramatic subgenre from the occult to organized crime to high school musicals and forayed into reality TV territory, in part by incorporating talent and other contests into its plots. These gestures have one thing in common; they are efforts to nestle shorter-term storylines within longer arcs, just as competitive reality series tell a weekly tale of which contestant will be eliminated in the course of weaving a seasonal narrative about who the ultimate victor will be. Even for soaps, then, it seems that serialization and the intricate, patiently plotted character stories it can engender are becoming suspect. The pivotal contribution daytime made to the development of "high quality" primetime drama has been persistently overlooked, and now this very feature--serialization--is one to be gingerly employed, if not drastically curtailed, wiped away like that soapy ring around the tub. Perhaps the anti-shippers need only wait--wait until soap operas themselves fade away and inflexibly episodic series are again so dominant in primetime that elegantly evolving relationships between regular characters are virtually impossible to assemble. I, on the other hand, would mourn that eventuality. Lynn Liccardo: My focus has been on the relationship between daytime soaps and primetime scripted dramas - hence the title of my essay for the book, "The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Operas." So, it's no surprise that, as my daytime soap viewership came to an end with the final episode of As the World Turns this past September, I was looking at several primetime shows to take up the slack, one in particular: the CW's Life UneXpected. But as the wise Yogi put it so well, "It's like deja-vu, all over again." Creator Liz Tigelaar's experience as an adopted child inspired the story of sixteen-year old Lux, who seeks out her birth parents. The show surely would have resonated with soap opera's creator, Irna Phillips, whose difficult relationships with her adopted son and daughter provided material for powerful stories on As the World Turns and Another World. Like Friday Night Lights and Mad Men, LUX (yes, the wordplay between the title and the title character is a bit precious) is one of those modest stories of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. LUX was always a strange fit on the CW (a joint venture between CBS and the old WB), a fact the network acknowledged when the show premiered in January 2010: The drama is unlike most of the CW's current schedule, because it's not about sexy high schoolers in Beverly Hills or sexy college students on the Upper East Side. Instead, it's a mature, adult drama. The show has more in common with classic WB dramas like Gilmore Girls and Everwood, dealing with the relationships between parents and children. Not only is it the best new show of 2010, but it's certainly the best new show the CW has produced in its four years on the air. Indeed it was, but that was then. Just before the second season premiere the very week ATWT left the air in mid-September, Tigelaar gave a candid - very candid (were that former ATWT executive producer Christopher Goutman as forthcoming about the network interference he had to deal with over his 11 years with the show) - interview detailing the changes the CW demanded before renewing Life UneXpected last spring. "I could tell tales about Baze and Kate and Lux and Ryan the rest of my life and not get bored. The CW would kill me and cancel my show, but I seriously could." And I would happily watch Tigelaar's tales. Sad to say, the second season reminds me of what daytime soaps have become: a few beautifully written moments squeezed in-between what the network wanted from Tigelaar: "to introduce new characters, to provide more conflicts, foils, love interests to all the main characters." In the words of The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff, "Can we maybe get some more superficial conflict in here?" So, for its second, and likely final, season LUX morphed from "a mature, adult drama" to one more CW show about a "sexy high schooler," in this case, having an affair with her teacher while thoughtlessly betraying her best friend. Fan reaction was predictable. For ShellySue at TWoP: Last night I was thinking, "This show is horrible. I can't possibly watch it anymore. It used to be a good show with so much potential. What happened?" At that same moment ShelleySueTeenDaughter said, "This show is great. I can't believe I ever didn't like it. It was so boring in the beginning. I'm glad they made it more interesting." So it's clear to me that I'm hating this show because it isn't written for me anymore (if it ever was). To bad, because I really used to enjoy it. Tigelaar gets character - and she gets soap opera - "I love those conventions, I love those moments...I love those soap opera storylines..." She has worked on some of the primetime shows I've always believed embodied the ethos of your mother's soap opera: "an ensemble of fully developed, multi-generational, middle-class characters shown in open-ended, inter-connected, intimate stories, where the actions of one character reverberated for all," among them American Dreams and Dirty Sexy Money. Yes, yes, I know the Darlings were filthy rich, but, in the first season, the family relationships were grounded in emotional honesty. That is until ABC programmers started mucking around with the second season, then cancelled the show. The recent announcement that the CW was not ordering additional 2nd-season episodes beyond the initial thirteen suggests that Life UneXpected will soon follow suit. The AV Club's Todd Vanderwerff speaks for many frustrated fans of these kinds of shows when he says: If there's one thing networks believe in the very pits of their stomachs, it's that real life, life as it's really lived, cannot make for interesting and compelling television, despite the fact that the entire output of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (thirtysomething, etc.), Friday Night Lights, and even the shows of David Simon suggest that writing small-scale stories about people living mundane lives can be really, really fascinating when done right But the truth is, for the broadcast networks, the numbers simply aren't there for these kinds of small-scale stories. Friday Night Lights made it to five seasons only because of the deal NBC put together with DirecTV. Mad Men survives on AMC with fewer than two million viewers. So it's not surprising that there's a growing consensus that if serialized storytelling is to survive, it will be on cable - and not just premium cable. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick provides a clear and cogent explanation of how economics allow basic cable to take a chance on a show like Men of a Certain Age. CBS would have taken the show; after all, co-creator Ray Romano made the network a ton of money with Everyone Loves Raymond. But the network wanted changes - 30 minutes, more comedic - Romano was not willing to make. (For what it's worth: as mentioned above, CBS is one of the owners of the CW, which might account for what's gone on with Life UneXpected.) But Romano stood his ground, and Men of a Certain Age, which was well received by critics, returns for its second season on TNT on December 6th. But it's not just taking a chance on a show: it's giving the show - and viewers - a chance. A cable show may get pulled after one season, but not before all thirteen episodes have aired - and in the same time slot. So, while a critically acclaimed show like Fox's Lone Star might not have survived more than one season, the show would have gotten a fair shot instead of being cancelled after two episodes. Losing Lone Star so quickly was particularly frustrating because the show had a fascinating, if edgy, premise - a con man leading a double life while trying to break with his past - with a cast that included Jon Voight and David Keith. Of course, while Fox's decision to use Lone Star cannon fodder against ABC's Dancing with the Stars makes sense in the real world of broadcast networks - put your strongest show up against the toughest competition - why, when it predictably failed to beat DWTS, Fox didn't give the show a lifeline at FX is anybody's guess. This is hardly a new phenomenon: Sam Ford and I had this conversation in 2006. The economic realities that force the broadcast networks to move shows around and pull serials after a couple of episodes have created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; many viewers who've been burned before simply don't watch, or, if they do watch, don't allow themselves to become emotionally invested. So maybe creators wanting to tell "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives" should follow Ray Romano's lead and not allow the broadcast networks to try to save any more of these shows by destroying the very qualities that make them so special. Had Liz Tigelaar gone to TNT or AMC instead of The CW when she was looking for a home for Life UneXpected, the show might be preparing for its third season rather than facing almost certain cancellation. But, while cable offers hope for the future of serialized storytelling, there are challenges. The thirteen-episode cable season limits the depth of serialized storytelling. Fans on Television without Pity's FNL board were hungry for more; marnyh's comment was typical: "As much as I adore this show, it really was harmed by the abbreviated season. There was too much stuff I wanted to see more of, and too many characters I wanted fleshed out." As for Mad Men, on Ginia Bellafante's New York Times blog, one fan posited, "I'm sure we can all agree that Congress should pass a law that this show should be two hours, at least 40 weeks a year. Rest up, Mr. Weiner." Then there's the question of gender. Because FNL, Mad Men, and, to a lesser extent, Men of a Certain Age, are about, well, men, or at least, manly pursuits, these shows are able to escape the "chick" label and, as a result, attract more media buzz. Witness Charlie Rose, one of the few places where in-depth conversations about popular culture take place. Rose's shows about FNL and Mad Men, have, with the notable exception of Connie Britton, have included only men. This is not to devalue the opinions of Matt Roush, Ken Tucker, and Bill Carter, but to suggest that people like Virginia Heffernan, Ginia Bellefante, and Alessandra Stanley, all of whom (and yes, I realized they're all at The New York Times) have written with great insight about these shows, and others, would enrich the conversation around Charlie's oak table. Another example: Todd Vanderwerff's posted his observations about Life UneXpected on The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. The A.V Club is a reference to "the olden times, a school's audiovisual club would be composed of a bunch of geeks..." Needless to say, AV clubs were largely populated by socially inept males. Hence, Michael Clayton's response to the Vanderweff post: "I think I grew an ovary just reading the first 2 paragraphs. Seriously though, I've never heard of this show. Why is AVClub covering it?" As serialized storytelling continues its transition, there are questions that must be asked and answered: Who's the audience for these kinds of shows? How to identify potential viewers? And why is that audience so small compared to, say, reality shows? Since there is such and enormous range of serialized storytelling, exactly what do I mean by "these kinds of shows" beyond being "small-scale stories about people living mundane lives?" What about the web? I'm still working on that, so check my blog for the future of serialized storytelling, part 2...
December 6, 2010
The Survival of Soap Opera (Part One): The State of the American SoapSoap operas have been a staple in American broadcasting since the dawn of network radio in the 1930s, yet at a time when several major soaps have been canceled, they seem to be an endangered species. A new book released this week, The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations For a New Media Era, brings together key thinkers about this embattled genre from the worlds of industry, fandom, journalism, and academia to share their reflections on the current state of the American daytime serial and to offer their suggestions on what tactics and strategies might allow it to thrive in a new media era. The book is edited by three researchers -- Sam Ford (Director of Digital Strategy for Peppercom Strategic Communications), Abigail De Kosnik (assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies), and C. Lee Harrington (professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University) -- who have been key contributors to the Convergence Culture Consortium (soon to be rebranded as the Futures of Entertainment Consortium). Ford is also the co-author with Joshua Green and I of my current book project, Spreadable Media, which we hope to release late next year. This book does what the best contemporary media scholarship should be doing -- tackling an issue which has enormous impact on the shape of our communications environment, brokering a conversation which brings key stakeholders to the table and reflects the diversity of perspectives around this topic, and making an intervention which reaps pragmatic rewards even as it sharpens our conceptual understanding of how television production emerges at the intersection between Broadcast networks and networked communications. The prose remains accessible throughout, in part because it is designed to reach an audience far beyond the university book store ghetto. There's an immediacy about the project because it seeks to bring classic scholarly perspectives to bear on a very pressing set of concerns. And there's a passion to the writing because everyone contributing feels a strong stake in these developments, because whatever else they are, they are fans of soaps as a genre and care about their long-term viability. I have asked the three editors of the book to help organize a forum to be conducted in four installments through this blog, bringing together some key contributors to the book, to share their reactions to its four core themes. This material is at once a sample of what the book offers but also an extension of the book which is able to include some developments which have unfolded since the book went to press. The first section of the book looks at the many challenges U.S. soap operas face today. Below, a cross-section of the contributors to that section answer some questions about the state of the U.S. soap opera industry today. Giada Da Ros is a television critic for a weekly Italian newspaper who has published essays on a variety of primetime television dramas, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, The L Word, Lost, and Queer as Folk. Patrick Mulcahey, a current writer with The Bold and the Beautiful, has won four Daytime Emmys and three Writers Guild of America awards for nearly three decades of writing for soap operas, also including General Hospital, Guiding Light, Loving, Santa Barbara, Search for Tomorrow, and Texas. The collection features a piece based on Da Ros' interview with Mulcahey which focuses on changes in soap opera writing contracts. Barbara Irwin, a professor of communication studies at Canisius College who has researched soap operas for more than two decades, has co-authored two books on soap opera The Young and the Restless and currently serves both as chair of the soap opera area of the Popular Culture Association national conference and as co-director of the Project Daytime research initiative. The collection features a piece based on C. Lee Harrington's interview with Irwin and research partner Mary Cassata, focused on the state of U.S. soap operas today. Jaime J. Nasser is the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Studies Program; the Gender and Sexuality Program; and the Latin American, Latino and Iberian Peoples and Culture Program at Bryn Mawr College who recently received his doctorate from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts with a dissertation that focused, in part, on the emergence of the telenovela. Nasser's essay in the collection is entitled "Giving Soaps a Good Scrub: ABC's Ugly Betty and the Ethnicity of Television Formats." William J. Reynolds is a published historian who writes about the Ossining, New York, area and U.S. presidencies and he researches soap opera history and actively participates in online and offline soap opera community events. The collection features a piece based on Sam Ford's interview with Reynolds on memories of the soap opera The Edge of Night. Tristan Rogers is an actor best known for playing the role of Robert Scorpio for various stints over the past three decades on General Hospital and General Hospital: Night Shift and who currently has roles on both The Young and the Restless and online series The Bay. The book features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with Rogers about changes in the soap opera industry, audiences, and texts. Melissa C. Scardaville is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Emory University who has published her work on soap operas for American Behavioral Scientist and previously served as the Guiding Light editor for Soap Opera Digest. Scardaville's essay in the book is entitled "The Way We Were: The Institutional Logics of Professionals and Fans in the Soap Opera Industry." For readers who are not soap opera fans, where do U.S. soap operas find themselves today? Barbara Irwin: Soap operas today find themselves at a crossroads. With diminishing ratings, intensifying scrutiny focused on the bottom line, and a new media landscape, questions are being raised as to their lasting power. In the last year and a half, we've seen the cancellation of two long-time CBS/Procter & Gamble shows, Guiding Light (the longest running scripted series ever in broadcasting) and As The World Turns. On the heels of these cancellations was the recent announcement that the Disney/ABC-owned cable network, SOAPnet, will end its run in January of 2012. Viewership of soap operas has declined dramatically over the last 20 years, with three-quarters of the audience vanishing. In their heyday on radio in the early 1940s, one could listen to as many as 65 different soap operas on any given day. In 1970, there were more soap operas on television than at any other time - 19 in all. Today, just six remain. Evolutionary changes in industry and storytelling have brought us to the present state of soap operas. For their first sixty years (1930-1990), there was little change in soap opera storytelling, due in great part to the close ties the writers and creators had to the originator of the form, Irna Phillips. Just less than 20 years ago, nine of the 12 soap operas on the air were being written and/or executive produced by individuals with a direct connection to Irna Phillips - what I would call the "second generation" of soap opera creators. Most of these individuals have by now been replaced, and some have passed away, leaving the writers of today farther removed from Irna and her way of creating and writing soap operas. The changes evident in storytelling reflect this distance. Industry forces are also at play. Today, even the most powerful headwriters are not insulated from the corporate executives whose job it is to ensure that their creative branches remain profitable. The soap opera industry has made numerous attempts to reduce costs and at the same time regain or build new audience. Some of the cost-cutting efforts are invisible to viewers, such as going to a 4-day production schedule. Reducing the size of casts and writing out long-standing characters played by high-paid actors, however, changes the soap opera landscape and potentially alienates viewers. Other cost-cutting measures that have affected the soaps include fewer sets, smaller production staffs, and the near elimination of the large production "roxie" scenes and remotes as stories climax. New means of distribution have been implemented in an effort to regain lost audience and build new audiences. SOAPnet, launched in 2000, provides same-day re-broadcasts of soaps and weekend marathons in an attempt to provide soap viewers with an opportunity to watch their shows at convenient times. DVRs offer another avenue for time-shifting. The Internet offers network soap opera sites, YouTube, and other platforms through which viewers can see full episodes, clips, and features related to the soaps. But with these new technologies comes the end of habitual, ritualistic viewing. Webisodes and online soaps represent an innovation in soap opera storytelling, though, with limited story arcs and definite start and end points, these diverge from the traditional soap opera. This form of storytelling is in its infancy, but it does offer the possibility of driving lost viewers back to their network soaps and to build a new and different audience. With the proliferation of mobile devices, delivering soaps to viewers on the go may hold some promise. Advancing technology is something of a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to help the ailing soap industry, it also has created an environment in which viewers have wide-ranging options on their televisions and an unlimited online world that has increased the competition for viewing soaps immensely. How would you explain the shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades? Giada Da Ros: Soap operas, as a genre, are at a difficult conjuncture right now. Reasons are different. The main one, in my opinion, is that they are opaque and therefore hard to "read." On the surface, they appear easy to follow. In reality, giving meaning to what is seen on the screen requires time and commitment to the program. I love the genre, yet the idea of following a new soap makes me cringe. I don't care for it. I know that if I want to follow one, I have to give myself time, know to learn who the characters are and what the relationships are. Like in real life: love at first sight can happen, but, for the most part, you need time to care about someone and to learn what is that makes them special, when they are having a good or a bad day, what is the norm or the bizarre about them. It doesn't happen instantly. The shift in people's behaviors and the fact that they don't give themselves time, I believe, reflects in the shift in the soap opera industry's popularity. Soaps are always in flux, yet you must keep a zen-like quality of viewing: you are in the moment, always. You don't know what the future holds. They say it takes at least six months to build a soap audience, and that is for a reason. Also, viewers are more aware of TV genres and tropes and have expectations that they didn't use to have in the past. They are more visually educated and critical. Trusting this knowledge and the expectations they often incur is a common misconception. Most viewers when approaching soaps expect to see Caravaggio, not Picasso, and they judge it accordingly. Despite appearances, soaps are more conceptual than mimetic. They do not portray reality; they use realistic elements to create a different reality: one of the mind, abstract and symbolic, which borders with the superficial "illusion of reality." Several planes of reality intersect, and the emotional reality emerges. Conventions of the genre, narrative and of other kind (like recasting, being back from the dead, the twin sibling, or inside jokes) are proof of how an intellectual leap beyond reality is required of the viewer. Awareness of this gap comes only progressively. The occasional viewer mistrusts and misjudges these aspects that are specific of the genre. I believe this misjudgment was less likely to occur in the past because people had fewer expectations about TV in general. What are the primary reasons for the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades? Barbara Irwin: Two critical factors appear to be related to the decline in audience. Most of today's viewers, from the oldest to young middle-age, likely established their soap opera viewing habits directly as a result of their mothers' or grandmothers' viewing. But, as the overall viewership declines, the likelihood of being "taught" soap opera viewing at the knee of one's mother is diminishing. If soap opera creators are to initiate a new generation in the habit of viewing, they will have to connect with them directly. And a second factor making an impact on the diminishing audience of soap operas today is the proliferation of alternative viewing options. With the dramatic increase in the number of television channels available in US households and increased time spent online, competition for viewing time is fierce. The soap opera audience's awareness of alternative viewing options may be linked to the 1995 broadcast of the O.J. Simpson trial. For thirty-seven consecutive weeks, the daily soap opera line-up was preempted and interrupted regularly. The trial also received wall-to-wall coverage on cable's Court TV (now truTV). It could be argued that the real-life drama unfolding before viewers' eyes was more dramatic than what the soaps had to offer. Many viewers did not return to their soaps after the trial ended, having discovered that the reality played out on Court TV and other cable networks was more worthy of their viewing time. While the Simpson trial cannot be blamed for single-handedly causing a crisis in the soap opera industry, it points to the larger picture. During this time, loyal soap opera viewers became aware of the vast array of viewing options available to them, and broadcast and cable programmers noted the types of programming viewers responded to. Reality-based programming began to flourish, and the sordid lives of real people were played out on myriad talk shows, court shows, magazine, and tabloid shows, all competing for - and many winning over - the soap opera audience. Giada Da Ros: I truly believe two main elements work against soap operas and help their decline at the present moment: their cultural standing in the public opinion and the way they are sold to the audience. In the mainstream, the regard for the professionalism and skill of soap operas is quite low. In a culture that relishes being media-savvy and hip, choosing soap operas is not desirable, quite the contrary. This is an obstacle insofar as, to go against the current, you must truly love the genre. Otherwise, it is simply not worth it, because you do not get "rewarded" for it; you get "punished." Fans are bullied into thinking they are not cool and, for the most part, they are afraid to come out as defenders of a genre they love. Hence the decline. Also, I believe the way soaps are promoted to be misguided at best. Promo ads are packed with the gist of twists: short, fast segments. This is the way it is done in primetime; this is the common sense. But I don't think it's the smart choice for soaps. It may bring a viewer to check out a soap, but it doesn't guarantee you stay. You see fast; you want fast. I argue you should go the other way. Show just one segment: plain, ordinary, yet meaningful. Don't go for what attracts; go for what pulls you in, for what ultimately lets you stay and gives you pleasure in watching soaps. Give a half-a-minute soap in the ad spot that leaves you with the idea that there is abundance, that there is more, and that you can have it by watching the program. You want two things from the audience you need to attract: that it craves the ritualistic, soothing return to the show and that it is able to see beyond the genre's rhetoric and conventions and use them as tools to enjoy the narrative. You don't want a viewer that is so fixed on the grammar and syntax of the genre that he or she is unable to understand it but rather one that speaks its narrative language. The only way to do that is to concentrate on what soaps do best without having them try being something else and being sold as something else. The way the industry is selling its product helps its decline. Jaime Nasser: The shift of the soap opera industry's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades is partly linked to the decline in U.S. soap opera viewership in the past few decades. There are two reasons that stand out which are interconnected: First, the increasing popularity and availability of television programming on demand and DVD means that there will be a decline in viewership of programs of limited availability. By "limited availability" I refer to programming that is available only via traditional broadcasting such as the case with most soap operas. Second, the shift in prime time programming from primarily an episodic to serial format offers similar, or comparable pleasures to the daytime soap opera format. I am not saying that prime time serials are the same as daytime soap operas but they share strong similarities that increasingly blur the lines between daytime and prime time serials. The industry is able to provide high budget serials that are considered "high quality" and whose narratives are sufficiently self contained that allow for effective digital marketing (DVD and on demand), as opposed to the open ended and expansive nature of the daytime soap opera whose main feature is that it does not end. In conclusion, the increase in consumption and availability of contemporary high budget, serialized television texts on demand (DVD and the internet) partly explain the decline of the soap opera's popularity and place in U.S. culture over the past few decades. An observation: The soap opera might have a comeback once technology catches up to the expansive nature of the format. That is, it becomes profitable to sell soap opera's and/or make them available for on demand viewing. Melissa Scardaville: Many people will say it's because of the Internet, more choices in television programming, and the style of soap opera storytelling now being the purview of multiple genres. These are all valid reasons, and all played a role. What is often left out of the discussion are the Nielsen ratings. We never, ever accurately measured television audiences in the past, so it's very difficult to discuss the decline. We don't really know how many people watched, so we don't know why they left and who they were. That said, even if we can't quantitatively devise an appropriate number, we can say qualitatively that soap viewership has declined. Why? Very simply is that the audience no longer trust the shows. They do not trust that their shows will stay on the air. They do not trust that, if they get invested in a storyline, there will be any payoff. They no longer trust there will be consistency. Your investment as a soap fan pays off because, if you watch today, you will get an even deeper understanding of the events of tomorrow. Audiences no longer trust that this will occur, so they stopped investing in the first place. How have declines in budgets for these shows impacted their quality? Tristan Rogers: It is doubtful that budget reductions have seriously been at fault when it comes to the soaps. At day's end, it all comes down to the way the shows are managed, and this started way before budget cuts crept in. You can trace this back to the 80s. For me personally, it all started on General Hospital when Gloria Monty stepped down. She realized what was happening and had made a plan to get out. Shortly after this, Capital Cities took over ABC, and many things changed, although, on the stage level, this was never evident. At the managerial level, it was. The "free wheeling" days were over. Still, this was never an issue for the show. The changes were made at a much higher level. I never had the feeling there was a desire to preserve what we "had." There was a constant desire to pursue the "heydays of the early 80s," and they were gone. Hence, the use of location shoots increased, something I felt to be a waste of time. Better to go back to story and use what was happening "real-time," something that has never been fully exploited. Daytime has always been hampered by the restrictions that are put on what can be done and said. I will admit things have changed radically in the area of speech. You can say things undream't of back in the 80s, but this looseness has not been extended to story. You still can't get out there and really take a current situation and project it with the drama and edge it requires. The point has to be "blunted." And so we get this "merry-go-round" of situations and relationships. I would love to have a character evolve with a dark side that was "Dexterish" in nature. But that just won't happen. Or, if it did, the character would have to be made "cartoonish" in order to be acceptable. Stories with that kind of edge and background are not the domain of daytime. And this is precisely what they need to be, or we are left with what we currently have. Daytime needs to reflect more of what is happening in the world. I mean, apart from the luridness and drama of interpersonal relationships, which daytime does well and pretty much pioneered. Everyone learned from daytime and then went on from there. We need to be accorded "some" of that license. And this doesn't require a bigger budget. In the end, it all comes back to story, not bigger budgets, gimmicks, or stunts. Melissa Scardaville: If we trace the organizational linage of television to its radio days, we see that the medium is deeply rooted in theatre and literature. In the 1990s, television became a more visual medium as it adopted film techniques for the smaller screen. That's not the say that soaps could not be visually stunning prior to 1990, but large-scale, technically complicated displays were usually reserved to advance major story. Over time, explosions, car wrecks, natural disasters, and location shoots became expected. Money was challenged to the visual elements of soaps. The declining budget also meant a severe restriction in dayplayers, under fives, and non-contract players. Soaps only have one character: its community. When that community no longer has inhabitants, you lose the very fabric that ties it all together. Third, in soap operas, characters are defined by their relationships. Not just romantic relationships, but who this person is as a parent, a co-worker, a best friend, a neighbor, etc. Declining budgets meant core characters could not be used as often, which weakened their ties to others and which diluted the character's identity. Budget cuts also meant that it was more advantageous to use the same small set of characters who only have ties to each other and not the larger community. This approach conditions the audience to watch for specific characters and/or couples and to not be invested in the soap as a larger town. Thus, soaps developed a fractured audience where Pine Valley, Oakdale, or Springfield were defined by viewers in irreconcilable ways. Therefore, communities went from having multiple definitions and understandings to having rigid and fixed identities. So, in short, the decline in budgets affected the: a) Channeling of money to visual and away from storytelling What are the chief differences between today's soap operas and the soap operas of yesteryear in the U.S.? Patrick Mulcahey: Formerly, soaps operas were to American small-town life what shows like Cheyenne and Gunsmoke were to the American West. Our Springfields and Pine Valleys celebrated and mythologized the close-knit communities and families our viewers came from or wished they had. For mothers home alone with children or single working women in the urban centers, the big canvas we worked on supplied an ersatz sense of community and of extended family, too, that was lost or imperiled in their real lives. That Feels like home appeal is crudely explicit in the earliest radio serials. Knowing your neighbors. Fearing the town gossips. Parents who never let go, of each other or you. Seeing your siblings every day. The strategies of serial storytelling itself have hardly changed since Homer. But the insistence, by program and advertising executives from other genres and other media, on sex and fantasy romance as the soap's raisons d'être represented a fatal misreading of what soaps were about that hastened us to our doom. It was difficult enough to design big stories in a time when social attitudes toward sexuality and marriage were splintering. But the network-prescribed emphasis on personal feelings, personal choices, loves-me-loves-me-not dilemmas existing in a vacuum because they're now nobody else's business; the unremitting emphasis on even individual bodies, gleaming and twisting in protracted candle-and-bedsheet scenes. All this spelled the end of what soap operas did best and made of us a cheaper, cheesier version of entertainments better done elsewhere. William Reynolds: The soaps of yesterday, which were only thirty minutes in length, told more in-depth stories than today's hour-long shows. Today's soap producers feel compelled to outdo themselves and their comeptition with large-scale special effects and exotic remote location shoots. Soaps feel compelled to give us tornadoes, floods, and explosions to draw the audience in. However, sets do not have to be elaborate, nor do special effects have to be over-the-top. Soaps have lost their intimacy. A longtime soap viewer like myself does not feel as if they are looking in our neighbor's window and seeing two people converse over a cup of coffee and listening in on their conversation. Today, all intimacy is gone because the viewer knows that this is "big business," and everything being done is on a large scale. Finally, and this is strictly from my personal viewpoint, soaps have crossed the line and, in some instances, border on being pornographic. I would normally tune into CBS in anticipation of seeing As the World Turns and would catch some of The Bold and the Beautiful, and what I would see on my screen would be something that I would expect to see in an adult movie. I also heard about a scene in which one of the genre's grande dames, Robin Strasser, gave (the allusion) of giving oral sex to a male counterpart on One Life to Live. I have the greatest respect and admiration for Robin Strasser and her career that has spanned four decades, but my skin crawled when I heard about this. My heart ached for her when I heard this. And, on Guiding Light there was a male character, I think it was Coop, who had a conversation with his significant body part. Call me old-fashioned, but I remember, when I was only 4 or 5 years old, hearing Lisa on As the World Turnssaying for nine long months simply that she was 'carrying Bob's child.' The soaps have come a long way since then, and, in my opinion, not for the better. Melissa Scardaville: The differences between today's soap operas and the soap operas of yesteryear stem from two discrete influences. First, changing business strategies in the television industry have affected both daytime and primetime. Overall, there is faster storytelling, quicker delivery of dialogue, more emphasis on youth and beauty, and less flexibility given to grow an audience. These changes negatively impacted soaps because the genre, contrary to popular opinion, is really about nuance, paradox, and multiplicity: hard concepts to convey in a very fast-paced environment. When one attempts to translate subtly and complicity into a fast-paced, visually oriented environment obsessed with immediate gratification, you lose the emotional authenticity key to soap operas. Applicable directly to soaps is the increasing role the network plays in creative decisions and the declining resources soaps have to manage that feedback. Let's be clear. Networks have always played some role, and soaps have always made some bad decisions. It's not that there are more bad decisions now, but more people with more power over long-term story have the opportunity to make more decisions. Resources that soaps have long used to facilitate these decisions -- multiple rehearsals, extensive writing staffs trained as writers, spontaneity born out of a show running short -- have been eliminated. Soaps have turned into inflexible organizations where one wrong turn leads to a permanent break rather than a temporary re-routing. Together, in today's current soap climate, this inflexibility and the overall change in business strategies affect what stories are told, who gets to tell them, and how.
December 1, 2010
DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Four)
FC: What do you remember about the experience of making the two vids of yours that are included in the show? Counteragent: "Still Alive": the agony! The structure was very difficult to craft. I wanted to criticize both the fandom and the show but ultimately wanted to make a vid about empowerment and squee. Finding that balance was really hard for me with the way the song worked. I really owe my betas on this one, especially Giandujakiss. FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY program? Counteragent: Yes, all. I'm a big fan. "I'm On A Boat": Fucking fearless song choice. "Handlebars" is a perfect vid to showcase the power of a vid as critical commentary on the source, especially to nonvidders. Simple but really, really effective. "Women's Work" is an institution. "Origin Stories" was gutsy storytelling both for the source and for the larger cultural commentary. Also a really great use of a tough song. "In Exchange for Your Tomorrows": great abstraction. Is "Piece of me" more RPFiction or cultural commentary? Anyway, it's all good. "How Much is that Geisha in the Window" is scaaaaathing. And I was too dumb to get "Art Bitch" the first time I saw it. Great use of outside graphics.FC: What's the best/worst thing about vidding? Counteragent: Worst: the amount of time it takes. That it's perceived as worthless by both people close to me and many cultural commentators. Best: the feeling of squee and empowerment. The community.An interview with kiki_miserychic. kiki_miserychic is a prolific vidder known for being experimental and for her use of unusual sources (e.g. movie vids, crossovers, etc.) She was the subject of Bradcpu's first Vidder Profile in August, 2009. Her Star Trek reboot vid "I'm On A Boat" was featured in the 2010 DIY show. The below is an audio interview; click to play!
November 24, 2010
DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part One)This is the third in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Francesca Coppa, a long time fan and media professor researching the feminist tradition of fan vids.
Many people still don't "get" fan vids, seeing them either as incomprehensible mashups or mere celebratory slideshows. In fact, vidding, like most forms of remix, is about critical selection and the editing eye: deciding what to put in and what to leave out. Vids can make very sophisticated arguments about the source text's plot and characters, and even its ideology. While some vids are edited to broadly emphasize certain themes, images, or characters, and are thus easily understandable to the uninvested spectator, other vids are made specifically for fellow fans who are assumed to be familiar not only with the source text but also with the conventions and established aesthetics of vidding. At the most basic level, turning film and television into music video represents a fundamental change of genre. While most mass media stories have a forward-moving, plot-driven structure, music video is more like poetry: expressive rather than descriptive, concerned with feelings and rhythm rather than the distanced narration of events. Like poetry, music video is also a highly concentrated form, distilling hours, days, or even weeks of footage into three or so minutes! Consequently, looking away from the screen during a vid is considered to be as offensive as arbitrarily deciding to skip words in a poem, since every moment, every conjunction of image and music, carries meaning. While not all vidders are part of the organized communities, there is a longstanding tradition of vidding within shared groups, partly because in the pre-digital age, vidding was complicated and expensive, and so the mostly all-female vidding collectives shared equipment and skills. (See Henry's 1991 chapter on fanvidding in Textual Poachers.) While today most vids are released straight to the web, fans making vids in the 1980s and 1990s had to take their vids to conventions if they wanted anyone to see them, so even today many vidders debut their vids at conventions like MediaWest, Escapade, Bascon, and Vividcon, which is entirely devoted to vidding. Moreover, the fans who attend these conventions have developed their own critical vocabulary for talking about vidding, and an institutionalized "vid review" based on art show reviews. Escapade features a 2 hour vid review; Vividcon not only has that, but also an additional "in-depth vid review" focused on only one or two vids. Even more recently, vidder bradcpu has been making a series of vidder profiles: short documentary films historicizing and analyzing the work of particular vidders. Like any advanced art form, vidding has developed its own conferences, critical literature, and theoretical apparatus. Vidding Programme. The following represent a selection of notable vids made from 2007 - 2010. * I'm On A Boat, by kiki miserychik (Star Trek, 2:36) This vid expresses the widespread fannish joy over the 2009 Star Trek movie; it also captures the reboot's younger, more frat-boyish tone compared to the original series. It's worth noting that this vid, along with a wave of others, was made from a camcorder copy in May 2009. (See also: Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor by Sloane in the political remix section.) Handlebars, by Flummery (Doctor Who, 3:27)
November 8, 2010
From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part Two)
November 5, 2010
From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part One)Several months ago, I was contacted by Rhianon Bury, an early contributor to the scholarly research on female online fan communities through her book, A Cyberspace of Their Own, asking me to help her publicize a survey she was conducting on how fans engaged with new delivery platforms for television content. Bury agreed to do an interview for my blog which deals with this new initiative and what it means in terms of her own methodological approaches (an expansion from primarily ethnographic to a more hybrid approach), as well as shifts in the field of fan studies and new media since 2005 when her book first appeared. Like many of us, Bury is finding it hard to separate out the study of media audiences, creative industries, and new media practices, at a time when some aspects of fan culture have become more central to the operations of convergence culture, while, as many recent scholars note, others remain marginalized and in some cases, continue to be fully hidden from outside attention. You have recently launched an online survey designed to better understand the shift in the media consumption patterns of fans in response to the changing affordances of the new media environment. What kinds of shifts are you hoping to explore?
Until now, you have been seen primarily as a qualitative researcher. What has motivated you to adopt a more quantitative approach to this project?
Rhiannon Bury is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her research interests include communication technologies, identity and community, and media fan culture. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own, was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently collecting data for her Television 2.0 project. To take the survey, visit here. Check out her blog.
October 13, 2010
Harry Shum Jr: Dancing With and Without GleeIn Media Res is a project of Media Commons. Every day, a media scholar posts a clip and some commentary which is intended to spark conversations. These clips are ideal for incorporating into teaching, but can also be considered resources for the ongoing virtual community of media scholars around the world who use the site to wake up their brains each morning. The format is one which exploits the properties of the web environment well in order to expand our teaching to larger communities. This week, In Media Res is running a series of posts themed around "Transmedia: New Platforms," and I was asked to provide one of the post. My materials are found below, but you will want to check out other great posts from Janet Murray and Chuck Tryon so far, with Christina Dunbar-Hester and Jeff Watson rounding off the week.
By contrast, Shum plays a central role in The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD), now finishing up its first season as a direct to Hulu video series, designed to showcase spectacular urban dance performances. Shum was allowed to essentially solo episode 8, "Elliott's Shoes" in a performance which echoes back to Jim Carry's rubbery movements in The Mask. Check it out, since Hulu doesn't allow us to embed clips. Shum is never given a chance to dance like that on Glee! There, the camera placements and choreography subdue his performance to make his co-stars shine. Yet, after seeing him in LXD, his efforts become much more visible when I watch Glee. His Showreal, shared here, suggests how often Shum has appeared in shadow (as in his appearances for iPod) or in the edges of frames (as in countless music videos), while LXD finally allows him to take center stage.
and on So You Think You Can Dance, which features Shankman as a judge. Shankman in turn was the executive producer for Step Up 3D, which also featured Shum and was directed by Jon Cho, who is the executive producer of LXD. Step Up, which was released near the end of LXD's first season, also features Twitch and Little C', two other veterans from Dance, while Little C appears in a cameo role in LXD. And the LXD dancers opened for Glee's summer road show (where Shum was given his own spotlight moment). Will his character get more screen presence on Glee this season? As the magic black ball hints, "Signs Point to Yes." What seperates these transmedia performances from more conventional strategies of star development may be the intense coordination across these various properties which are clearly designed to move attention from one media platform and one text to the other. I would love to hear of other examples of how transmedia performance is operating today.
October 8, 2010
How I Became Part of Adrian Grenier's Entourage ... For a NightSeveral years ago, I was interviewed for the HBO documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, playing this month. The following is my story of that strange evening and my reflections on what it taught me about the nature of celebrity culture. Let's be clear: I have been an enthusiastic viewer (if not a hardcore fan) of the HBO comedy series, Entourage, since it launched, so you can imagine my excitement and disbelief when I received an email from someone associated with lead performer Adrian Grenier asking if I'd be willing to on camera with the star for an HBO documentary. Even with short notice, I was able to rearrange my schedule to meet Grenier at Boston's Fenway Park. (This was back when I was still based at MIT, mind you.) Grenier originally planned to conduct a conversation with Noam Chomsky and me in the "Green Monster," the elite seats, during a Red Sox vs. Yankee's home game. Talk about one of the strangest trios you are likely to ever encounter. Despite twenty years at MIT, I only met Chomsky twice and both were intensely unpleasant experiences for everyone involved. Chomsky turns out to have been characteristically less accommodating (with the result that while his name appears on the credits of the completed film, he ended up on the cutting room floor.) As I was walking from the Subway station to Fenway, I wondered how I was going to find Grenier and his production crew. I shouldn't have worried. As I arrived, there was a massive sea of fans engulfing a small cluster of people. Elbowing my way through a rough and tumble Boston mob, I soon found Genier at the throng's center. It turned out to be more difficult to separate myself out from all the others shouting for his attention than it was to find the charismatic actor at an already crowded location. And that's how it ran for the rest of the night. Everywhere we went, the crowds pushed and shoved to get close to us -- well, him, really, but a boy can fantasize. He posed for pictures, signed autographs, hugged people, and remained surprisingly good-natured about the constant intrusions and interruptions. Of course, if he wanted privacy he would not be shooting at such a public location. Filming a documentary during a Red Sox game worked about as well as you might expect. Every time I started to say something interesting, one of the teams would score a point, the crowd would go wild and it would drown out what I was saying. By the time they got to the part they included in the documentary, my voice was hoarse from trying to be heard over the cheering fans. Even if there was not a baseball game going on, it would be hard to maintain my usual focus sitting just a few feet away from Vinnie Chase, I mean, Adrian Grenier, and sinking into the gravitational pull of his intense blue eyes. There's an aura about meeting someone you've seen on the screen face to face -- I don't care who you are. It's a heady, intoxicating experience, one which can scramble your sense of the borders between fantasy and reality, between fiction and everyday life. And it didn't help things that Grenier is in person so much like the character he plays on the screen -- puppy-dog likable, somewhat impulsive, deeply earnest, yet not necessarily inhabiting the same reality as the rest of us. It's not hard to picture Vinnie being so touched by meeting a teenage paparazzo that he decides to make a movie about him or that he later feels a need to try to make an impression on the young man and change his life or that he wants to become friends with him outside the shooting of a movie which is necessarily going to change their relationships with each other, or for that matter, that he would try to interview an MIT professor in Fenway Park during a game. As I watched Grenier interact with his old time buddies and his camera crew, it became clear just how autobiographical Entourage is. I watched him exchange text-messages with a certain female pop star who plays a key role in the documentary and who was put out by someone from Granier's camp who may have said some not nice things about her. Off and on, for the rest of the night, he was grilling people, even phoning his mom, to see who may have made the unattributed comments that hurt his relations with said pop star. At another point, I watched a standoff between Grenier and a certain horror writer who also was in the Green Monster that night to see which was going to leave their box seats to interact with the other. Once the interview was completed, the star decided he wanted to go get Sushi and removed his team from the park, even though the Sox were still battling it out with the Yankees in a highly competitive game. Whatever else was going on, we were not there to watch the ballgame. In fact, it turns out that we were there to be interrupted. I was there to interpret those interruptions, to bear witness to what it was like to live in a fishbowl. I was there to explain Grenier's life to him. Whereas normally my job in conducting an interview is to abstract from the person asking the questions and help them disappear from the viewer, the opposite was true here. I ended up addressing my comments directly to Adrian, telling him about why his celebrity status matters to his fans. It doesn't matter to anyone, except maybe me, that while my son has been a season-pass holder for the Red Sox Nation (and has always wanted to sit in the Green Monster), I have little to no interest in baseball. This is not a place where I would be found if it wasn't for the film shoot. For that reason, I was perplexed when I got texts and emails from friends who claimed to have seen me on the sportscast sitting in the stands with Grenier. I mean, given my well-known lack of interests in the game, how likely was that? Of course, when I saw the shot in question in the documentary, I had a better understanding of how a shaggy bearded academic in suspenders, waving his hands around like a crazy man, might be recognizably me even in a blurry and long-distanced shot on ESPN. So, you have to decide which was less likely -- that I would be having an intense (and seemingly one-sided) conversation with the Entourage star at a ballgame or that someone who looked, dressed, and moved like me would be doing so. My segment in Teenage Paparazzo shows a particularly insistent fan interrupting the interview, demanding a cell phone photograph of himself with Grenier, and praising him for the performance which Mark Ruffalo gave in The Devil Wears Prada. It is admittedly a very funny sequence -- one which The New York Times and many other reviewers have singled out. In fact, such disruptions occurred all night long. Fans seemed not in the slightest deterred by the presence of a camera and production crew. They had no hesitation about stepping into the shot, though I would note that the crew could have been more effective at blocking off the traffic if they had wanted. The fans feel like they already know Grenier or at least his on-screen counterpart and they feel entitled to a moment of attention given the amount of attention they've given him over the years. This is, as the film tells us, an attention-based economy. The part of the interview which made it into the film centered around the social and cultural functions gossip about celebrities performs in our culture. I argued that the focus of gossip shifted as we moved from a face-to-face culture where we talked about people we know directly -- the town drunk, the village idiot, the school slut -- to a networked and broadcast culture where we gossiped about people we knew through media -- the drunken, crazed, and slutty celebrity. Indeed, the more we communicate with each other through networked computers, the more we need to discuss people who are known over a broader geographic scale. We use celebrities as "resources" which allow us to talk about our concerns, interest, and values. Here, I am drawing on John Fiske's discussion of the O.J. Simpson case in Media Matters where he outlined the range of different ways the case got framed in conversations about class, race, gender, and justice across diverse communities. And I was also building on feminist writers -- from Patricia Specks to Mary Ellen Brown -- who have stressed that the value of gossip rests not on what it said about the object of the exchange but what kinds of communications it facilitated between the gossiping parties. We use gossip as a way of talking through our values by applying them to specific situations which are abstracted from our immediate circumstances. The film picked up on these themes and showed a range of young fans who used celebrities as an excuse for social interactions, for sharing values, and for talking about their own lives. What got cut from the analysis though was another key point I made -- celebrities need to learn how to mobilize this attention towards their own ends, not just to advance their screen careers but also to help shape the values of the society. I have always been disappointed by the ending of The Truman Show where having discovered that the attention of the world is focused upon him, Truman seeks to escape its gaze rather than direct it towards things that matter to him. (Of course, Truman is such a product of television culture that there may not be much that really matters to him beyond television itself, and the same may be true of some of the celebrities in question.) Around the world, some celebrities have stood for something (or stood up for something) bigger than themselves -- whether it was Bob Hope visiting the troops in Vietnam in the midst of an unpopular war or the Dixie Chicks questioning Bush's policies during their concerts, whether it is Bollywood stars running for political office or American celebrities promoting disaster relief. One can argue that Grenier is doing something like this in making a documentary about the pressing issue of celebrities who are made uncomfortable by being stalked by teenage photographers. Yet, the person who comes through in the film (and despite meeting him in person and even sharing Sushi with the guy, I don't know him much better than I did after the two hour broadcast) is deeply ambivalent about the attention he is receiving: there's a side of him who understands it as part of his obligation to his audience, a side that enjoys it as his rewards for his hard work, and a side that wants to deflect the cameras and hold onto as much privacy as he can. I understand all of those sides, even if the film risks portraying him as a tad self-indulgent in focusing more on his needs as a celebrity than on the larger social context within which celebrity culture operates. Shooting the film gave me a chance to see close up what it is like to be a celebrity -- it was frankly overwhelming. I don't see how anyone can withstand the intense attention they receive, even though, experiencing it for a night, was pretty damn fun.
August 11, 2010
On Mad Men, Aca-Fandom, and the Goals of Cultural CriticismA few weeks ago, Jason Mittell published a provocative essay on his blog, Just TV, which sought to explain why he dislikes Mad Men, an essay which he framed through reference to the concept of the Aca-fan as cultural critic. The fact that Jason dislikes Mad Men and I like the series is not that significant in and of itself, but Jason uses the essay to challenge some preconceptions about how taste formations work and to trace the trajectory of his relationship to the series. Here are a few excerpts from what he had to say: Mad Men is lodged squarely within my habitus: along with other cable series from channels like HBO, Showtime and FX, it's part of the wave of "quality television" serial dramas that has raised the medium's cultural value in the 2000s (as Lynne Joyrich discusses in this volume), and served as the object of much of my own scholarly research and personal fandom over the decade (see Mittell 2006). The show is steeped in cultural references that resonate with my own background as a media scholar, flattering my otherwise esoteric knowledge of U.S. advertising and media history. Nearly every television scholar and critic with whom I interact loves the show, making it required viewing for people in my professional and personal taste circles - in fact while I was writing this essay, Facebook encouraged me to become a fan of the show, noting that 61 of my friends had publicly declared their allegiance. In short, it's a show seemingly designed for me to love, and I have tried to fulfill that prediction by giving myself over to it. I found Mittell's essay enormously valuable -- both in sorting out my own complex and often unsettling relationship to the AMC drama and in terms of raising important questions about the place of the autobiographical and subjective in academic criticism. Game designer and theorist Ian Bogost, on the other hand, was disappointed with the essay, seeing it as illustrative of bigger problems he has with the stance of the Aca-Fan in debates about culture. (I should note in passing that I consider both Jason and Ian to be gifted critics and good friends.) Here's part of what he wrote at his blog: A critic's job, in part, is to explain and justify his own tastes, and to act as a steward for those tastes on behalf of a constituency of readers. People tend to circle around the critics we respect and, more so, agree with because we come to trust their taste. There are pros and cons to such a tendency, the most obvious downside being that we can avoid stretching our minds by surrounding ourselves with only like-minded ideas. Both Jason's original post and Ian's critique of it have sparked extensive discussion and comments, involving many of the top thinkers in the space of fan studies and cult media, and if you did not follow them, you probably should take a look. As often happens, the discussions devolved a little as they went forward with side issues taking over from the central concerns, but there was still much at both forums that should spark thoughts about criticisms. I weighed in enough at Ian's blog that I don't need to repeat all of my thoughts here. I should note that I was engaging there with the larger issue of aca-fan criticism and had not at the time had a chance to read Jason's essay fully. Having done so, I must say that I disagree with Ian's central claim that the essay is too self absorbed and doesn't teach us much about the series. The discussion the piece generated at Jason's blog suggests otherwise. Many people there found themselves testing their own embrace of the series against Jason's critique in a way which helped them to better understand their own relationship to the series. Much of the discussion centers on how we are supposed to feel about these characters and thus what kinds of pleasures one derives from the series. Much like Vic (on The Shield) or Tony (on The Sopranos), I find my feelings towards Don Draper and the other characters shifting almost scene by scene. One scene may cause me to admire Don for his creative vision and intuitive understanding of the culture around him, the next may lead me to despise him for his lack of self-consciousness about how he treats the people in his life. He charms me and he repulses me. Part of that fascination has to do with how closed off he is from intimate emotional expression. Much of my own interest in the show comes in trying to make sense of my parent's generation. I was born in 1958 and was a child, about the age of the Draper offspring, at the time the events depicted on the series took place. My life was deeply shaped by the cultural forces the series tries to capture, including the shifting values around race, gender, and sexuality, which represent the most loaded moments on the series. I respond to the series often as if I was eavesdropping on adult conversations after they thought I had gone to bed. My father couldn't have been more different from Don Draper on so many levels and yet, I do recognize the forces of emotional containment and stoicism that shape this character in my relations with my father (now deceased.) So, as I watch the series, I find myself drawn into both a search for traces of my parents and their friends in the program's character and in a search for signs of the dramatic changes which the culture underwent in the 1960s. Read in this way, I do not have to have sympathy for a particular character or even for any of the characters in order to be emotionally engaged by the series. For one thing, the characters are drawn with sufficient complexity and nuance that I find myself drawn towards them or repelled almost scene by scene. For another, I have enough affection for the people from Don's generation who have touched my life that I will watch the series out of respect for them and out of a desire to cut through the emotional wall that sometimes blocked me from fully knowing why they felt and acted the ways that they did. Of course, I recognize that the series represents an interpretation of those times, one seen through a modern lens, but the references to smoking early in the series aside, I don't think the point is simply to express the superiority of our current values but rather to understand the values and behaviors as part of a social system. The series has a strong sense of the ways characters are performing for each other, suggesting how the set of values and practices were mutually reinforcing and thus extraordinarily difficult to change. Yet, I do see in some of the characters the potential for growth as they respond to the changing cultural environment around them. And that's why, for me, it is very important to watch more than one season of the series in order to understand the evolving nature of the characters (as well as to see the brittleness of some of the characters, such as Roger, who seem charming and dominant in the beginning but show limited capacity for growth.) That said, one of the more interesting strands on Jason's blog has to do with how much of a series one must watch in order to be able to cast a judgment about it, given the almost impossible challenge of doing justice to the complexity of a long form drama such as Mad Men, as well as the obligations of the critic in relation to works they do not like. In the course of the discussion at Ian's blog, I referenced the manifesto which Tara McPherson, Jane Shattuc, and I wrote as the introduction to our book, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, "The Culture That Sticks to Your Skin." When we published this book in 2002, we saw it as building the case for newer perspectives in cultural studies -- including but not restricted to those coming from the then emerging aca-fan community. We used the introduction to sketch out the defining traits of this new mode of cultural criticism and then used the thirty something essays published there as illustrations of these approaches in action. I will say that I would have been proud to have included Mittell's Mad Men essay in the collection because it speaks to many of the central concerns of that book and the current debate seems to me to suggest that the issues Hop on Pop posed are far from resolved. I wanted to sketch here briefly the traits we saw as identifying this alternative cultural perspective, since I think they might provide a vocabulary which could inform some of these discussions: We began the essay with reference to the Cyberpunk movement and Bruce Sterling's suggestion that they were writing in response to a shift from monumental technological achievements to technology that was everyday and intimate, that "stuck to your skin." We drew an analogy between that and the position of a generation that had grown up in a world where writing about popular culture had gained a certain degree of academic acceptability and we had the freedom to write about forms of cultural expression which were central to who we were and how we saw the world. "Like the cyberpunks, we are interested in the everyday, the intimate, the immediate; we reject the monumentalism of canon formation and the distant authority of traditional academic writing. We engage with popular culture as the culture that 'sticks to the skin,' that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. Like the cyberpunks, we confront that popular culture with a profound ambivalence, our pleasures tempered by a volatile mixture of fears, disappointments, and disgust. Just as the cyberpunks intervened at the point where science fiction was beginning to achieve unquestioned cultural respectability, we are the first generation of cultural scholars to be able to take for granted that popular culture can be studied on its own terms, who can operate inside an academic discpline of cultural studies....The hard fights of the past have won us space to reexamine our own relationship to the popular, to rethink our own ties to the general public, and to experiment with new vocabularies for expressing our critical insights." We then outlined a series of identifying traits of this "emergent perspective" in cultural studies: 1.Immediacy -- a trait we associate with "intensification (the exaggeration of everyday emotions to provoke strong feelings or a release from normal perception), identification (strong attachments to fictional characters and celebrities), and intimacy (an embedding of popular culture into the fabric of our daily lives, into the ways we think about ourselves and the world around us.)" We offered these trait as a critique of "objective" or "distance" scholarship as blinding us to many defining characteristics of popular culture. "The challenge from our emergent perspective is to write about our own multiple (and often contradictory) involvements, participations, engagements, and identifications with popular culture -- without denying, rationalizing, and distorting them....We can draw on our personal experiences and subjective understandings to critique the popular as well as to embrace it. Even fans are far from uncritical in their relations to cultural producers."We linked this concept to shifts in women's studies and queer studies that had embraced the "intimate critique" or "writing from a standpoint," which acknowledged the subjective in exploring cultural issues. 2. Multivalence -- Here, we were arguing against either-or perspectives, insisting on writing that acknowledged the complexity of the popular. We noted, for example, that for some groups which have been consistently marginalized in our culture, they may not be able to describe themselves as fans of dominant cultural productions. "Their engagement with popular culture cannot be dispassionate, disinterested, or distanced. The stakes are simply too high. Their writing acknowledges the pleasures they have derived from engaging with popular culture as well as their rage and frustration about its silences, exclusions and assualts on their lives. These writers express contradictory responses to the materials of everyday culture and their own dual status as avid consumers and angry critics."While I have chosen to frame my own perspective of culture in terms of being an aca-fan, because the fan communities within which I have participated for almost 40 years have helped to define how I see the world, and while I often embrace others who share my vantage point, this discussion was intended to signal the validity of many different vantage points from which to frame cultural critique. It simply insists that the writer be honest both about their stakes in their object of study and about the contradictions that they see within the works they are examining. For me, there is nothing "comfortable" or indulgent about taking seriously these two demands. And Mittell's essay demonstrates an ongoing process of self-reflection and self-questioning, exploring contradictions in the text and in his own relation to it, while offering respect for those who differ with his perspective. Not everything written under the "aca-fan" banner does so, to be sure, and so I see Bogost's critiques as a challenge to re-examine our own critical practices and theoretical positions. While these two traits arose in the course of the discussion at his blog, the remaining traits we identified did not and they also help to round out our expectations about what would constitute quality scholarship in this tradition: 3. Accessability -- We challenged our fellow scholars to take the steps needed to open up their cultural analysis and critiques to a wider public, recognizing that academics are not the only ones who are concerned with the place of popular culture in their lives and suggesting that there is a political stakes in creating resources that are valuable to readers beyond the ivory tower. In a sense, both Mittell and Bogost, along with many other academic bloggers, embody this challenge to expand the address of cultural criticism so that it might engage with fans, policy makers, journalists, industry insiders, artists, and a range of other publics. I am proud of how much progress our field has made along these lines over the past eight years. 4. Particularity -- We summed this up quickly as "details matter" and went on to explain why overly generalized criticism and the sweeping dismissals of whole sets of cultural practices of the previous generation was no longer adequate to the new contexts in which popular culture was produced, circulated, and consumed. We saw the push away from broad theory and towards specific case studies (and within that, case studies that were attentive to as many details as possible) as embodying this shift in the nature of criticism. 5.Contextualism -- Here, we sought to counterbalance our focus on meaningful details with a recognition of how they illustrated and embodied large trends in our culture. As we wrote," we view popular texts not as discrete entities that stand alone but instead exist in relation to a broad range of other discourses, placing media production and consumptions witihin a social and cultural configuration of competing voices and positions. Rather than cannonize a text for its intrinsic or inherent value, we try to understand and articulate more fully the framework within which individual texts are produced, circulated, and consumed." 6. Situationalism -- Basically, this trait calls for attention to the contexts within which we are writing, recognizing that we write from a perspective of local knowledge and within our own historical moment, rather than seeking criticism which is universal and timeless. I am not doing justice to the complexities of this essay, which examines a broad array of different scholarly, critical, and intellectual projects, and would urge you to track down the book and look through its contents. There are many essays there which illustrate the complexities and challenges of creating this kind of criticism. Many of them, I suspect, would embody the kinds of cultural criticism that Bogost has called for at various points during this exchange. These traits set exacting standards which we impose upon ourselves as critics. I don't always meet these standards in my own work, either on the blog or in my publications, but these are the criteria by which I judge my own performance and by which I measure the quality of other people's writing. Like Bogost, I'd love to see more ongoing discussions about the goals and roles for cultural criticism in the 21st century. If nothing else, Jason's Mad Man essay has helped open up such a conversation and that's more than it's reasonable to expect from any given piece of critical writing. Thanks, Jason and Ian, for the provocation. I am going to be traveling this week and so my ability to respond will be circumscribed, but I would be happy if this post might serve as a fresh start to get out of the entanglements caused by competing understandings of what a fan is and to focus instead on competing ideas about how and why academics should write about popular culture. We received surprisingly few reactions to our own 2002 provocations along those lines, so I would be happy if we could restart the conversation now.
June 2, 2010
The Hollywood Geek Elite Debates the Future of TelevisionEditor's note: It looks like we were sent two copies of the same segment. We are tracking down the missing piece of this and will get it up as soon as possible. We wanted to bring the smartest people we knew from the entertainment world face to face with leading film, television, and media researchers for a conversation about the future of entertainment. In some ways, this was a mini version of what we do with the Futures of Entertainment conference on the East Coast and the new Transmedia Hollywood conference on the West Coast. Today, I am able to share with you the web-version of that program. Part of what is fascinating about this exchange is how much these producers of cult television shows are thinking and rethinking their relations with their audiences, trying to understand how to court and hold active and engaged consumers in an era of competing media options and multiple delivery platforms. The value of fan participation runs through this conversation.
Below, I've included some transcribed highlights from the event. But so much is conveyed by the emotional tone and stylistic self-presentation of the various participations, which include the two head guys from Lost who had flown in just the day before from shooting the final episode in Hawaii. We didn't get any real spoilers but we did get to understand their thinking and sense the glow they had after finishing this key phase of their work. Ironically, their shows have all ended. Heroes and Ghost Whisperer were canceled in the latest wave of network decisions and Day One never reached the air. Without knowing it, we captured a moment of transition in American television.
CARLTON: Most of these things are very narrative driven for us and it's a hard thing to try to articulate specifically when we want the audience to understand that every small little niggling question will be impossible to answer watching the show. Our goals as storyteller were to tackle the big questions and try to bring the story to a satisfactory resolution. But if you're wondering who's the guy is, etc, you're not gonna get that answer in the series. The story we were telling in Lost, we planned to end on May 23rd, we have no plan to do any kind of sequel or spin off, anything. We set out to tell the story of the most significant thing that happened. Telling the story was our ability to negotiate with ABC in the 3rd season of the show. Now we're bringing the story that we plan to tell to a conclusion. Now that said, we've also acknowledged that we're not the owners of Lost. It is owned by the Walt Disney company and it is an incredibly valuable franchise. Worth billions as opposed to millions of dollars. And we completely understand that the Disney company will choose to continue to make money under the Lost franchise at some future point... There's no way when you tell a story that you can tie up all the loose ends, there are many creative minds who'll come stories to ABC and propose to take Lost, using franchise label in the future, and that's great. The story we wanted to tell was that tv series and that ends in May. The previous transmedia series you worked on--Smallville and Heroes--both had strong ties to the comic book realm--one directly from comic books, and the other owing a lot to the comic book tradition. Melrose Place is on the other side of the spectrum. Has the difference in genre affected where the online stories come from? Or do you find that teen soap lends itself as much to a transmedia story as the sci-fi fantasy genre? MARK: It's definitely different. You have people who want to get immediately after online and play games. But that's part of why I jumped out of the Melrose Place thing, and we're doing other things kind of that side of the spectrum. If you look at the spectrum, all, at the core, it's about extending a narrative and dipping into the fandom. On a soap opera, there's tons of different worlds and relationships to dive deeper into. That's a really rich photogram for telling transmedia stories. So it was really fun to dive in there, instead of feeding people with the ways to get your light saver. This is fun to go into the most stylish person on Melrose Place's cast and go into her closet, and learn about stuff she had in her closet. Or the diaries, you can just dive deeper. These are just fertile places to make buckets to tell stories. It was a very fun challenge and I think that anything with a story has a good place to go in the transmedia world. CBS is primarily known for an older demographic which, stereotypically, is not known for frequenting the web. Yet Ghost Whisperer has thrived beautifully both on the network and online. What did you do to make the series and its online components accessible and appealing to an audience that is normally not attracted to this type of content? KIM: I think that first of all CBS demographics has changed in the last 5 years that we've been on the air. At first when we started with Friday night and Ghost Whisper, we made the announcement for CBS, my partner and I knew we had a math problem, which was 82% of all the shows that had been launched on a Friday night since the X Files which was 10 years prior had not gone to its second year. And before that we had run a show Profiler which was on a Saturday night, so we knew what the challenges were. And we had been working for about 4 years before Ghost Whisperer got ordered, and we were working at the intersection of the Internet had some amazing discoveries when we were doing Profiler, that we were able to continue on and then fold onto our experience with Ghost Whisperer. So what we did was that we created this thing called the "Total Engagement Experience", which is a model that Professor Jenkins and I have talked a while about....CBS had never done this before. We also felt that moving into the 21st century, that our obligation is just developing, pitching and selling tv shows and delivering the film was not the end of our obligation as executive producers and showrunners. Our commitment to any network and studios that we've worked for is...to deliver the audience as well. And I believe that going into the future of tv and feature films, everybody is gonna need to get on board with that, and figure out how to deliver an experience, as opposed to just something that you watch, because we are in the experience era. So when we had layered that out for CBS, and our approach, unlike the CBS at the time, was to go out and find our audience, and court them, and create a playground for them so that they could experience the Ghost Whisperer world rather than just watch. And then, bring them back to the tv show in a very gentle way, that became very successful. Because what we built was a very, very loyal audience, not just a substantial audience on a Friday night, but a loyal audience, which has... this whole thing has served as a model for us to moving forward in the business. And be in the 21st century. It's an important time to do it. Many academics are describing a push in popular television towards more "complex narratives" (longer story arcs, greater seriality, larger ensemble casts, and so forth) and you represent some of the series which are most often held up as illustrating this turn. What factors do you see leading towards these developments? What obstacles have made it harder to shift television in this direction?
JAVIER: When I was a network executive in the mid 90s, one of the heads of research for NBC came and talk to us, and one of the things that he used to say is that "why is Stay By The Bell so successful?" when it is so hooky and so corny? And he said look: the audience is fragmented, into two very big pots: either there's 20% of your audience is A audience. This is the taste making audience, the audience that goes online, the audience that buys new clothing, the audience that does all of these stuffs. And there's your B audience, that is your audience who's content to go and watch a self contained show, have a laugh and then leave. And the funny thing was that some networks wanted to have A audience cause it would get that magazine cover, some people wanted the A audience, and NBC was going for the B audience at that time. And I think that there's a sweet spot which is sort of where Man Men is right now, with challenging serialized show, but they can have that audience and that's all they need. They don't have the pressure, which Lost had for its first 3 years. They're trying to get to that more mainstream audience without trying to alienate the one audience and I think that the success of Lost and Heroes is in a way, countered to that social wisdom. The media industry talks often about the value of "audience engagement." And your series are often cited as having produced particularly engaged audiences. Can you describe the relationship you've created with your consumers and what value you place in their active participation around the franchise? CARLTON: We very consciously try not to write the show outwardly but write the show inwardly. I mean we started basically this Lost just sitting around in my office every morning, we'd have breakfast and just talked about story [...] We stuck with that same methodology all the way through. We were working in the office until 11pm yesterday for the finale of the series, and we've kind of kept that same protocol. Now the advent of the Internet has provoked profound differences of what you can do as a storyteller. I mean for us, we were actually kind of building Lost and at the beginning, one of the things that we found ourselves doing was that breaking a lot of fundamental rules of television, which was: we had a large cast, a sprawling complex narrative, and we infused that narrative a lot of intentional ambiguity. I think we were influenced in a certain way by European filmmaking; this idea that we'd give a chance to make up their mind about certain narrative aspects of the show and it get the audience talking about the show really evoked a sense of discussion and the Internet became a place where people gathered. I remember actually when Javier and I went to this fan event at the Hollywood renaissance hotel the first year, and there were these people who'd flown from all over the world, who were kind of happy to see us, but they were more happy to see each other. They had created an online community. Lost was the catalyst for that community, but the community transcended the show very quickly and there were people who got married, there were relationships that were formed, it was a way of sort of finding a shared interest, but that shared interest ultimately was transcended by the relationships between all these people, and there was all the people from the Fuselage who were basically all meeting each other for the first time. That was really an interesting experience to see that, and I think that over time, we have used the Internet as a way to gage what the responses to the show. Usually we're so far ahead, it doesn't influence the storytelling. Now of course we're done pretty much with the writing of the show, so any surprising responses now, the ship has sort of sailed... The other sort of example we cite al the time is Nicky and Paula. The fans were clambering and saying: what about those other people, there's always those other people on the beach. We see them, they never talk, who are they? So we were actually influenced by the audience to make a narrative decision that actually backfired. So we actually said, "well okay, " [ laughs ]. We started to write those two characters and it felt wrong, but people wanted it, and then, we realized it was kind of a disaster. And then we decided to burry them alive. And the audience was in that same cycle, but they were behind us. We came to that realization week by week, and then the audience was sort of reacting because they were seeing episodes, it was like looking at life from a distance star, when the event had already occurred. But it was something we did because of the fans and then they hated these characters and then they were happy when we killed them, and they thought it was their doing. TIM: It's an amazing process when you're in this loop with the fandom. As the writer's room, you often emulate, or you basically mirror the fan base. When you start to feel you've gone too far with the story line or not gone far enough, and the characters are working for you, sure enough, it sort of mirrors the same reaction that the fans have except we're still three or more months ahead when... so, you often want to say to people "wait, and see: we're getting exactly to the place where you are" and this whole idea of how to communicate with the fans... it's very interesting. When Damon and I did Crossing Jordan, there was this "one way street" that you had. You pushed the narrative out in the world and two or three months later people saw it, and if people liked it they sort of voted with their Nielsen box. CARLTON:You got a Nielsen number, that was the entirety of your feedback. TIM: Yeah, that was it. So the feedback loop was really a one way street. Then the Internet created this two way street where you immediately had an obligation to the fans who were connected to the show. And all of the transmedia components of the show become that part of the show that allows them to have a more immediate feedback. JAVIER: yeah but the thing is that no matter how mediated you are, and how much of a two way street of communication you have, you're inviolate right as a storyteller, is the right to hold on to your ability to give the audience what it needs rather than what it wants and to be the judge of that, right or wrong! And I think that especially in the early days of the internet, it became very porous, because there was an oversize reaction to Internet reaction to shows. And then you realize: wait a minute, this is still an audience of 10,000 people who read Television Without Pity, and maybe 20 who post on the board. So I think that we're kind of cycling back to a place where storytellers were less likely to be swayed cause we have a better understanding of what that audience is and what our rights as storytellers need to be. DAMON: There's this incredible Catch 22 that exists, exactly on the point that everybody is talking. And I'm sure you experienced it too, which is: the question that Carlton and I get asked by far, above any other mythological question on the show is: are you making it up as you go along? People ask us that question, they want the answer to be "absolutely not". We have a big binder, we open it up, we go "hop", we're completely functioning by our plans. However, then they also say to us: "do you guys ever go on the boards and listen to what the fans have to say?" and they want the answer to that question to be "yes, absolutely". Now these two things are in direct opposition to each other. Because, unless the fans are saying exactly what's in the binder, which of course, they wouldn't be, so they want us to be making it up as we go along, they just don't want us to admit to it. And they want us to listen to their feedback, ... we're all in the gladiator arena: they're there, and they're giving us the thumb up or down. They want the gladiator to look to them to decide who lives and who dies. And when we kill characters which are popular, they get angry at us, and when we kill characters which are unpopular, they cheer us. And that's the game. KIM: Last year season 4, we killed Millie's husband and there was a huge push back from the audience. The thing that's valuable for us on the Internet is we're all subjected to testing. Even if you're in your 4th or 5th year, they're still testing the show, and the network and studios are giving you numbers and responses. The testing group is not that big. On the Internet, it's a very, very democratic voice. And that's really exciting. It can be dangerous at time, but I mean (we got death threats, ...) but it's also exhilarating where you're taking your show. And so, I would say, had we done this 10 years ago, when the Internet wasn't what it is today, I don't know what would have happened to our show. But because we did it, we knew that there was gonna be push back, but we also had a plan for it. We were able to go on the Internet and court the audience, and explain to them that there was more coming and that he was going to be a ghost... and it was a great experience. And CBS called us at one point and said "what are you guys doing over there, you're affecting all of our websites, it's because your fans have taking everything over". As you guys know, that happens. And that was very exciting for us. But it is very valuable. Even if you don't act on what you're getting, it's valuable to take the pulse yourself rather than have it filtered through different kinds of agendas. The television industry is struggling with the reality that consumers are pursuing the content they want through means other than broadcast television - both legally through iTunes, Hulu, and other such sites, and illegally through Bittorrents. How does this reality impact the way you approach your series? One recent study, for example, found that many television series, including several represented on this panel, were watched by more people illegally than legally. CARLTON: The Internet has kind of changed the world of distribution internationally. So now Lost has moved closed to a day and day model that's basically what's happened to the theatrical film business, to avoid piracy and to capitalize on sorts of marketing campaigns that aren't just now national but international.... TV used to be sort of a gentlemany business where you'd open the show here, and then a foreign buyer would come over and they'd look and they'd watch, and they'd see how it'd do. And then months, sometimes years later, the show would actually run there. Now, because of how the world has shrunk because of the Internet things have gone much more day and day. So we've actually changed.... So this year... each episode of the show has to be done 5 days earlier in order for it to be sent all around the world....One of things that's come up in China too is that there was a race amongst pirates in China to dub the latest issue of Lost. And they were telling me that within 48 hours of the broadcast on NBC, there would be fully dubbed versions of that episode of Lost on Chinese websites. And I was like: these guys are doing it for free! You guys are professional dubbers, why is it taking you 3 months to dub a show? And it was hard to argue with that. So they've actually really shrunk the window of time, and we're on a couple of days later on the English speaking territories, and really the window in terms of dub territory is going down. The studios are doing this for two reasons: one is primarily policy, but secondly, the ability to sort of capitalize on global marketing initiatives which reconnected these ARGs. All the ARGs that we've done have been done in constant with international broadcast partners. Around the world it contributed money and resources to these Internet things. And actually the Internet component of Lost has significantly impacted the actual way in which the show itself ended up being distributed. TIM: The interesting thing is that the networks, are in a sense, they shoot themselves in the foot a little bit by driving these audience towards these alternate platforms. Heroes, we show commercials where we promote coming to the website, to NBC.com, coming there to be able to watch the show online with extra content and commentary etc. so we're actually incentivizing the audience to go to these different platforms and the fact that you can watch the show on your DVR where you want it and when you want it, without commercials, or watch online with commentary or content, we are incentivizing this audience to go and find another places. Heroes was the number 1 downloaded show last year, Lost right there with it. And the general attitude of the networks towards this massive audience that's out there has been to stand on the sideline and heckle these people when, in fact, these are people who actively sought these shows out. They went some place and actively pirated the show. These are fans that should be embraced, and, somehow, figured out how to monetize. An interesting thing would be product placement as a way to sort of create favor with the network. The interesting thing about that is that when we do a Nissan product placement in the show, those 55 million people who download our show illegally are all getting a Nissan commercial. So in some way that may be the solution there. JAVIER: Activity creates fertility--especially when you're dealing with a niche show like The Middleman. If people are downloading it illegally in China...my God, please do! Because, ultimately, what I find is that, the more people talk about the show, the more other people will end up buying the DVD. Eventually, anybody who looks at a pirated copy will tell somebody to buy the T-shirt or the DVD or the keychain, and the money will come back to us. I mean that's something...I'd rather have the show I work on be seen, and, frankly, given the way that the studios have dealt with the royalty compensation for writers on alternative platforms...I'm so sorry about your pirating problem, really! 
May 12, 2010
What Reality Television Tells Us About the Arab World: An Interview with Marwan Kraidy (Part Two))
Gender seems to be at the heart of many of the controversies you describe in the book -- whether the issue of men and women sharing the same space in Big Brother or what kinds of public voice women should have in the case of some of the talent competitions. How is reality television helping the Arab world think about the changing status of women in their society? And what does it suggest about the limits of tolerance for these changes?
While some of these shows seek to construct a Pan-Arab identity, they also become sites for struggles over national reputation, struggles which can become quite intense and can involve interference by governments. In what sense are these reality programs becoming a staging ground for the status of the nation state? Arab politics has historically involved tensions between the pan-Arab realm and individual nation-states. As I was doing my fieldwork, I was amazed to hear, over and over again, rumors about heads of state getting involved in mobilizing their armed forces, politicans, or population to vote for this or that candidate. Despite strong protests from some government and religious leaders, these shows have enjoyed great popularity with Arab publics. What can you tell us about the fandom around reality television in the Arab world? How do these programs take on ritual dimensions for some of their viewers and why has fandom itself become the target of concern for some religious and political leaders? In chapter 4, I analyze a radical Saudi preacher's sermon, titled "Satan Academy," which illustrates concerns about fan activities and rituals competing with rituals of religious and political power. This applies most clearly to Saudi Arabia, but it is relevant to other Arab countries as well. The sermon, the transcript of which reads like a passionate and sophisticated essay in media criticism, focuses on interactivity, participation and liveness as sources of danger for the prevailing social system. When viewers become involved in intricate details of a program, and when they eagerly await things to go off-script at any moment, a new affective bond is created, and ritually maintained, one based on a notion of authenticity as spontaneous, non-scripted personal behavior, as opposed to authenticity as adherence to prevailing social and religious values. This, as I explain at length in chapter 4, poses a threat to the cleric-religious system in Saudi Arabia, in which subjects constantly reenact their submission via prayer rituals, re-aired ad infinitum on television. Reality television basically creates a competing set of rituals, therefore a rival potential set of allegiances. American reality contestants are often accused of exhibitionism, seeing their participation in terms of a personal desire for fame. Your account suggests that contestants in the Arab world are more likely to be understood in terms of struggles over representation -- as standing in for larger groups, including some which have historically been denied public visibility and recognition. Can you describe what claims get made there about their motives for participation and how they may take on larger symbolic weight? Though a few critics made similar charges against Arab reality television participants, and though contestants expressed a personal desire for fame and producers and promoters of reality shows relentlessly stoked that desire, social and political aspects took over very quickly. In essence, candidates were hijacked by discourses swirling around these shows, as representatives of nations. Many of them played that game aggressively and courted these identifications. Shadha Hassoun, the Iraqi woman who won Star Academy 4, did everything she could to be perceived as a representative of Iraq, its tragedy and its hopes, and she succeeded spectacularly, managing to win the show. But playing with national identity is a dangerous game, especially for women, who have historically been symbolic boundary markers between groups, tribes and nations--in the Arab world and elsewhere. Reality programs world-wide have been used to encourage the embrace of new media platforms. What does the rise of reality television in the Arab world teach us Marwan M. Kraidy is Associate Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent books include Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Arab Television Industries (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Previously he published Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Patrik Murphy) and Hybridity, or, The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple University Press, 2005, single-authored). The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2010, co-edited with Katherine Sender) is in press. His current book projects are Global Media Studies (co-authored with Toby Miller, under contract with Polity), and Music Videos and Arab Public Life. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7f013bed-6e36-4d10-a650-442b25f2639e)
May 3, 2010
When Fans Become Advertisers: Smallville Becomes LegendaryWhen we hear that fans are rallying support behind a favorite television series, we might imagine the letter writing campaign in the late 1960s which kept Star Trek on the air; we might imagine fans of Jericho sending crates of peanuts to network executives; we might even picture fans of Chuck organizing a large scale "buycot," getting people to purchase foot long sandwiches at Subways to show their enthusiasm for the series. What we probably do not picture is fans raising the money to support and air their own commercial paying tribute to the star of their favorite series. So, I was impressed when I received this press release the other week: . I wanted to know more of the story behind this project and reached out to Maggie Bridger, who is one of the organizers, to learn more about how fans have been able to mount such an ambitious undertaking and to explore with her what it's implications might be for future forms of fan activism. Your project represents a unique example of fan-supported and generated advertising in support of a commercial television program. What are you trying to accomplish here? We are hoping to celebrate our adoration for a character whom we feel serves as a positive representation of a heroine in popular culture and in fandom. Part of it is about gratitude for DC Comics, Warner Brothers, the CW, Smallville Productions and Allison Mack for bringing us Chloe. The other part of it is about showing that we love Chloe and want to see her as the series goes forward. Why Chloe Sullivan? What does this character mean to you? Chloe Sullivan represents the meeting of two worlds---the fantastic and the ordinary. We watch her and see the journey of a driven career woman who, from her first days at her high school paper through her career at The Daily Planet and beyond, has served as a role model for many of us. A lot in our group started watching the show and Chloe Sullivan when we were still in high school and college. We have doctors and lawyers and grad students among us. Chloe didn't make us into those, of course, but she was a girl out there in the media who was going through our same journey. She gave us hope and confidence. If she could accomplish her goals, then we could. That common drive was how Legendary was conceived in the first place. Can you describe the process you've gone through to produce the advertisement? Sleeplessness? In all seriousness, it's been a long process. We started with planning back in January. The executive producer, Liz De Razzo, called me about this idea she had. We all clearly love Chloe and had felt some disappointment over her reduced screen time this season. This commercial came to Liz as a way to draw some attention onto fans' love for Chloe Sullivan and the actress who plays her, Allison Mack. Where are you at in terms of meeting your goal for this project? Currently, we are finishing our sound mixing and score for the completed edit. We will be sending it off via our air agency to KTLA this coming week. We had a lot of goals going through this process. One was to get the commercial shot and finished and we're almost there with post-production. The next was to get funds and purchase air time on KTLA, the Los Angeles CW affiliate. Again, we're finalizing a deal with them. However, while these initial goals are finishing up, we have a bigger goal---taking the Legendary commercial to other markets. We're eying WPIX, the New York affiliate, and would love to air there as well. It all depends on funds! How many people have contributed - time, ideas, money -- to make this all work? I have honestly lost count. What has been the biggest challenge in terms of pulling this together? Murphy's law. I have to be honest and admit that something unexpected always comes up. If you budget out X amount for a project like this, I think it'll probably double or triple by the end. I know it has for us. The other huge problem is distance. That's a unique aspect of online fandom. While many Chloe fans are from the United States, we also have a large international community. Our script writer lives outside of Tokyo; one of the copy editors for our press releases and our website is in Australia; I live in the Deep South on central time and Liz, of course, is in Los Angeles. It's been hard coordinating virtual teaming meetings for a time we could all make it. Basically, it took me and Megan Butler, our script writer, being insomniacs to pull it off. Do you think this is a model other fan groups can or should follow -- not only in terms of paying tribute to characters but also as a way of increasing the visibility of favorite programs? Well, I'm not sure yet. As far as increasing visibility for favorite characters and for favorite programs, I hope this is an exciting new direction. I know we've all seen fans send in favorite items like peanuts for Jericho or the Tabasco bottles for Roswell as well as putting out Variety ads. I think fan ads, even if it's specific like for an actor/actress or a character, can change how marketing is done. It can help form a partnership in a new way between shows and their fanbases. Maggie Bridger is an aspiring graduate student in developmental psychology at a university in the Deep South of the United States. Always interested in fandom studies, she's been published in Slayage, the online journal of Buffy studies. She is currently working toward her masters doing research hippotherapy and autism. One day, she hopes to also be able to write a scholarly piece on fandom campaigns, citing Legendary as a prime example.
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March 4, 2010
On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part One)If you are interested in Lost, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Star Wars, Fan Studies, or Transmedia Entertainment and you are not reading the work of Jonathan Gray, then you aren't doing it right! And let's face it, if you weren't interested in at least one of the above, then you probably have simply stumbled onto my blog by mistake. Given that I am interested in all of the above, I keep stumbling onto Gray's work and each time I do, I come away a little better educated than I did before. Gray has got to be one of the most productive -- and provocative -- writers working in media studies today. This guy really is an extratextual! And he's someone I'm finding myself working with more and more. He's a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium network of scholars; he's edited several books where my essays have appeared; and he's been working behind the scenes to help pull together our Transmedia, Hollywood events this month. And he's now teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I did my PhD. So, it's a pleasure to share this interview with you. The first installment covers everything from his recent work on parody, popular culture, and politics to his long-standing interest in fans and anti-fans. Mostly, Part Two focuses around his significant new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010). I wrote a blurb for this book, so I got to read it months ago, but it is just now hitting the shelves and starting to have a real impact on how we theorize and criticize everything from movie trailers to action figures. Jonathan, you are a highly prolific writer who has published books on a broad range of topics. What do you see as the unifying theme(s) running through your work?
One of your primary contributions to the space of fan studies has been to focus attention on "nonfans" and "antifans." Why have these groups been neglected in audience research for so long? How do they relate to older categories like negotiated and oppositional readers? And what do they add to our understanding of fan culture? Functionally, fans tend to be easier to study, at least from a cultural studies, qualitative perspective. When one is going to spend a portion of one's life sitting down and chatting with people about their media consumption, or reading their postings online, it's understandable that one would gravitate towards those audiences who are most literate about their subject, and most excited. "Snowball" sampling tends to pick up more fans too, since they can often be keen to be interviewed. Theoretically, a lot of qualitative audience research was motivated in part by a desire to show media consumers as not so hopelessly lost in the system as some suggest, and thus it was rhetorically important to make that case with fans.
That complaint, that The Daily Show and its colleagues take viewers away from hard news, always seems to forget that very few satiric shows actually compete with the news in timeslot. It also seeks to blame satire for the failings of the news. If people aren't watching the news, it's not because Jon Stewart is doing magic tricks in the circus tent down the road: it's because the news is often a seriously debased entity, reporting in a slack, half-ass way, addressed to an older white male audience, often with little interest in others, in a manner that is often the true circus act. So first off, I'd respond to that criticism by saying that if satire TV is so often being compared to the news, that's because the news is doing something wrong. And if people are trusting Stewart more than many newscasters, the productive question would be what is the news doing wrong and what is Stewart doing right, not how is Jon Stewart responsible for the fall of democracy. Satire TV mostly focuses on the role such programs played under the Bush administration. We are now a year into the Obama administration. How has his presidency changed the relevance and tone of The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and other such programs? Why are there not shows about Obama in the same way that Lil Bush made fun of his predecessor? Satirists aren't going after Obama as much, as you note. Which is a pity, since every person in power needs to be subjected to a satirist's sting. I'm a big fan of the medieval Fool model. But we're in a two party system, and therein lies the problem, since too often it requires a binaristic way of looking at politics, whereby criticism of one "side" becomes, whether it wants to be or not, support for the other. On one hand, then, if your job is to make fun of stupid things said and done by people in power, how could you be expected to see the Democrats when at times you need to look through Rush Limbaugh is encouraging people note to donate to Haitian relief since it'll only embolden Obama, when Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino are claiming there were no terrorist attacks under Bush, when Glenn Beck is being Glenn Beck, when Jonah Goldberg is saying the Na'vi should've been Catholic in Avatar, when Sarah Palin thinks universal healthcare is a secret Nazi "death panel" plot, and when Dick Cheney is doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression? As they did under Bush, the Republicans just give way too much A-grade material to satirists. And on the other hand, if your sympathies lean left, as most satirists' do, it must prove hard to focus on Obama when it means supporting the Birthers and the Tea Baggers as a result. You've written about "news fans" and I find myself returning to this concept in trying to think about the cult that currently surrounds Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Are we at a moment where reactionary politics is fueled as much by the fan followings of talk show and news personalities as it is by Washington-based leaders? It certainly seems that way, doesn't it? Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity on the right are all doing pretty well. And I'd bet that more folk on the left identify with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann than with many politicians. Rumor has it that Lou Dobbs is even planning a presidential run [shudders]. Granted, few other fan objects get the chance to "cover" their fans on a weekly basis, so there is something of an echo chamber effect. But the more that we find political mobilization looking like fandom, the more that we need to think seriously about the connections. Liesbet Van Zoonen has an excellent book called Entertaining the Citizen in which she broaches the topic, Cornel Sandvoss has done some thinking about this, and you have too. But sadly the folk who study fans and the folk who study politics and journalism have been so successfully segregated from one another in most instances that there's nowhere near enough analysis along those lines. Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.
March 3, 2010
Don't Miss Transmedia, Hollywood Conference March 16Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place Tuesday, March 16, 2010, on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics (March 17--21, 2010) in Los Angeles. By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.
Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood's six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, "lean-forward" consumers--coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike--are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people's work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki's, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered "valuable" and "entertainment" within traditional business models. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.
9:15--9:45 am
Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Moderator: Denise Mann 2:00--3:00 PM
Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Moderator: Denise Mann
Registration General Public: To register and for more information, please go to: www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference
January 20, 2010
"Going Bonkers" (Revisited): A Father-Son Conversation About Pee-Wee (Part Two)Henry 3: Parents at the time were nervous about the show and the influence it might have on young people because they were "spooked" by the Pee-Wee personality. Mr. Rogers seems much more contained in his effeminacy while Pee-Wee was flamboyant and in your face, yet they are drawing on the same cultural reservoir, where men who spend too much time and show too much interest in children as seen as, well, a little abnormal. Yet, children always felt a strong kinship with Pee-Wee, embraced his innocence and playfulness, and that may be why the character is receiving such an out-pouring of love and affection from young adults right now. Henry 4: One of the best discoveries for me in reading you article was your fairly deep psychological analysis of the ways kids distance themselves from Pee Wee, even as they identify with him. You're certainly right that I cringed when classmates ran around knocking things over and screeching because I wanted to feel more grown up than they were. I was an only child, and I wanted to feel special. In a family of graduate students that meant being serious all the time. But watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse did give me a safe time to be a kid, if only vicariously. One of the kids you interviewed, Kate, described her dream of opening a construction company - a surprisingly practical goal for a five year old girl. But when you asked her if she would build a playhouse for Pee-Wee she said, "I would tell them that I saw that show that they wanted, but I have a lot of work to do and I can't do it... And I don't like, when I go home home, you see, my boss, he likes me to work and not go home and watch TV all the time." Kate's story makes me really sad. She's trying so hard to earn respect that she can't allow herself to be five. It starts that young. I could be way off, but I'm guessing Kate's father worked for a construction company, and that she was basically modeling her ideal future self after him. You, of course, spent a lot of your time writing; so one of the ways I learned to feel grown up and earn approval was to write. Perhaps partially because you studied fan cultures, and partially because I had such a mismatched pile of action figures, I found it natural to write crossover stories about TV characters. As you accurately describe one of my typical plots, "Batman and Dr. Who can join forces to combat Count Dracula and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man." (That's The Doctor, by the way. Not Dr. Who.) Anyway, I may not have put myself in a room with Pee-Wee either, but I liked the idea that I could control what happened next in the story. I came up with hypotheses - "What if...?" or "What would Pee-Wee say if...?" I therefore find it all the more revealing that I ended up following such a similar path when I grew up. For a while after college I became a screenwriter for a regional professional wrestling company. As it happens, wrestlers, like Pee-Wee, tend to go bonkers and act like children in grown up bodies. Every Saturday night we held another show - another installment of the story - and I had a definite role in deciding what happened next. In learning to write for the characters, I often tried to capture the voice of particular WWF and WWE wrestlers who represented similar archteypes. I thought of my job in very practical terms. I was trying to build my resume, collect a portfolio, make industry contacts. But turn the picture around just slightly and you see a very different picture. In a sense, I was able to make my childhood idols act out stories like giant action figures and use the crowd the way a child would use teddy bears at a tea party. They were there to enjoy my presentation. Currently I am a TV critic and entertainment reporter at BuddyTV, a Seattle dot com. Last week I attended a party at CBS to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Survivor. 250 of the 301 former contestants were there, dancing and talking all around me. Since I have seen every episode of the show's 19 seasons to date, that was a hair-raisingly exciting opportunity for me as a fan, let alone a reporter. To add to the crossover feel, I was especially excited to run into former WWE wrestler and Survivor contestant Ashley Massaro, who I had previously only encountered from the stands of 70,000 seat stadiums. As it happens, I had already been friends with past contestants, and had known a few before they became TV "characters." I have a far more nuanced sense than most of the line between the people and their on-screen counterparts, the real life events and the TV storylines. But none the less, blogging could legitimately be seen as another opportunity for me to tell stories surrounding my favorite TV characters. Since I have no control over what they say or do, the only thing left to dream up are the questions. It may sound like a loss but it doesn't feel like one. There are no action figures here. You don't have to pull anyone's red bow tie to make them talk. I can just ask them questions and they'll tell me things. My original goal had been to set up a face to face interview with Paul Reubens (or, if he preferred, Pee-Wee Herman.) It would have been a surreal and awesome moment of life coming full circle. Lots of people had childhood dreams. I guess, in a way, that was mine. Unfortunately, I couldn't ascertain who his agent is, or how to contact them, as we normally rely heavily on long standing relationships with network laisons. Perhaps I'll work that one out eventually. Still, I do have to admit that the fact I can't remember Pee Wee's Playhouse very well - or that reading about my five year old self feels like reading a fictional story - is disconcerting. Did I, at some point, divorce this other, playful personality in order to join the adult world? Are they gone? Or did I simply incorporate them? Henry 3: When we were packing up our stuff at Senior House to get ready to move from Cambridge to Los Angeles, we stumbled upon your old Pee-Wee's Playhouse action set in the basement. It had already survived multiple moves since Madison, but we've never wanted to be the parents who could be accused of tossing out our son's old collectibles and besides, if you didn't want it, I sure as hell did, so even though it was a bit musty and mal-shapen at this point, we packed it for another move and it remains in our new storage unit. I don't know what it says that I can still tell you where the toy resides, more or less, while you may well have forgotten you had it.
January 18, 2010
"Going Bonkers" (Revisited): A Father-Son Conversation About Pee-Wee (Part One)This conversation contains mild spoilers about The Pee-Wee Herman Show.  Image via Wikipedia In the process of writing the article, we hosted a Pee-Wee Party at our apartment and you played a central role in the research process, identifying who to invite and why, discussing with me what you observed about the experience. At the party, your kindergarten classmate watched and commented on episodes, made up stories, drew pictures, and play games around the Pee-Wee characters, though as you noted, they were often "going bonkers" and not totally focused on the series. The essay is still taught today and I often encounter people who still imagine that you are in kindergarten, since you are such a vivid voice in the piece, forgetting that several decades have past since "that crazy show" (as one of your friends called it) was on the air. Paul Reubens, who played Pee-Wee Herman, is now 57 years old, after all, though still extraordinarily nimble. He's bringing back The Pee-Wee Herman Show after all of this time, reconstructing something approximating the sets of the Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and giving live performances at Club Nokia here in Los Angeles. Your mother, you, and I were lucky enough to get sixth row tickets to the opening performance of the show. I thought we could use this blog post to reflect on that experience and at the same time, reflect back on what Pee-Wee meant in our lives several decades ago. I don't know about you but I felt positively misty-eyed when Pee-Wee walked back on the stage in character for the first time in several decades, only to be met with an extended, impassioned standing ovation from the audience. When I was young, I remember reading about a stage revival of The Howdy Dowdy Show, where Buffalo Bill and Clarabell took to the road to visit college campuses and reconnect with members of the Peanut Gallery who had grown up watching the series. I'm sure the experience must have been very similar for you and others of your generation. Henry 4: 24 years have passed since our Pee-Wee Party. Henry 3: Pee-Wee's Playhouse always had a double address. Pee-Wee told an interviewer at the time, "The most fun we had writing the show was when we could come up with stuff we knew was going to kill the five-year-olds." yet it was also clear that he was fully aware of addressing a large adult population -- some of whom were parents watching the show with their children, but many of whom were young single, often queer adults, watching the show for their own entertainment. How could it be otherwise? The character and some of his friends emerged through The Groundlings, one of the legendary improv comedy groups; The original Pee-Wee Herman Show, on stage and then as an HBO special, was intended as an adults-only spoof of traditional kiddie show. Only gradually was the project reconceived as an actual Saturday morning program for children, one cast mostly with veterans of experimental theater. The great underground comics creator Gary Panther was a key contributor to the set design. The music for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure came from Danny Elfman who at the time was crossing over from Oingo Boingo and the Negative Zone to become a more mainstream composer. And of course, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was directed by Tim Burton who was crossing over from doing animated shorts into live action feature. At the time, most of the adult discussion centered around the "queerness" of Pee-Wee at a moment of increased gay visibility in American culture and on the eve of the gays in the military debate which would shape the early years of the Clinton administration. So, the show adults saw was radically different from the show that kids saw. Even so, before you can say there was nothing like it on television before, keep in mind it was also evoking memories, also very faint in my case, of earlier children shows with almost equally surreal hosts and characters -- specifically those associated with Soupy Sales (who passed away last year) and Pinky Lee. On a more personal level, I also have some difficulty recovering who I was when I watched the show. I was a young graduate student still trying to find my voice as a scholar, doing some of my first explicitly ethnographic research. I remember writing the essay sitting in a walk in closset in our apartment which we had converted into a home office. It was incredible narrow and there was still a coat bar hanging over my desk. The computer cord stretched down the hall and into the bathroom. On the day I was writing this essay, I wrote in a burst of inspiration for several hours without thinking to hit the save key. All of a sudden, young Henry came racing down the hall in desperation for the john, tripped over the cord, and I watched with sputtering rage as all of that writing -- the better part of the essay -- disappeared in a flash. That moment came to mind when Pee-Wee did an extended bit in the stage show centering around an out of date computer and the sputtering sounds it made when trying to go online. So, for me, too, there is something unnerving about seeing the Pee-Wee character, seemingly unchanged, a figure of eternal youth, which allows me to reflect on the changes in my own life and which embodies a new beginning at the same time. Your point about remembering Pee-Wee as a series of fragmented impressions is a key one. Lynn Spigel and I did an essay on the Adam West Batman series which found something similar. When we interviewed people who had grown up watching the series, some 25-30 years earlier, they recalled isolated elements, mostly recurring details, from the show, but had difficulty reconstructing whole storylines. They were much better at connecting elements of the show to aspects of their own personal identity, using it to explain who they were, who they had become, and how they had gotten there, than they were at discussing the show as a series of episodic narratives. I do think this is consistent with the distracted, interactive, ways that the children in our study watched the show, but it may also tell us something bigger about how our memories of popular culture work. I am finding myself thinking about how many recurring elements from the show Pee-Wee included in this performance -- not simply reconnecting the character to popular memory but also the Playhouse world. After all, he's talking about making a Pee-Wee's Playhouse movie and not simply a Pee-Wee movie. And that may be why both of us felt flashes of recognition as we recovered things we once knew and had forgotten as we watched the show. To some degree, the producers are shrewdly reigniting smoldering memories, even as they are playing on our more generalized affection for the host's persona and as they are tapping a pent up anger many felt that Pee-Wee was prematurely and unjustly removed from circulation. The new show seems very much aimed at adults who happened to be the same five year olds who Pee-Wee enjoyed entertaining two decades ago and for many of them, it is all about rediscovering a place which is at once faintly remembered and beloved. In a way, it is an experience of re-remembering things that are on the threshold of our consciousness and bringing it back to a more central place in the popular imagination. Henry 4: Maybe you shouldn't have put the computer cord in the bathroom. I'd trip over that now. (More To Come) ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=00d28f2c-accc-4de6-8ee0-5b768f5a8890)
November 6, 2009
Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy. Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts. Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea. Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces. Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.
Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on. Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.
September 8, 2009
Hightlights from My Conversation With J. Michael StraczynskiLate last spring, I moderated a public lecture and interview with J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the writer and producer known for his contributions to television (Babylon 5), comics (Thor, The Twelve), and film (The Changeling). Straczynski was speaking as part of the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series which MIT hosts in tribute to a long-time editor at DC Comics who spent his lifetime supporting genre entertainment. Straczynski was, as always, engaging in addressing questions posed by me or by members of the MIT audience and the discussion ranged across his career and addressed everything from his experiences interacting with fans online to the challenges of sustaining continuity across the full run of a complex science fiction series and explored everything from his early work for animated series such as He-Man and Ghost Busters and what he learned from Rod Serling and Norman Corwin to his forthcoming work on Ninja Assassian and Lensman. The Comparative Media Studies program recently posted videos of the full event on line. They are broken down into three parts -- the first features Straczynski's opening remarks to the audience which center on the importance of being willing to risk failure in order to achieve creative rewards; the second features my one on one interview with Straczynski and the third features the question and answer period with the audience. Altogether, the original program ran for 2 1/2 hours, thanks the persistence of the audience and the endurance of the speaker. The webcast version offers more extensive highlights from the significant longer exchange. Today, I thought I would share some highlights from the exchange with you. In this first segment from the audience question/answer period, JMS speaks about how his ability as a showrunner to preserve continuity on Babylon 5 have been core to his personality since childhood, although he has not always been awarded for this obsessive attention to detail.
Here, JMS offers his predictions about what serialized television drama will be like five years from now and it sounds very much like what many of us are calling transmedia entertainment -- a form which breaks down the barriers between platforms and taps into the desire of audiences to more actively participate in the life of the franchise.
Here, I asked him about the persistence of themes of religion across his writing for Babylon 5, Jeremiah, and Twilight Zone. He describes it in terms of playing fair with his characters and his audiences.
JMS speaks about the "breakthroughs" Babylon 5 made in its representations of alien cultures on American science fiction television. JMS explores how the innovations of Babylon 5 reflected his own tastes and interests as a fan of British television SF series such as Doctor Who, Blake's 7, and The Prisoner.
These segments do not begin to scratch the surface. There's a lot more to learn from this gifted creative artist who has done substantive work across multiple media and genres.
August 21, 2009
UCLA Faculty Rally to Support Endangered Arts LibrarySome 20 years ago, I spent a month in Los Angeles doing research for my dissertation on early sound comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic. I have vivid memories of time spent in some of the great libraries and archives in the Los Angeles area and one of the many things which appealed to me about moving to the west coast was the thought that I might be able to dig deeper into the collections housed at USC, UCLA, the Academy, and the American Film Institute, among many others, in this great city. I was much distressed earlier this week when Janet Bergstrom, a film colleague at UCLA, contacted me with the news that as a result of a budget crunch, her university was taking steps to close down the UCLA Arts Library, which houses many collections central to the fields of film and television studies. Bergstrom solicited my help in spreading the word about this tragic decision and about the efforts of UCLA faculty members to rally support behind the Arts Library. She shared with me this description of the situation: The Film, TV and Digital Media section of UCLA's Arts Library (that entire library is now on the chopping block) is one of the finest and largest research libraries of its kind anywhere - books, periodicals, microfilm going back to the pre-history of the cinema, with deep international holdings. (The library holds some 160,000 volumes.) The reference room provides a place for students and researchers to consult print resources that are not on-line, and often held nowhere else in LA. The library is geared to integrating web-based research with traditional library research and special collections. Just take a look at this portal, put together by our Film/TV/DM librarian Diana King. I would normally not get involved in the internal discussions of a university of which I am not a faculty but let's face it -- this decision will impact media researchers all over the world, who have come for many years to use these collections. I should I have wanted to expand on my early film comedy project by returning to the papers of Carol Burnett, Caesar's Hour, Jackie Cooper, MGM Studios, Milton Berle Show, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures, Smothers Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, not to mention a score of television and film scriptwriters who helped to shape the movement of vaudeville performers into other media. And if I wanted to pursue my research into science fiction on film and television, I might have been able to Irwin Allen, Harve Bennett, Dan Curtis George Pal, or Gene Roddenberry.And I might just dream up a new project if it meant getting to thumb through the archived collections of Dorothy Arzner or William Wyler! If you study film, television, or radio, take a look at the list of UCLA's collections and then contemplate what the consequences for your research would be if UCLA blocked or limited access to these materials. It is a painful cliche that when budgets get slashed, the arts are the first to go. But it is disappointing to see a place like UCLA which has always been a leader in supporting film and media studies make a decision which can have such a dramatic and lasting impact. The passion which many have for this great collection is suggested by this powerful comment from filmmaker Stanton Kaye:
UCLA faculty, staff, students, alums, and friends are organizing a public outcry against the potential shutting of this great resource. According to an announcement sent out yesterday, they have already collected 1,250 members to their Facebook community and 1,500 signatures on a petition they have drafted. For more information, check out the Save the UCLA Arts Library Facebook page.
August 11, 2009
Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment -- A SyllabusGiven the interest out there in transmedia or cross-media entertainment, I thought I would share the syllabus for the course I am teaching this fall at the University of Southern California. I am still shifting some details, as I deal with the scheduling of guest speakers, but all of the speakers listed have agreed to come. The readings are a good starter set for people wanting to do more thinking on this emerging area of research. I will be sharing reflections about the course material here throughout the fall, since I'm sure working through these readings in a class context is going to spark me to do some fresh thinking on the topic. I'd love to hear from others out there teaching transmedia or cross-media topics. If you know someone at USC who you think might want to take this class, let them know. I still have room for more students. Course Description and Outcomes: A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities. The course is broken down into five basic units: "Foundations" offers an overview of the current movement towards transmedia or cross-platform entertainment; "Narrative Structures" introduces the basic toolkit available to contemporary storytellers, digging deeply into issues around seriality, and examining what it might mean to think of a story as a structure of information; "World Building" deals with what it means to think of contemporary media franchises in terms of "worlds" or "universes" which unfold across many different media systems; "Audience Matters" links transmedia storytelling to issues of audience engagement and in the process, considers how fans might contribute unofficial extensions to favorite media texts; and "Tracing the History of Transmedia" pulls back to consider key moments in the evolution of transmedia entertainment, moving from the late 19th century to the present. In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling through: • Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts which contribute to larger media franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).
Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 636 pages. Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 136 pages. Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (Marvel Comics, 2003), 216 pages. Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995), Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007), 136 pages. All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class. Grading and Assignments: Commercial Extension Paper 20 percent In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole. COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. (Due Sept. 23)(20 Percent) GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.) and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise, what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or world of the original franchise. (Due Nov. 18) (20 Percent) FINAL PROJECT - FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. By the end of the term, your team will be "pitching" this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes: 1) the core defining properties of the property The pitch itself will be a 20 minute group presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questioning. The presentation should give us a "taste" of what the property is like as well as to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. For an example of what these pitches might look like, watch the materials assembled at http://www.educationarcade.org/SiDA/videos, which shows how a similar activity was conducted at MIT. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform as well as to contribute to the over-all strategies for spreading the property across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team Members will check in with the instructor on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to review their progress on the assignment. Presentation (Dec.7, 9) Briefing Book (Dec. 14) (40 Percent) CLASS FORUM: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comments via the class forum on BlackBoard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore through class discussions or with the visiting speakers. (20 Percent) *Guest Speakers are tentative, subject to availability. Shifts in speakers and thus topics and readings may occur after the semester starts.
Week 1 Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101" Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html Geoff Long, "What Is Transmedia Storytelling", Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php, pp. 13-69.
P. David Marshall, "The New Intertextual Commodity" in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69-81. Derek Johnson, "Intelligent Design or Godless Universe? The Creative Challenges of World Building and Franchise Development," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and The Collaborative Production of Culture, PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009. pp.170-279. Watch:
Anne Allison, "Pokemon: Getting Monsters and Communicating Capitalism," Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 192-233. David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, "Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children's Media Culture" In Joseph Tobin (ed.) Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 12-33. Mizuko Ito, "Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix," Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, MIT, 2008), pp. 97-110. September 2: Toys and Tales Jeff Gomez, "Creating Blockbuster Worlds" (unpublished) Henry Jenkins, "Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/05/an_interview_with_starlight_ru.html Mark Federman, "What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message," http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
Faris Yacob, "I Believe Children are the Future," http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future Henry Jenkins, "How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning...", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be.html
Week 4 September 14 Heroes and Alchemists: The New Storytelling The 9th Wonders, Chapters 1-9 http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.shtml?novel=9 Henry Jenkins, "We Had So Many Stories to Tell': The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html
Guest Speakers: Mauricio Mota, Mark Warshaw, Here Come the Alchemists
September 16: Seriality
Watch: "Young Prop Joe" Jennifer Haywood, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), "Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," pp. 21-51. (rec)
Sharon Marie Ross, "Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation," Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124-172. Sam Ford, "From Oakdale Confidential to L.A. Diaries: Transmedia Storytelling for ATWT," As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture (Master's Thesis), pp. 141-162. Louisa Stein, "Playing Dress Up: Digital Fashion and Game Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl's Second Life," Cinema Journal, pp. 116-122. Watch: LA Diaries September 23: Creating Alternate Realities Christy Dena, "Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 41-58. Jane McGonigal, Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming." Ecologies of Play. Ed. Katie Salen. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 199-228. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199 Dave Szulborski, "Puppetmastering: Creating a Game" and "Puppetmastering: Running a Game,"This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (New York: New Fiction, 2005), pp. 207-284. Guest Speaker: Evan Jones, Stitch Media COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PROJECT DUE Week 6 Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007) (Required Book) David Kalat, "The Long Arm of Fantomas" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 211-225. September 30: The Unfolding Text Neil Perryman, "Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21-40. Lance Perkin,"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the 'Rules' of Doctor Who Affect the Writing," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 13-24. Matt Hills, "Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variations on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005) as Cult/Mainstream TV," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 333-343.
Week 7 William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, "I'm Not Fooled By That Cheap Disguise," in Roberta E. Pearson, The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to A Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182-213. Will Brooker, "Establishing the Brand: Year One," Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (London: Continuium, 2001), pp. 36-67. Bob Kane, "The Legend of the Batman" (1938) and Bob Kane, "The Origins of the Batman," (1948) in Dennis O'Neil (ed.) The Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes (New York: DC, 1976), pp. 36-50. Bob Kane, "The First Batman" (1956) and Dennis O'Neil, "There Is No Hope in Crime Alley," (1978) The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (New York: DC, 1988). Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Long, GAMBIT October 7: World Building in Comics Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 129-133. Jason Bainbridge, "Worlds Within Worlds: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universe," Angela Ndalianis (ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2008) pp. 64-85. Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, "Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 303-313. Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (New York: Marvel Comics, 1993) (Required Book) Alec Austin, "Hybrid Expectations, Expectations Across Media, CMS Thesis, pp. 97-127.
Stuart Moulthrop, "See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 287-303. Watch: The Keene Act and YOU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkWGZ1G7TAE&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=878F6464EEBE32 Saturday Morning Watchmen Guest Speaker: Alex McDowell, Production Designer, Watchmen
Walter Jon Williams, "In What Universe?" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 25-32. George R.R. Martin, "On the Wild Cards Novels," in Pat Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin (eds.) Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Cordwainer Smith, "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," and "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," J. J. Pierce (ed.) The Best of Cordwainer Smith (New York: Del Rey, 1975), pp. 124-209, pp. 315-337.
David Lavery, "Lost and Long-Form Television Narrative" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), Guest Speaker: Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer, Year One
TBA Guest Speaker: Bram Pitoyo, Wild Alchemy
Week 10 Ivan Askwith, "The Expanded Television Text, "Five Logics of Engagement,"; "Lost at Televisions' Crossroads," Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, CMS thesis, pp. 51-150. Guest Speaker: Ivan Askwith, Big Space Ship
Kim Moses and Ian Sander, selections from Ghost Whisperer: The Spirit Guide (New York: Titan Books, 2008). Guest Speaker: Kim Moses, Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer
Jesse Walker, "Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the Vidding Underground," Reason, August/September 2008, http://www.reason.com/news/show/127432.html Francesca Coppa, "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures (2008), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64
Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90. Bob Rehak, "That Which Survives: Star Trek's Design Network in Fandom and Franchise" (Unpublished), pp. 2-79. Robert V. Kozinets, "Inno-Tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia" Consumer Tribes (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007), pp. 194-209. Watch:
Kristin Thompson, "Not Your Father's Tolkien" and "Interactive Middle Earth," The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp.53-74, p. 224-256 C.S. Lewis, "On Stories," Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvest, 2002), pp. 3-21.
Michael Bonesteel, "Henry Darger's Search for the Grail in the Guise of a Celesttial Child" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 253-267. Amelie Hastie, "The Collector: Material Histories, Colleen Moore's Dollhouse, and Ephemeral Recollection," Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 19-72. Week 13 The Blair Witch Project Website http://www.blairwitch.com/ Head Trauma Website http://www.headtraumamovie.com/ Guest Speaker: Lance Weiller, Head Trauma
Mark Evan Swartz, "A Novel Enchantment," Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 161-172.
J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State, 2004), pp. 1-91. Karal Ann Marling, "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks," in Karal Ann Marling (ed.) Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (Montreal: Centre Canadian d'Architecture, 1997), pp. 29-178. (Rec.) November 25: Franchises and Attractions Henry Jenkins, "The Pleasure of Pirates And What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/forced_simplicity_and_the_crit.html Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park industry," Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm Jonathon Gray, "Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films," Show Sold Separately (Forthcoming), pp. 232-247. Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), "The Fan Betrayed," pp. 79-99, "Canon," pp. 101-114. Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995) (Required Book)
Tanya Krzywinska, "Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 385-399. Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007) (Required Book) Watch: December 7 Student Presentations December 9 Student Presentations
August 3, 2009
And to Think That I Saw It At Comic-ConLast time, I shared some textual impressions of this year's San Diego Comic-Con. My son, Henry Jenkins IV, took his camera and has agreed to allow me to share with you some of the images he captured of the festivities. The first two try to capture the experience of the dealer's room at the convention -- the congestion of the floor and the spectacle of the displays (in this case, Mattel was showcasing the continued cultural value of He-Man, Masters of the Universe with this Castle Greyskull replica).
Much of the pleasure of wandering the floor is the chance encounter with costumed fans dressed up as characters from across the full spectrum of popular culture -- in this case, we see the rabbit from Donnie Darko and the Riddler.
If you ever want a precise illustration of the differences between geeks and fan boys, you might want to listen to this exchange between Peter Jackson (fan boy supreme) and James Cameron (the geek's geek) as they talk about their approaches to the filmmaking process. Jackson's fascination is with the rich details of fictional worlds, many of them remembered from childhood viewings and readings, while Cameron is someone who wants to always push to the outer limits of existing cinematographic technologies. When we look at them on stage, we recognize parts of ourselves reflected back. (Alas, I missed a chance to see Tim Burton, another filmmaker, whose work I consistently admire.)
I didn't go to many Hall H style panels but I did wait in a long line to get a chance to see the Lost cast and producers talk about the final season of the series. They made it worth our while with a very lively presentation, including cast members emerging from the audience, and the sharing of year's worth of fan-produced content.
The other time I waited hours in line was to see David Tennant and Russell T. Davies talk about Doctor Who. It's hard to get a non-blurry photograph of Tennant who is full of gawkish energy. But this was as good as my son's camera could get, stretched to the limits of its focal lengths.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 3:00 PM | Permalink
July 30, 2009
My Wild and Wonderful Comic-Con ExperiencesThe first thing about San Diego Comic-Con which hits you (sometimes literally) is the throng of attendees. A decade ago, the con attracted 45,000 people. This year, it attracted something like 125,000 fans. Most of the growth has been since the dawn of the 21st century, with the population expanding at something like 20,000 new guests each year. It's hard to think what other kind of event attracts such a large number of people and holds them together over a four day period. At any given moment, about a third of them is probably in the dealer's room and another quarter is spread across the two main halls -- Hall H and Hall 20 -- which is where the most star studded events occur. For those who want to attend Hall H events, it is not unusual for people to start lining up in the wee hours of the morning. We got there at 6:30 am for a 10 A.M. session on Doctor Who, for example. And the lines will wrap for several city blocks. In the midst of this chaos, though, the crowds are surprisingly well behaved. Every few feet there will be someone in a costume striking poses and photographers taking pictures and the crowd simply swerves around them so as not to disrupt the picture taking. A friend joked though that if you pause too long in this madness, a line will start to form behind you with people not quite sure what they are waiting for. The costumes by the way lead to some interesting rumors: Peter Jackson was rumored to have dressed up in a storm trooper costume so that he can navigate the floor of the dealer's room without being mobbed. My wife suggested that if Johnny Depp wanted to do the same, his best strategy would be to dress as Jack Sparrow, given the large number of great Jack Sparrow imitators wandering through the masses. At the end of the day, you will feel overwhelmed from the sheer intensity of trying to navigate around all of those people all day long. There are basically two strategies for dealing with the crowds at Comic-Con: a)camp out all morning, get into Hall H or 20, and stay there as long as you can. Most of the high profile events are in those rooms and people will camp out through panels they have no interest in to be able to stitch together those events which are most important to them. This can be an advantage to smaller productions which get sandwiched between the core events. A film like Kick Ass or District 8 may gain much greater visibility because it grabs the interest of people who otherwise would not be motivated to attend. It can create enormous frustration, though, as when the Twilight fans arrived early in the day, took over the auditorium, and blocked others from attending panels they wanted to see (especially the sessions with Tim Burton and, as it turned out, Johnny Depp), when their session wasn't until much later in the day. Twilight fans, in particular, have a reputation for very focused interests, as opposed to the broad generic interests which might draw science fiction or comic fans to the event. (Of course, the conflict with the Twilight fans has as much to do with generational and to some degree, gender differences as anything else). My son and I ended up sitting through a really tedious session on the current state of the Star Wars franchise in order to be able to see James Cameron and Peter Jackson. It says something about how much Star Wars has fallen from grace that even so, that panel was only about a third full. It also says something about the limited knowledge of many reporters sent to Comic-Con that a USA Today reporter tried to make the disputes between old school and newer Star Wars fans a major story coming out of the event. b) Attend smaller scale panels and avoid the main events as much as possible. Ironically, you can almost always get good seats on the comics-related panels at Comic-Con, given what a high percentage of the newer attendees come because of the media circus Comic-Con has become. Last year, I spent most of my time in Hall H or 20 and left disappointed that I had missed a chance to see some of my favorite genre writers and comics creators. This year, I tended to reverse the strategy, though I did manage to see, among other things, Sigourney Weaver and other "Wonder Women," The Cameron-Jackson exchange, and the Doctor Who, The Prisoner and Lost sessions. Because of my choices this year, I have a chance to share with you some of the stories the mainstream media didn't cover, assuming that you've read a lot already about the 20 minutes of footage from Avatar that Cameron showed. I wasn't able to get into that session, so I don't know anything you haven't already read. Warner Brothers offered sneak previews of three of its new television series: Human Target, V, and The Vampire Diaries. We arrived a few minutes into Human Target and missed the set up. All three of them suffer from some of the classic problems of pilots and have not yet achieved their full potentials. I will give Human Target and V second looks. Vampire Diaries, not a chance! Human Target, based on long-running DC comics series, deals with a body guard who puts himself in harm's way to protect his clients and the support network he's built around him. The lead, Mark Valley, is engaging and good looking but a little flat, especially when compared to much more colorful performances by Chi McBride playing more or less the same cranky private eye character he did so well on Pushing Daisies and Jackie Earle Haley as a character with a dubious past who knows how to get the information needed just in time by hook or by crook. The pilot dealt with a murder attempt on board a high speed train connecting LA and San Francisco. It delivered the goods with some really spectacular action sequences. Personally, I still prefer Leverage which hits many of the same genre buttons. I fear that I may not have enough room on my Tivo for both. V is of course the remake of the 1980s alien invassion series. Even a quick glance suggests that the producers have framed it as a neoconservative critique of the Obama era: with the Visitors making hopeful promises starting with a reform of the health care system, offering charismatic spokespeople who seem to be able to play upon the idealism of the young and the ambitions of the mainstream media. Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet on Lost) plays a single mom, a federal investigator, who by the close of the first episode, is finding himself immersed in an underground resistance movement which promises to uncover and publicize the hidden truths of the alien conspiracy. This one was the strongest of the three and will certainly demand a second look, though I wasn't totally hooked after the first episode. The Vampire Diaries sucked -- and not just in the ways you expect or want a vampire series to suck. Producer Kevin Williamson has been telling the press that Vampire Diaries is not Twilight the television series and after watching the pilot episode, which deals with a high school girl who seems on the path to falling in love with the new kid in the neighborhood who happens to be a vampire, I understand why. True enough, Twilight is the most successful of a broader range of "my boyfriend is a vampire" stories. You can love or hate Twilight but it does speak with its own voice. Vampire Diaries is what happens when you put Twilight, Gossip Girl, TruBlood, and Dawson's Creek into a blender. On a first viewing, I had trouble finding anything there that had not been done before and much better. A personal highlight of the con for me was the session of The Middleman, which I wrote enthusiastically about here after hearing the pilot episode last summer, and remained totally hooked into till the bitter end. The Middleman came and went on ABC Family without getting any real attention from the mainstream media so odds are you've never heard of it. Picture something with the playful campy tone of the old Batman series, coupled with the chemistry of the old Avengers series, and the imaginative plots of the Men in Black movies. For me, all of the pieces worked; the cast was great and the dialogue was some of the best I've seen on television in the past few years with the possible exception of Pushing Daisies. If you haven't seen it, you must get the DVD boxed set which came out this month. Like many short lived series, The Middleman left many unresolved plot points in its wake, so it was wonderful news that the cast of the series would be reuniting at Comic-Con for a live table read of the script of a never produced final episode which promised to answer all of the remaining mysteries. (The same script has also been adopted into a graphic novel). I can't tell you how much fun it was to see the entire cast, in person, performing the script. Each cast member got wild applause on first entrance. Given the tongue-twister style dialogue, there were bursts of applause when an actor managed to pull off a particular convoluted section of the script. It meant so much that the producers, writers, and cast were willing to go this far in creating a sense of closure on the series -- as disappointed as we all were to see it come and go so quickly.
Yes, They Still Talk About Comics I was able to attend sessions focusing on three of my very favorite comics creators, Mike Allred, Seth, and Bryan Talbot. Allred, often working in collaboration with his wife, Laura Allred, has produced some really wild romps through popular culture over the past several decades. He is best known for his work on MadMan, though I have also very much enjoyed his contributions to X-Force and X-Static (where Marvel's X-Man franchise parodies itself) and The Atomics. Allred's current run on Madman has been especially open to formal experimentation with one issue drawn in a range of styles as a series of visual shout outs to key influences on his work, constituting a mini-history of the comic arts, and another was designed so that the entire issue can be read as one continuous panel. The closest comparisons to the tone of his work might be Zot! or Concrete, that is, superhero comics with a strong sense of characterization and with an eye towards critiquing aspects of the culture around them. Seth, by contrast, is drawn towards an entirely different set of cultural influences -- more inspired by old New Yorker comics than by the superhero tradition. He's a Canadian based indie comics creator, whose works speak to our shared obsession with residual media. It's A Good Life if You Never Weaken is a semi-autobiographical piece about his search for a long-forgotten cartoonist. Wimbledon Green is a larger than life story about the world's greatest comic collector (think Richie Rich if Richie Rich collected comics rather than cash). Clyde's Fans, still a work in progress, and his most recent graphic novel, George Sprott, are character studies of old men reflecting back on the past -- in the first case, the protagonist, among other things, collects postcards, while in the second Sprott was an adventurer, filmmaker, lecturer, and television host. There's so much to love about Seth's work -- a very humane and caring tone, a great attention to detail (especially the artifacts of our cultural past), solid characters, and a visual style which is at once retro and surprisingly fresh. Seth's public persona captures so much of what I love about his work: he is a very quirky guy who dresses in a timeless though vaguely retro style and speaks in a low key voice that fits his work perfectly. He read a series of short autobiographical bits which spoke to key influences on his work, how he thinks about stories and images, and what he did and did not learn in art school, all of which honestly helped me to understand his work more fully. Bryan Talbot is a British cartoonist who has been credited with producing some of the first Steampunk comics in the English language, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Many of his works draw inspiration for late 19th and early 20th century British children's literature. The Tale of One Bad Rat includes long ruminations on Peter Rabbit and other Beautrix Potter characters. His more recent Alice in Sunderland is a long, rambling look at the creation of Alice in Wonderland which manages to convey large chunks of British regional history; the visual look of Alice is complex, scrapbook like, created through the juxtaposition of drawings and photographs, and is a powerful illustration of how graphic storytelling can be used for the purposes of cultural criticism and literary history. Here, he was speaking on the anthropromorphic tradition in British comics -- basically funny animal strips in the newspaper and magazines -- and how they have inspired his latest creation, Grandville, which is scheduled for release later this fall. I also attended a lively session on contemporary art direction hosted by John Muto (Home Alone, Terminator 2 3D), who I have gotten to know through our mutual involvement with the 5D conference, and another session focusing on the life and work of Harvey Kurtzman, best known for his contributions to Mad, his war comics for E.C., and his Little Annie Fanny series for Playboy. Henry Takes the Stage I told the group that we should learn from other fields which have sought to tackle materials beloved at Comic-Con: the teaching of film studies at the university level has broadened the public's background and tastes, especially around independent films, foreign films, and documentaries and thus expanded the market for kinds of films which don't play at the local multiplex; Game Studies has helped to rally a defense of the medium against censorship, with scholars being able to add credibility to industry participants concerned about freedom of expression issues. Both of these represent directions that Comic Studies could take. On the other hand, I fear that science fiction has been badly served by being folded into Literature programs with many college courses emphasizing only those works which are already in the canon but which can claim some association with SF, rather than dealing with the popular and pulp roots of the genre and the ways they influenced a much broader range of cultural materials. I worry that comics scholarship may emphasize indie and alternative comics at the expense of the popular roots of the medium, taking a "no capes, no flight" philosophy which again only accepts those works which can be most easily embraced by the literary and art worlds. The panel on Harry Potter fandom was organized by Eric Bowling and included many of the key players in the fandom: Leslie Combemale from ArtInsights Gallery; Melissa Anetelli, webmistress for the Leaky Cauldron and author of the best-selling Harry: A History, Gwendolyn Grace of the HP Educational Fanon, Time Magazine critic Lev Grossman, and Heidi Tandy, a founder of the Fiction Alley website. I had gotten to know many of these great people through my participation the previous week at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter fan gathering in San Francisco. Here, there was lots of concern raised about Warner Brother's lack of Harry Potter promotion at Comic-Con and whether the fans still exert any meaningful influence over what happens next with this franchise. It was astonishing to me to see the number of people waiting in line for this session, which was standing room only and turned many away. A few came no doubt expecting to see cast-members, but most came to "represent" for their fandom. There's so much more to tell but I am hoping this will give you some taste of the pleasures of this year's Comic-Con.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 3:15 PM | Permalink
May 15, 2009
My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part Two)So, there's a second trip out to Hollywood, this time in order to try on the actual costumes, to make sure that they fit. And I got to wander around through the costume racks, taking note of references to a Cantina sequence and a Vulcan Tea Ceremony, among other things. I overheard the people working there chatting about what color lingerie the blue-skinned Orion girl should wear for the movie. (Pink really would have been a bad choice!) And I got fit for my costume. Now, by this point, I was starting to get a little anxious about how I am going to pull off a Klingon part when the other Klingons were a good foot taller than me, sometimes more, and most of them naturally had much broader builds. I was going to be the scrawniest Klingon in the Galaxy. They kept reassuring me that they would build me up through the padded costume, though I am fully aware that they are going to be using padded costumes for the other guys too, so we were locked into an armour race that I was never going to win. That said, the costume they gave me was breathtaking. They had designed helmets for the extras to wear which have built in head-bumps so that they wouldn't have to spend hours in a make-up chair with each of us. I had a floor length great coat made out of a rubbery material designed to look like elephant skin or some alien equivalent. I have big shiny black boots. Once I put all of this on and looked in the mirror, I felt Klingon down to the souls of my feet. But there was one small problem: the pants they gave me were way too baggy and kept sliding down. There's a reason why I always wear suspenders and it's only partially a fashion statement. They took my measurements again and then promise me that they will take up the pants more so this won't be a problem on the set. After all, this is the whole reason why I've flown out to LA just to do a costume fitting and am about to fly back to teach class the following morning. A week later, I met the other cast and crew of the film on the piers at Long Beach for what was going to be an all night long shoot at the secret location they have transformed into a Klingon prison compound. There was an army of us sitting there, waiting, eating the best array of junk food I've ever seen, and trying to cope with what promises to be a "hurry up and wait" kind of evening. There was a minor crisis when the casting director comes around to ask us to take off our jewelry and I realize that there's no way I can take off my wedding ring. It's not that I wasn't willing but after almost 30 years of marriage, my finger has grown around it, and it would take a jeweler's saw to cut it off me. Luckily, just as they were about to throw me off the set, I remembered that my character is supposed to be wearing heavy black gloves and so no one will ever see my ring finger, and they let it pass. We were led back to the make-up tent, where I spent about half an hour in the chair, as they blacken the bottom part of my face and add a bristle goatee on top of my already scraggly looking beard. From here, we were supposed to wear robes and hoods so that the spoilers who were camped out around the location can't take our pictures. Once we got into costumes and make-up, we began to separate ourselves off by our races: the Klingons start to hang out with the Klingons, the Romulans with the Romulans, and then there are all of the other prisoners who represent an array of classic Trek races, including a guy in a really spectacular costume as a Salt Vampire. Once everyone is in make-up, costume, and robe, we all wereloaded onto a bus and driven some distance away. As we steped off the bus, I set eyes on the set for the first time -- there were cameras on cranes and huge lighting units; there were synthetic boulders and giant fans blowing across the set; and there were massive fire pits in the ground which erupted into flames as the crew test the equipment. It's about this point that it occurs to me that Klingons are not known for their designer eye-wear and that I am very nearsighted. This was going to be the first and last chance I was going to get to see the set in focus. A few minutes later, someone circulated through and asked those of us who are visually impaired to remove our glasses. You can ask me if J.J. Abrams was on the set that night and I couldn't tell you because I never saw him. I did hear the amplified voice of someone who was directing the scene coming down from on high. I never met the man, though people kept saying that I really should see if I could meet him, if he had specifically asked for me in the movie. It was clear some of the other extras in the scene were there because they had been hardcore fans of the series. Some bragged that they had also done extra work for Battlestar, Star Wars, and even Doctor Who, so some of these fans get around. By this point, there were persistent rumors that I speak fluent Klingon. I do not. I barely speak English and have no gift for foreign languages. And even before I get into conversations with anyone, they are already calling me "the Professor." I suppose that being a professor isn't something I do: it's who I am. In any case, it seemed that when people heard I had written a book on Star Trek, the only mental image they had was that I had written a book on the Klingon language. They moved us out on the set and gave us our positions. We weren't told very much about what's happening in the scene. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. All we know is that we are Klingons who are guarding prisoners and that things are falling from the sky and exploding all around us. We were told that if we really got into our characters, we'd have a much stronger chance of ending up on screen in the final film, and there was a roving camera just trying to grab expressive closeups. We got no instruction on how to hold our weapons and as I look around, its clear that there's not exactly trained consistency in things like whether guards hold the gun barrel pointing down or up. Some of the guys had military training and we consult with them trying to at least understand human practices in this regard. I don't think I realized before how much extras really are improvising, creating their own characters, with very limited attention from the production staff. I find myself much more attentive watching extras in the backgrounds of shots having gone through this experience. But many of us had real fear that nit-picking fan boys were going to nail us for not holding our weapons the Klingon way! And then they start staging a range of different vignettes -- at one point, I am trying to keep a group of increasingly unruly prisoners at bay using a disrupter rifle; at another point, I am on guard duty looking out over the prison complex. The most spectacular moment came when I was handed a torch (which are heavier than they look!) and told to lead a group across the compound as the wind blows down upon us and things are blowing up on other sides. Of course, being near sighted, I can't see more than a few feet ahead of me, so the group was zig-zagging like crazy as I try to avoid getting myself blown to bits or running into the blades of the giant fans. There was a real look of terror on my face for those sequences! I know I caused more than a little frustration for the assistant director who is trying to stage this little scene. And, oh yes, my pants kept sliding lower and lower down my butt: at first, it was hip hop style but in one scene, I had to grab my waist to keep my pants from sliding off altogether. I suppose that the Klingon army like other military organizations is indifferent to matching guards with the right size uniforms. Periodically throughout the evening, I had to have a costume girl try yet again to stitch up the costume so it didn't slide off me. But they never seemed to fully solve the issue. By this point, between my clumsiness with the guns, my near-sightedness, my slight size, and my baggy pants, I am starting to think of myself much more as a comic than a heroic figure. I am K'henry the Hapless! Fear my fumbles! As the evening went along, everything starts to become more and more casual. The Salt Vampire is letting us feel his rubby tentacles and everyone seems to want to hold my disrupter. If at first we sorted ourselves by race, we start to just collapse in the green room between takes, indifferent to whoever is sitting next to us. If at first we take everything too seriously, a row of Klingons started singing "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story or doing the "Crank Dat Soulja Boy" dance. At one point, they planted me on a rock to wait for instructions and forgot about me in the fog of war. I ended up dozing off in the wee hours of the morning and woke up vaguely disoriented, sitting in a Klingon prison compound, holding a disrupter in my hands. At another point, they lined us all up in various action poses for photographs and we started to joke that we were posing for the action figures, and indeed, the set up reminded me of those little green army guys I played with as a kid. Somehow, we all managed to stay more or less awake through the night, though I gradually started to feel a level of exhaustion I hadn't felt in decades. They loaded us on the buses, collected our costumes, and sent us along the way. No, I didn't meet any members of the cast, though I did see some of the Romulans characters with tatooed faces and so I am starting to wonder if one of them was Nero. No, I never met J.J. Abrams. And No, I don't have any photographs of myself dressed as a Klingon. They didn't allow any cameras on the set because they didn't want any of us leaking images prematurely to the media. I had been telling friends that I had played one of the classic alien races in the film: some imagined a Vulcan, some suggested a Ferengi, but for months, there were no reference to Klingons in the build up to the movie, there was no Klingon footage in the previews, and I got really anxious. I knew from the beginning that as an extra in a scene which involved more than 60 extras, my odds of ending up on screen were pretty small, and I had to keep lowering expectations from the students and staffs who imagined something bigger. I figured that once we had some footage of Klingons, I could start to tell people, but I didn't want to be the blogger who spilled the beans. Eventually, Abrams announced through the blogosphere that he was going to cut the Klingon sequence from the film: "There was a big Klingon subplot in this and we actually ended up having to pull it out because it confused the story in a way that I thought was very cool but unnecessary. So we have these beautiful designs that we're going to have to wait and do elsewhere I guess." I've read various reasons for his decision, having to do with trying to streamline the character motivations, trying to avoid confusion about the current relationship between Klingons and the Federation for those viewers who only know some of the later Treks where the Klingons are our friends, and having to do with keeping the opening of the film crisp and taunt. It's pretty clear from the dialogue included more or less where the Klingon sequence would have gone. And I'm personally hoping we get to see this footage as a DVD extra. My biggest disappointment is that we probably will never see Klingon action figures for this film. I had fantasies of getting a figurine of a Klingon in a floor-length elephantine coat holding either a torch or a disruptor. So, now you have it, the saga of K'Henry the Hapless, the most scrawny Klingon in the Galaxy, and how he ended up on the cutting room floor.
May 14, 2009
My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part One)
At long last, I can share with you, oh loyal reader, the utterly true, sometimes comical story of how I became a card-carrying Klingon in the new Star Trek film (well, almost). I've been itching to share this yarn for the past year and a half but had wanted to wait until the film was in the theaters and many of you would have had a chance to see it. The adventure began with an unexpected e-mail: a Hollywood casting director wrote me to say that J.J. Abrams wanted to include me in the then upcoming Star Trek reboot. At first, to be honest, I thought it was a joke. I had no idea that J.J. Abrams knew who I was. We had not and still haven't ever had any direct contact with each other, though my mind starts to race trying to figure out the chain of events which might have led him to discover me. Might J.J. be a reader of this blog? My loyal and trustworthy assistant, Amanda, did some followup and got on the phone with the Hollywood type to try to determine what would be involved in shooting "my" scene for the movie. Doing so would require me to take three trips to Los Angeles in a little under a month -- not a small demand given the number of long-standing commitments I had -- and I would need to do so on my own dime. What I was being offered was a chance to become an extra and in Hollywood, in some cases, as I would discover, extras are literally recruited off the streets, and all of them are paid only a minimal wage. The idea of a full professor at MIT flying to Hollywood to appear as an extra was absurd, but given my life-long love of this particular media franchise, which had inspired two of my books and several more articles, not flying to LA to be an extra in a freaking Star Trek movie would have been equally absurd. I had to do it, even though it meant postponing some significant meetings, ducking out early from academic conferences, and taking a series of red eye flights, not to mention spending several thousand dollars. I have often joked about boldly going where no humanities scholar has ever gone before and this was going to be a wild ride. So, I flew out to Hollywood and made my way, straight from the airport, to the Paramount Studio backlots, dragging my suitcase behind me. I was greeted by the casting agent, and was then led along with an army of other people out to what literally amounted to a cattle call. I was lined up against the wall with about fifty or sixty other men as people with clipboards moved along the line, discarding some, shifting some to another wall, and otherwise sorting us out into smaller groups. I was trying to make sense of the patterns: along my wall were men who are for the most part bald and have ample facial hair. So far, I fit the category they were looking for. But then I became acutely aware that I needed to strain my neck to see the tops of the other men's heads. Most of them looked like they were tall enough to play professional basketball and most of them were black. Indeed, by the time the sorting out process was done, I was the shortest, whitest guy left standing. They then took us one by one into a dressing room area to take our measurements and to get us to try on some costumes for size. I was fit with some heavy leather gloves, some pants which looked like they come from a military uniform, some tall black boots, and a helmet. I glanced down at a clipboard when the costumer wasn't looking and saw the notice, "Klingon Guard," and my heart beat a bit faster. It wasn't until the second trip out to Hollywood that the costumers confirmed that I was indeed going to be given a chance to play a Klingon part. (Indeed, some of the other extras only learned they were in a Star Trek movie when they arrived on the set for our actual shoot.) Now, keep in mind that being a Klingon has been one of my life-long ambitions. When I was in high school, I went to the DeKalb County Honors Camp, where I majored in drama. I spent the summer in the company of some of the most wacky friends I ever had, doing skits and plays, and when we were not doing that, just cutting up in the hallways. One of the girls in our cohort was a hardcore Trek fan. At this point, I had watched the series as a casual viewer but I had not taken the plunge. But she decided she was going to adapt the script from David Gerrold's "Trouble with Tribbles" for the stage and we were all going to play parts. I met a guy, Edward McNalley (who is still one of my best friends) when he got pulled in from another group to play Spock. I was cast as the Klingon officer who sparks a bar fight with the Enterprise crew when he insults first its captain and then the ship itself. In getting ready to play the part, I started reading every book I could find on the series -- The Making of Star Trek, The World of Star Trek, Star Trek Lives, and of course, the James Blish novelizations of all of the episodes, even the photonovels and the viewmaster slides. That's how you kept up on a series back in the days before any of us had a VCR, though my wife still has audio tapes recorded through alligator clips attached to the television sound system, which she recorded when the series was first being aired. It was through all of this reading that I discovered not only Star Trek but also the fan culture around it. Flash forward several decades to when I was doing research for Science Fiction Audiences, the book I wrote with John Tulloch. That's when I became a Klingon for a second time. I was trying to do research on Klingon fan culture as a contrast to the female fanzine writers, the GLBT actvists, and the MIT students who figured prominently in that study. In true participant observation fashion, I joined a Klingon role-playing group, seeking to better understand what it was like to walk that particular swagger. In many ways, this Klingon fandom was a branch of the men's movement which was taking shape around Robert Bly's Iron John. Most of those I met were working class men who were embracing a warrior mythology to work through anger and frustrations they had encountered in life. Both men and women involved struck me as experimenting with power and trying to reclaim aspects of masculinity which they saw as under threat elsewhere in the culture. In the end, my research on Klingons was a failed project which never found its way into the final book. I never really could figure out how to perform Klingon masculinity in a convincing manner and I got lost in the role-play activity. I had been cast as a Klingon ambassador, which I took to be an oxymoron, and so I was proceeding by insulting and abusing the Federation ambassadors with whom I was interacting, much as my character in "Trouble with Tribbles" had intentionally picked a fight with the Enterprise crew. But the guy representing the Federation took it all too personally, could never grasp that I was playing a character, that we were operating in a magic circle, and eventually filed a protest against me, which led to the Klingon high council suggesting that I step down from my post. I guess I played too rough to be a Klingon, go figure. Skip forward a few more years and I'm being profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The photographer is scoping out my living room when he stumbles on my Bat'leth, a Klingon battle sword, which I have propped up against my fireplace. And he asks if I would be willing to pose with it for a photograph. As a long-time fan, I smell a trap. After all, I've written critically about the ways news coverage depicts fans in costumes with program-related trinkets as people who can't separate fantasy from reality. Even with the release of the new film, I am reading lots of prose about "rubber Vulcan ears" and the like, despite two decades of trying to dismantle those hurtful cliches. But I also relished the absurdity of appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education showing off my Klingon cutlery and so, once again, in for a penny, in for a pound. So, given that history, I can't tell you the excitement I felt when I called my wife, a fellow lifelong Trekker, to tell her that I was about to become an official Klingon. She was jealous, of course; what wife wouldn't be? But she also was really supportive of this fantasy-fulfilling opportunity.
May 12, 2009
Five Ways to Start a Conversation About the New Star Trek FilmSpoiler Warning: The following post assumes you saw the new Star Trek film this weekend. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be reading this post. You should be heading to a multiplex. Cynthia and I went to see the new Star Trek film this weekend. We have managed to see every Star Trek film together as a couple on opening weekend since the film franchise lost with Star Trek: The Motionless Picture in 1979. So, the two of us proceeded to spend the better part of the evening going through the film scene by scene armed with a lifetime of fan and critical perspectives on the franchise, trying to figure out what it signals about the future of Trek. We certainly went into the film with high hopes but also with a certain sense of dread. J.J. Abrams has worked hard to demonstrate to the world that "this is not your father's Star Trek," and the problem is that we are, well, sorta, when you look at our birth certificates and all, part of 'your father''s generation. People like 'Your Father' and even more likely 'Your Mother' have kept Star Trek a viable franchise for more than four decades. None of us object to bringing in new souls for the faith or attracting younger followers but you don't have to write off the old fans to do so. We certainly were not opposed to the recasting of cherished characters: quite the opposite, many of the franchises we care about -- Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Cyrano, Hamlet, Sam Spade -- have been recast many times with differing results but always with new discoveries to be made. We certainly hoped that having someone other than William Shatner playing the part would rekindle our respect and affection for Kirk, as a character, for example, while we remained skeptical that a new actor could capture the complexity which Leonard Nimoy has achieved through his portrayal of Spock through the years. As a fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series, I'd be hypocritical if I objected to them rethinking the characters or revamping the worlds depicted on the series. When Cynthia was asked what she thought upon walking out of the theater, she responded that it felt like a Star Trek movie precisely because there were things we loved and things we hated about it. It's been like that from the beginning and it will always be thus. Rather than write a review of the film, though, I figured I'd throw out some discussion topics. After all, it's exam season around here and so the genre of essay questions comes readily to hand. The following are some of the things we've been debating since we saw the film: 1. For us, the coolest thing in the movie was the image of Vulcan educational practice, which is consistent with previous representations (most notably the scenes of Spock retooling himself in Star Trek III) but also gave us new insights. Vulcans seemingly learn in isolation yet immersed in a rich media landscape. Each climbs down into a well surrounded by screens which flash information, allowing them to progress at their own rate, dig deeper into those things which interest them, and at the same time, develop a certain degree of autonomy from other learners. There are no teachers, at least none represented in the segment we are shown here, but rather the individual learner engaging with a rich set of information appliances. In some ways, this is the future which many educators fear -- one where they have been displaced by the machine. In other ways, it is the future we hope for - one where there are no limits placed on the potentials of individual learners to advance. But if learning is individualized, why do people come together into what can only be described as a school? Why not locate the learning pod in each home? Why have a structured school day? In the midst of all of this well-considered if somewhat alien pedagogy, we are introduced to the issue of Spock's bullying by his classmates. The scene where he confronts the Bullies is oddly ritualized, as if he was reporting to them for today's insults and abuses, and as if they were testing his ability to develop the toughness and emotional control to push aside those insults. It's clear elsewhere that he faces a certain degree of prejudice as a result of his half-human/half-Vulcan background -- see the casual deployment of race as a handicap as he is admitted to the Vulcan Science Academy. But here, it is as if there is a system of ritualized bullying designed to test and toughen each student. What if bullying was incorporated into the pedagogical regime as it is more or less in several other educational systems on our planet? Certainly the content of the insults would be different in each case, but the logic of ritualized insults as a way of developing emotional control is not actually alien to the way Earth cultures operate. 2. I've read reviews which suggest that the Uhura in this film represents a progressive reworking of the character from classic Trek. I'm not convinced yet, even though I very much liked the actress who played the part. However limited her role might be ("hailing frequencies are open, Captain"), the original Uhura was defined first and foremost by her contributions as a member of the Enterprise Crew. Whatever subtext there was suggesting a Kirk/Uhura romance, it was just that -- a subtext -- left for fans to infer from a few telling moments in the trajectory of the series, among them, the first interracial kiss on American television -- albeit executed under mind control -- albeit an implied projection of one or both of the character's actual desires. In the new film, Uhura asserts her professional competence but she never really demonstrates it. How does that make her different from many of the female professionals in classic Trek who are introduced in terms of their professional abilities and then reduced to being the girlfriend of the week for one of the primary characters? Here, more screen time is devoted to her but she's ultimately a love object in some kind of still to be explored romantic triangle between Kirk and Spock. Basically, she's been inserted into the story to discourage fans from writing slash stories, though most of us won't have any trouble figuring out how the exchange of women facilitates an expression of homosocial/homoerotic desire. The classic definition of a Mary Sue is someone who is claimed to have extraordinary mental abilities, who manages to gain the romantic interests of multiple members of the crew, and who manages to have the information needed to save the ship. In way sense, then, is the new Uhura anything other than a Mary Sue figure in the body of an established character? Surely after forty plus years, Trek can imagine a more compelling female character. 3. I'm still trying to make sense of the implications of Kirk's absurdly rapid rise to command in this version of the story. In the past, we were allowed to admire Kirk for being the youngest Star Fleet captain in Federation history because there was some belief that he had managed to actually earn that rank. Here, he manages to gain command in large part because Captain Pike was an old family friend, and because he had one really successful mission. It's hard to imagine any military system on our planet which would promote someone to a command rank in the way depicted in the film. In doing so, it detracts from Kirk's accomplishments rather than making him seem more heroic. This is further compromised by the fact that we are also promoting all of his friends and letting them go around the universe on a ship together. We could have imagined a series of several films which showed Kirk and his classmates moving up through the ranks, much as the story might be told by Patrick O'Brien or in the Hornblower series. We could see him learn through mentors, we could seem the partnerships form over time, we could watch the characters grow into themselves, make rookie mistakes, learn how to do the things we see in the older series, and so forth. In comics, we'd call this a Year One story and it's well trod space in the superhero genre at this point. But there's an impatience here to give these characters everything we want for them without delays, without having to work for it. It's this sense of entitlement which makes this new Kirk as obnoxious as the William Shatner version. What it does do, however, is create a much flatter model for the command of the ship. If there is no age and experience difference between the various crew members, if Kirk is captain because Spock had a really bad day, then the characters are much closer to being equals than on the old version of the series. This may be closer to our contemporary understanding of how good organizations work -- let's think of it as the Enterprise as a start-up company where a bunch of old college buddies decide they can pool their skills and work together to achieve their mutual dreams. This is not the model of how command worked in other Star Trek series, of course, and it certainly isn't the way military organizations work, but it is very much what I see as some of my students graduate and start to figure out their point of entry into the creative industries. 4. If the narrative makes it all look too easy for the characters, the narrational structure makes it much too easy for the viewers. There's a tendency not so much to ask questions as to hand us answers to the questions fans have been struggling with over the past four decades. So, for example, classic Trek was always carefully not to fully explain how Sarek and Amanda got together, allowing Vulcan restraint to prevent Sarek from fully articulating what he feels towards Spock's mother. As a consequence, there were countless fan fiction narratives trying to imagine how Sarek and Amanda got together -- Jean Lorrah, for my money, wrote the best of these narratives, though there were other great fan novels out there on precisely this theme. Yet, here, the question is asked and answered, overtly, in a single scene. Ditto the issue of whether Vulcans are incapable of feeling emotion on some biological level or if they have simply developed mental discipline to bring their emotions under their control. Again, this question inspired decades of fan fiction writing and speculation and is here dispatched with a few short sentences. The mystique that surrounded Spock from the start had to do with things he was feeling but could not express: he is a deeply divided character, one who broods about where he belongs and how he relates to the other Enterprise crewmembers. But this film makes it look ridiculously easy for him to get a girl friend and he is surprisingly comfortable necking with his pretty in the transporter room, an act that it is impossible to imagine Spock prime doing. The original Spock was a deeply private person. It isn't that the new film has made Spock Sexy. The old Spock was a whole lot sexier than the new Spock for all of his hidden depths and emotional uncertainties: the new Spock is just too easy all around and there's no real mystery there. He isn't sexy; he's having sex and that's not the same thing at all. 5. As a stand alone film, it's reasonably engaging: I like most of the cast and think they achieve good chemistry together. The pace is, as has been suggested, good, though most of the action scenes -- except for the free fall sequence -- seem pretty average. It's a flawed work but I'm certainly in for more adventures. My problem is that the film didn't give us much to anticipate for the sequel. In answering its mysteries so easily and not setting up new ones, there's just not that much room for speculation and anticipation. This would work if it were the pilot episode of a new television series. I haven't loved any of the pilot episodes but they gave me enough reasons to like the characters that I kept watching. It usually takes a good number of episodes for the cast to jell with their characters, for the writers to figure out what they are doing, and for the audience to figure out what is distinctive about the new series. I think I need more momentum to get over the hump than a movie every few years and that's why television would have worked better to relaunch the franchise than a feature film is going to do. Is this a space where transmedia storytelling practices can create a bridge between this film and the next? Is there other ways that they can allow us to have encounters with these characters as embodied by the new cast? If so, what strategies will be the most effective at strengthening what ever level of identification was created for this new film? Then, again, there's nothing wrong with this film that couldn't have been improved by the addition of Klingons. I will explain later in the week.
April 24, 2009
How Susan Spread and What It MeansI've done four interviews over the past few days -- with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Mainichi Shimbun (Japan) -- which in one way or another have touched on the dramatic story of Susan Boyle, the dowdy and musically gifted contestant on Britain's Got Talent who has become the new queen of both broadcast and participatory media. What I've been telling all of them is that Boyle's success is perhaps the most spectacular example to date of spreadability in action, and indeed, since we've discovered a fair number of busy corporate types out there who don't feel like reading the eight installments of "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," I figured I'd use this space to spell out again some core principles of spreadable media and show how the Boyle phenomenon illustrates how they work. The statistics are moving so fast that it is impossible to keep track of them but here's the basic data points as reported on Monday by the Washington Post: According to Visible Measures, which tracks videos from YouTube, MySpace and other video-sharing sites, all Boyle-oriented videos -- including clips of her television interviews and her recently released rendition of "Cry Me a River," recorded 10 years ago for a charity CD -- have generated a total of 85.2 million views. Nearly 20 million of those views came overnight. By comparison, the 2008 Season finale for American Idol, one of the highest rated programs on American broadcast television, attracted almost 32 million viewers, or between a third and a half the number of people who had watched Susan's video as of Monday of this week. So, what's happening here? Contrary to what you may have read, Susan Boyle didn't go "viral." She hasn't gained circulation through infection and contagion. The difference between "viral" and "spreadable" media has to do with the conscious agency of the consumers. In the viral model, nobody is in control. Things just go "viral." In the Spreadability model, things spread because people choose to spread them and we need to understand what motivates their decision and what facilitates the circulation. While she originated on British broadcast television, her entry into the American market was shaped more by the conscious decisions of 87 plus million people who choose to pass her video along to friends, families, work mates, and fellow fans than by any decision by network executives to put her on the airwaves in the first place. This is not to say that the original video was not professionally produced and edited in such a way as to maximize the emotional impact of what happened to her at that particular talent composition. This is not to say that our interest in the content wasn't shaped by our general familarity with the genre conventions of reality television (leading us to expect another William Hung kind of moment) or by our particular perceptions and investments in one Simon Cowell, whose boyish grin and sheepish expression represents the ultimate payoff for her spectacular performance (which we can appreciate because we've seen American Idol and know what a tough-minded SOB Simon can be). And that's not to say that the visibility of Susan Boyle hasn't been amplified as she's gotten interviewed on Good Morning America and spoofed on the Tonight Show, to cite two examples. We have to understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon as occurring at the intersection between broadcast media (or to use Amanda Lotz's term, television in the post-network era.) In other words, this is convergence culture at work. The Susan Boyle phenomenon would not have played out the same way if there wasn't YouTube, if there weren't social networks, if there weren't Twitter. Indeed, the very similar video of Paul Potts making a similarly surprising success on the same program generated nowhere near the same level of circulation a year ago (though it may have also prepared the way for the public's interest in this story). What allowed the Susan Boyle video to travel so far so fast was that it could travel so far so fast. For most of the people who saw it and decided to pass it along, they had a sense of discovery. They could anticipate that they were sharing the video with people who probably hadn't seen it already, precisely because the content was not yet being broadcast on commercial television. The fans found Susan Boyle before the networks did -- much like that old saw that by the time a trend makes it to the cover of Time Magazine, it's already over. There was an infrastructure in place -- across multiple communication systems -- which would allow anyone to share this content with anyone else who they thought would like to see it with minimal effort. We can send links. We can embed the content in our blogs. The role of Twitter in all of this is most interesting. Twitter Twits did what Twitter Twits do best -- they tweeted alerts about an interesting bit of content and were able to embed micro-links so their followers could quickly access the content. I think of Twitter as like a swarm of bees that spread out in all directions, searching for interesting materials to share. When someone finds it, they come back to the hive, do a little honey dance, and send the swarm scampering behind them. This is how collective intelligence outsmarts the broadcast decision-makers: The Twitter Tribes can figure out what content the audience wants to see because the Twitter Tribes are the audience, making decisions in real time. Equally important is that we had the agency to decide which content we wanted to pass along -- out of all of the possible video clips posted on YouTube last week or indeed, out of all of the many segments of media content which are circulating around us. We believe that we can only understand what happened here by identify the choices which consumers made as they decided to pass along this content and not that content. The USA Today on Monday sought to identify a range of different motives which shaped the decisions to pass along this particular content: "Vindication . . . Surprise . . . Guilt . . . Shame . . . Psychology . . . Hope . . . Distraction . . . Empowerment . . . Authenticity . . . Spiritual Solace." There's no need to identify a single cause for why people spread this content. Different people spread this content for different reasons. Hell, often, the same person spreads this content for different reasons. I sent the link via e-mail to my wife with a note saying "want to feel warm and fuzzy," to a close friend with a note suggesting "this will crack you up," and to my Twitter and Facebook mobs with the suggestion it illustrates something important about reality television because you wouldn't believe this if you saw it in a movie. My sharing of the video meant something different in each of these relationships. We can certainly identify a range of common reasons for why the emotional structure of this video might motivate people to circulate it. Does the wide-spread circulation of reality television suggest the triviality of what constitutes public interests? I don't think we can answer that question without knowing what we are using Susan Boyle to talk about. Her meaning doesn't reside in the video itself -- we won't exhaust it no matter how many times with watch it. The meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other. As it starts to circulate, the Susan Boyle video gets inserted into all kinds of ongoing conversations across a range of different communities, so that I've stumbled into prayer circles for Susan Boyle; I've found scientists talking about how someone with that body could produce such a sound; I've seen discussions amongst Karaoki singers about her techniques, and I've seen reality television fans trying to explain why her success would never be possible given the rules of American Idol which exclude someone her age from competing in the first place. Susan Boyle circulates because she's meaningful on many different levels and after a while, all of this has started to go meta so that we are spreading Susan's videos to talk about how fast they are being spread. For many of the people who are spreading her videos, the transaction is understood through the lens of a gift economy. We share her because she allows us to make someone we care about have a somewhat better day. We share her because of what she allows us to say about ourselves, our world, and our relationships. I sent Susan to my wife as something like a Facebook Gift -- a short, quick, friendly gesture on a day when we weren't going to see each other until much later. Yes, there were other groups who had other motives for getting me to pass along the content -- the producers of the programme and the network on which it aired, perhaps YouTube itself -- but their motives had very little to do with why I chose to share that video with people I cared about. So my circulation of the video needed to be negotiated between their interests and mine. The fact that YouTube makes it easy to embed the content makes it easier for me to share it. The fact that Bit.ly allows me to reduce the length of the url allows me to tweet about it. And all of these technical innovations makes it that much easier for the video to spread, but at the end of the day, it also spreads because I and all the rest of us have become more literate about social networking, because we are linked to more people and have more regular contact with them, because we now often interact with each other through sharing meaningful bits of media content. Keep in mind a fundamental fact: many of the 97 plus million people who downloaded the video are part of a surplus audience from the perspective of the people who produced and marketed Britain's Got Talent. Indeed, beyond a certain point, Susan Boyle's rapid visibility becomes a liability rather than an asset. Keep in mind that Boyle stars in a British program which does not get commercial distribution in the United States. I can't turn on a television network -- cable or broadcast -- and watch the next installment of Britain's Got Talent. I can't go on Hulu and download that content. And I can't at present go on iTunes and buy this content. Market demand is dramatically outpacing supply. What I can do, though, is consume illegal downloads of the series via various torrents or fan distribution sites, which have the flexibility to get the content into circulation without having to negotiate international deals or work through protectionist policies which make it hard to bring international content into the American market. Even with Cowell's production company already having working relations with multiple American networks, my bet is that he can't get that show on the air quickly enough for Americans to be able to catch up with the Brits. Sure, Simon Cowell has already signed her to a contract and talks about how ""there's every chance Susan Boyle will have the number one album in America" if she appears on Oprah . But the record can't go on sale fast enough to capitalize on this burst of public interest and by the time it reaches the market, there's a good chance that her 15 minutes of fame will have expired. Wired tells us that even where the media producers might have made money from the spread of Sarah's video, they are so far choosing not to do so: "a Google spokeswoman responded to our e-mail and phone queries with some surprising news: "That video is not being monetized." We've contacted Sony (Simon Cowell's label) and FremantleMedia (the show's producer, owned by RTL Group not Sony as appeared in this update earlier) to try to determine why the $500,000 or more Boyle's video should have generated so far is apparently being left on the table -- despite the fact that both companies are confirmed revenue-sharing partners of YouTube." So, whatever calculations have gone into getting us to help spread this video, they don't make sense in terms of a simple and direct economic equation. This isn't about counting impressions and raking in the cash. Keep in mind that what we've seen so far is her first appearance in a season long competition and the implication of this blockage becomes clear. I've argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn't that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning's phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone's still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next. When many of us write about the global circulation of media, the American circulation of British reality television isn't necessarily what comes first to mind. Indeed, there's some kind of mental block in terms of understanding this content as international in the first place. Yet, there is already a strong fan base in the United States for British media content which had already been downloading and circulating Britain's Got Talent, even though no commercial producer had guessed that this series might generate this kind of American interest. And that fan base is now in a position where they may need to service Susan's growing audience. Part of the reasons Americans like Susan Boyle is that she's so damned British. USA Today says her story is like "a Disney movie," but it isn't: it's like a British movie, like Calendar Girls or Billy Elliot or The Full Monty, one of those down to earth dramas where average Brits cut across class and taste boundaries and do something extraordinary. The mixture of gritty realism, portly stars, eccentricity, class consciousness and wild-eyed optimism is what draws many of us to British media in the first place. We are used to talking about things that could only happen in America. Well, Susan Boyle is something that could only happen in Great Britain -- get used to it because the next one will be something that can only happen in India or Japan. When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks. We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand. And as we discover we like someone like Susan Boyle, we seek out more information. Suddenly charity records she made years ago spring up videos on YouTube. Suddenly there's a flood of interest on Wikipedia about this previously unknown figure. And people are seeking out videos of Elaine Paige, the queen of British stage musicals, who Susan identified as her role model. Many Americans had never heard of Paige before so we can chart dramatic increases in downloads on her videos though they are dwarfed by the Susan Boyle original. Most of the thousands of comments posted on the Paige videos make unfortunate comparisons with Susan Boyle, suggesting that even though she has been a much bigger star historically, has a string of commercial successes, that for this week at least, Susan Boyle's got a more dedicated fan base. Just to give us a baseline, some of the Elaine Paige YouTube videos reach more than a million viewers, where-as the rest don't get over 100,000. My theory is that Susan Boyle's fan base have discovered some of them and not others, accounting for the huge gap in traffic. Or consider the fact that Susan Boyle gained more than a million Facebook subscribers in less than a week at a time when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have been battling it out to see who could be the first to get a million subscribers on Twitter. (Yes, Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter but it's still an impressive accomplishment!) This is not to say that long-term Oprah could help Susan Boyle open up her record to a much larger audience, just that in this frenzy of interest, she doesn't need Oprah or any other old style broadcast celebrity to turn YouTube on its ear. So, that's what Susan Boyle can teach us about Spreadability. So what happens next? Talk among yourselves. And while you are at it, spread the word.
April 15, 2009
Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part Two)As you wrote the book, you clearly struggled with the issue of how to balance the classic examples in the field, many of which reflect the successive generations of television scholarship, with the need for contemporary examples which are relevant to the current generation of students. How did you resolve that issue? I hope I resolved it! The book was based on my own course (also entitled "Television and American Culture") which has evolved over the past decade. I initially began teaching the course as a chronological history of broadcasting, starting with radio, moving through network television, and ending up in the convergent present - there are good textbooks to frame such a historical narrative. But I found that students taking the only television-centered course in the curriculum were itching to talk about the contemporary context - while I would highlight how early radio frames our understanding of 1990s internet, or 1950s single-sponsorship helps explain contemporary product placement, I found that the course wasn't working well to either capture the historical or the contemporary, and needed to be restructured.
When choosing examples and areas to cover, my first imperative was to pick examples that spoke to students and encouraged them to look deeper into the shows that they know and enjoy. So while using programs like South Park, The Simpsons, Lost, and The Daily Show as examples does cater to my own tastes, it is really motivated by student interest - I have found that students get really excited when I tell them about my research on The Wire and Lost, much more than my work on Dragnet! Contemporary programs that get high ratings, like Two and a Half Men and NCIS, are not on the radar of most undergraduates, and thus fall short as pedagogical examples. I was struck looking at the references in your book by how much television studies has expanded and matured as a field over the past decade. How did the current state of this field impact the decisions you made in creating this book? The primary job of a textbook is to synthesize the field into an introductory framework; given the growth of television studies in recent years, this was both exciting and daunting. I didn't want to structure the book by methodology or theoretical approach, which is an organization that some other television textbooks use, so I mapped out the key elements of television and looked for scholarship addressing those core aspects. It also feels like the field has moved away from theoretical modeling and more toward an applied mode - take the approaches to the medium developed in previous eras, and provide detailed historical and analytical accounts of a wide range of examples and moments. Thus it was a rich vein of scholarship to mine. Others have argued that there has been much more work on the ideological and economic dimensions of television, especially in regard to television audiences, than to the aesthetic dimensions. What challenges did you find in writing the chapters that deal with more formal issues? A good indicator is that Chapter 5, "Making Meanings" (about the formal dimensions of the television text) is the only one without any endnotes! Not to suggest that there is no scholarship in this area, but it certainly has been less explored than issues of industry, reception, and representation. Most of the core scholarship on the formal elements of television is quite dated today, dealing with examples and modes of production that are less central to contemporary television. In some ways, scholars have been reluctant to return to questions of form and aesthetics due to the politicization of the field (which I've written about elsewhere concerning Lost). But I also think it's because there hasn't been a recent tradition to build on, and the comparable scholarship from the 1970s is hard to update. So I hope these chapters help lay things out enough to encourage scholars to build on this foundation.
When I started the textbook project, my Genre & Television book had recently been released and I was starting to build my narrative project. I conceived as the two modes of writing as distinct - the textbook would be synthesizing other people's research, and the narrative book would be my own ideas more in line with my first book. But as I got deeper into the textbook, I found that these two modes of writing were far less distinct from one another than I had thought. The textbook does build on others' works more fully, but I'm still framing arguments, selecting examples and evidence, and guiding readers through a narrative. I also became enamored of a more accessible writing style - while I've always tried to write with a minimum of jargon or density, looking back on early publications shows how much my writing style has changed (hopefully for the better!). So I anticipate that even though the ideas will be less synthetic, I hope that the tone and style of my narrative work is more like the textbook than my earlier scholarship.
April 13, 2009
Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part One)I can think of very few examples of textbooks that have made original contributions to scholarship in media studies: Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art and Film History books may be the notable exception. I generally prefer not to use textbooks in my classes, exposing my students to cutting edge articles from books and journals, and increasingly to blog posts from key public intellectuals. Most textbooks homogenize and generalize, lacking the particularity and pointedness of other kinds of academic writing. They try to appeal to everyone, try to include everything that matters, and in the process, they mask the criteria which shape their construction of the field. For these reasons, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Jason Mittell, who I consider to be one of the top thinkers in television studies, was tackling the task of writing a textbook for this field. Mittell has been working on late on the issue of complexity in television narrative, having already contributed to our understanding of genre and television. We share a common intellectual background -- both being alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications Arts Program. Mittell is involved in our Convergence Culture Consortium and recently posted some interesting thoughts on his Just TV blog which compliments my focus on "spreadability" with what he calls "drillability." You can learn more about Television and American Culture here. I had a chance to read some of this textbook project in draft form and was excited by what I saw, so as soon as I heard Television and American Culture was being released, I contact Mittell to do an interview for this blog. Let me be clear: Mittell has done what I would not have thought possible, creating a compelling, up-to-date wide-reaching, nuanced, readable, and engaging introduction to television studies, a textbook which does what we want a good textbook to do but doesn't read at all like a textbook. As you will see, I wanted to get the genre theorist Mittell to reflect on textbooks as a genre and on the ways he chose to reinvent that genre through this project. In talking about Television Studies textbooks, Mittell also offers some reflections on why we should study TV and what the current state of the field looks like. You open the book with a consideration of the Janet Jackson flap at the Super Bowl. What does this incident teach us about the range of different ways television functions in relation to American culture? This was the first section I wrote during the book proposal process. I knew that the book's core model would be to show how television, like all media, can be understood as spanning a number of facets that are often treated separately - this was based on the "circuit of culture" model emerging out of British cultural studies in the 1990s. For television, the six facets that I identified are commercial industry, democratic institution, textual form, site of cultural representation, part of everyday life, and technological medium - the first draft of the book actually had only six (very long!) chapters, each covering one of these facets. Many textbooks strive for a "neutral" voice which balances out competing perspectives in the field. You do lay out competing arguments here, but as you note in your introduction, you also take sides, constructing your own arguments about key contemporary trends and programs. How do you see your book relating to the genre expectations surrounding the "textbook"? When I decided to tackle a textbook, I spent some time reading through a number of textbooks on the market, both within media studies and other fields. What struck me most was how disengaging and dull the majority of them were. Even when they were written by authors who can be lively and compelling writers in their other scholarship, the genre of the textbook seemed to follow the edict of a lot of network television: provide least objectionable content. They present material in a seemingly objective, overly-simplified manner, and write without passion or personality. The cover of your book shows contemporary television projected across a range of different screens, some of which look like the boxes we've used for years, and some represent mobile phones, computers, and other emerging platforms. Does the cover of the book signal the obsolescence of its content? At what point as we explode the range of distribution options, does television cease to be television as a specific medium and begin to blur over into all of the other media around it? When I started working on this book in 2004, YouTube didn't exist, iPods had no video capabilities, and networks had only just begun to experiment with putting their programs online. By the time the book came out in 2009, the idea of television as defined by the box in your living room had lost its centrality. And there's no doubt that the last five years are not the end of this core technological shift - honestly, I don't know what "television" will mean in another five years. But I'm certain that the history of the medium and its industrial and regulatory systems will still matter - whatever technological ecosystem we'll be living in during the 2010s and beyond, some remnant of television will matter, just as the lingering presence and influence of print, theater, cinema, and radio still matter today. You could argue that many of the topics you deal with here - convergence, digitalization, globalization, branding, shifts in audience measurement - are impacting all media. What do you see as the relationship between television studies and a more generalized media studies? Can we read the title of your blog, "JustTV," as a statement of sorts about how you position yourself in the space between television and media studies? I see television studies as both on the forefront of media studies, and in danger of being forgotten. In many ways, television studies has led the charge for a humanistic model of media studies, and it has really set the model for a mode of scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, socially engaged yet historically grounded. This is probably in large part due to the luck of the draw in its intellectual history, as the field came of age after the peak of high theory in film & literary studies, and was in the right place at the right time to introduce the British cultural studies model to America, in large part through the work of our mutual mentor John Fiske. When I look at the best of media scholarship today, whether it's about videogames, popular music, or transmedia narrative, I see the influence of television studies of the past two decades and the model it helped establish.
December 17, 2008
From Neil Gaiman to J. Michael Straczynski: News on the Julius Schwartz Lecture SeriesLate last spring, we held the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of Julius Schwartz Memorial Lectures at MIT. Schwartz had been a founding figure in science fiction fandom and a influential editor at DC comics who was a key influence on the so-called Silver Age of American comics and on genre entertainment more generally. When he passed away, some of his friends put together seed money for us to start a series of public talks by key figures in the space of comics, science fiction, and genre entertainment. Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda Williams' Hard Core, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory. In this excerpt from the event, Gaiman talks about his "pulp roots" and his ongoing relationship to genre entertainment
And here, Gaiman talks about the "dark" qualities of his children's fiction:
Gaiman was consistently this witty, engaging, and intelligent for the entire evening! Too bad you weren't there! Well, the good news is that CMS and New England Comics are offering you the chance to order a DVD of the Neil Gaiman lecture and discussion with most of the proceeds going to help fund future events in the Julius Schwartz Lecture series. You can order your very own copy here for ONLY $19.99. We are already making plans for the second lecture in the series to be held on May 22nd at 7pm in Kresge Auditorium. Tickets will go on sale early next year. This year's speaker is another transmedia creator – This January, CMS will be hosting a screening series some key episodes from his television work, intended to revive awareness of the extraordinary contributions Straczynski has made to the evolution of American television. I thought I would share her a passage from my forward to Kurt Lancaster's 2001 book, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performance in a Media Universe, which spells out some of the cultural and historical significance of Straczynski's series:
Midway through Babylon 5's first season, in an episode called "And the Sky Full of Stars," Security Chief Michael Garibaldi picks up a copy of the newspaper Universe Today and the camera quickly pans over the various headlines on the cover. Some of the headlines refer to narrative issues raised on previous episodes; others introduce issues and topics that will surface more directly in subsequent episodes. What initially might seem like a throwaway detail -- a character reading a newspaper -- becomes an important turning point when we return to it for a second viewing. Of course, these headlines are only fully decipherable if you freeze-frame the image for closer scrutiny, and their full importance was made clear only through the ongoing Net and Web discussions of the series. Hope to see many of you at the event in May!
December 1, 2008
Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson (Part One)"In Cyberspace, nobody knows your race unless you tell them. Do you tell?" Several years ago, I put this slogan on a poster advertising an MIT-hosted public forum about race and digital space. The resulting controversy was an eyeopener. This passage comes from an essay I published in Technology Review in 2002. (The article still periodically generates whole class sets of angry letters when it gets taught at various universities. Almost no one wants to accept that the taken-as-given "color-blindedness" of cyberspace could be anything other than the realization of Martin Luther King's Dream.) The forum the article describes was held four or five years before that and was intended to foreground the relative lack of research on race and cyberspace. Yet, I fear that the same conversation could be held today (though I am less likely to make the same mistake in my framing of the event) and despite some ground breaking work on race in digital spaces by writers like Anna Everett and Lisa Nakamura, among many others, there is still far less scholarship about race in digital theory than there is about gender, generation, or sexuality. You should certainly check out Anna Everett's edited collection, Learning Race and Ethnicity, which is part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning book series and can be read for free online. This gap between gender studies and critical race studies looms especially large in research on fan and geek culture, as was suggested again and again in the conversations we held here last year about "Gender and Fan Culture." I've been struggling ever since to try to figure out the most productive way to open this blog to conversations around this topic. All suggestions welcome. Knowing of this interest, Robin Reid, a participant in those discussions, recently introduced me to a colleague of hers, Sarah Gatson, whose work straddles fan studies, digital theory, and critical race studies, who is currently organizing a conference on race and digital media, and who is co-editing with Reid a forthcoming special issue of the Transformative Works and Culture which tackles this topic. Here's the call for papers for Gatson's forthcoming conference: In the following interview, Gatson spoke with me about the current state of research on race and new media, about what critical race studies could contribute to our understanding of fan culture, and about how Barack Obama is transforming our understanding of the "black geek." You are currently organizing a conference on "Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media." Almost a decade ago, I was part of a group at MIT, UCSB, and USC which organized a series of similar events on "Race in Digital Space." There has been a massive amount of research and reflection on digital media over that decade. Why do you think there has been relatively little reflection on the place of race in the new mediascape?
Most often considerations of race and new media get subsumed into discussions of the digital divide. What do you see as the limitations of this framing of the issues?
When I hosted the "Gender and Fan Culture" conversations last summer, there was a persistent agreement that the field of fan studies needed to address issues of race, though we could find few examples of scholarship which did so in any systematic way. What do you think critical race studies would contribute to our understanding of fandom? And conversely, what do you think an understanding of fandom would contribute to our understanding of the way racial identities operate in the online world?
August 25, 2008
Impressions from Two Comic-Con NewbiesBy now, some of you will have seen the spot NBC has been running during the Olympics celebrating the enormous audience response to the screening of the first episode of Heroes' third season at Comic-Con. I was lucky enough to be there in Hall H and if anything, the advertisements underplays the excitement of watching an episode of one of my favorite series with some 6000 other fans. There were so many crowd pleasing moments in the episode and so much evidence that they had gone back to the drawing board and responded to fan reactions to the lackluster second season. It was as if the episode had been designed and produced simply to be shown at Comic-Con! And indeed, this may be the case, given the growing centrality of this convention to the way cult media operates in America today and given the particular history of Heroes at this convention. I went to Comic Con for the first time this year. As it happens, a long time friend, Kristin Thompson, was also attending for the first time. Thompson, a noted film scholar, is the co-author of the Observations on film art and Film Art blog. I featured her here last year in an interview ( Part One, Part Two, Part Three) focused on her recent book, The Frodo Franchise, which studies the production of Lord of the Rings and its related media offshoots. She was speaking on a panel focused on the forthcoming Hobbit movie, while I was at San Diego purely in vacation mode with my wife and son along. We got together Sunday night after all of the events were over to record our initial impressions of the event. This transcript is being cross-posted on both of our blogs. Next time, I am going to share some impressions of the specific previews and panels I attended. On Different Tracks KT: Yeah, I had that impression that there were probably people here mainly to buy stuff, some people here mainly to see celebrities and get autographs and so on. HJ: And even on that there was a split between the film and the TV people. And there's a whole comics track. Under other circumstances I would have just been spending my entire time at comics panels, because they're the strongest comics sessions anywhere in the country. Coming Alone vs. Having Something Specific To Do KT: I was happy that I had something to anchor myself, though. I don't think I'd like to come here, at least for the first time, alone and not having anything specific to do. HJ: Luckily Henry and Cynthia were along, but it was overwhelming a bit, trying to negotiate and keep up with three people in a space that congested. So that was its own kind of challenge. Sometimes I was thinking it would be great just to be a single person navigating through the space and not have to have large-scale logistics! The scale of it just blows you away. I've been on the floor at E3, which is supposed to be one of the largest entertainment trade shows. I've done South by Southwest. But neither of them are anywhere near the scale of Comic-Con. The Scale of the Event KT: They always say 125,000, because that's the number of tickets they sell, but then you've got all the exhibitors and the people who are presenting on panels. It must be another few tens of thousands packed into that building. HJ: Yeah, at least. KT: I was kind of amazed that it worked as well as it did. HJ: Yeah, they did a remarkable job in just managing crowd control. Getting people in and out of things with some degree of order. Some more bullying guards than others, but it was probably necessary to keep the peace. KT: Yeah, there were a LOT of guards and guides and so on, but people seemed really to be polite, on the whole. I was taking the shuttle bus from a hotel down the street [from my hotel] every day and then coming back by shuttle bus. This morning the bus was quite late compared to other days. It was supposed to come every ten minutes, and we were there maybe twenty. And people who were arriving made this very neat horse-shoe shaped line on the sidewalk. It was very orderly. HJ: Almost no signs of anyone breaking in line, despite the intensity of some people's desire to get into things. Someone commented behind me about 'honor among geeks,' and that's probably a good description. There's a strong honor code. KT: The venue seems to be up to having that many people in it. I hardly had to wait for rest rooms at all. HJ: No, the facilities are good. KT: I didn't try camping myself. But I was going to this action-figure panel because it involved Toy Biz, which did the action figures for Lord of the Rings. I heard from people in line that a lot of them were there for the next panel, which was on Sanctuary, which I know nothing about, but they were very devoted and were saying, "They shouldn't have put this in such a small room." HJ: There is a sense that you vote with your body at Comic-Con. One of my newest fandoms is Middleman, which is a new ABC family show, and it was in a small room, but we packed it. There was a sense of accomplishment. The producer looked out and said, 'This may be the whole audience for the show,' because it hasn't gotten much publicity yet. There was a sense that just being there was show of support for things. KT: I wonder how many of the companies have people at those panels--in the audience. I hadn't realized it, but there was somebody from New Line--who's probably not from New Line anymore--and then some Warner Bros. people, supposedly, sitting out in the audience for the Hobbit one. That kind of surprised me. Why bother? HJ: At the larger sessions it seemed they had blocked off four or five rows of space just for the studio people. Rarely were they occupied to anywhere near that extent, so it was maybe overkill. But there were a few sessions where there were a significant number of people. The Battlestar Gallactica, for example. There was a large studio contingent there for that. Suits and friends and family and other writers, because that was a kind of last hurrah for that production. They just wrapped shooting the last episode two weeks ago, so this would have been a major last gathering of a lot of those people. They said they really hadn't had a chance to have a wrap party yet, so in a sense it probably was. The Hall H Experience HJ: We went to see Heroes one morning, which was the first time, they said, a TV show had made it into Hall H. We managed to be there for Watchmen and a few of the other movies that followed it. KT: I avoided it for a while because I kept hearing that there would be incredibly long lines, and I pictured just sitting there for hours and hours and hours reading and possibly not getting into what I wanted to see anyway. So I avoided it until yesterday [Saturday], and I went to the Terminator Salvation one. I wanted really to go to the Pixar one, so I went to get in line very early, and ended up getting in on time for Terminator Salvation. HJ: Well, for Heroes we waited for about an hour outside and then got in. Then there was a fairly long wait to get started, but then we knew that there were several things after that that we wanted to see as well. KT: And was it full? HJ: It was packed. But Heroes has been a kind of success story of Comic-Con. They showed the pilot there before it debuted, and Heroes is pretty desperate at this point to rekindle fan enthusiasm. Last season is largely seen as a bust. Hence their decision not to come back from the strike. They did a partial season and put it off to the fall, because the ratings were plummeting and they were getting bad buzz from fans. So they wanted to come back this year with a killer. They showed the entire opening episode, which was definitely a fan-pleaser. They had figured out what had gone wrong the first season and had put together something that was going to please. So there was lots of extended applause at key moments. It's kind of fascinating to watch an episode of a TV show with 6500 other people. The Exhibition Hall HJ: I felt I barely made a dent in the hall. The first day I didn't quite realize how big it was, so I was just going up every aisle, and the second and third day I was going on targeted missions. But it still was just so immense that there's no way you could see it all. KT: And it's so congested. HJ: Especially if you get to the studio side of things. Autographs and Planning KT: I could not figure out what was going on at the Warner Bros. exhibit, but they were constantly surrounded by lines and lines and lines of people who were obstructing the aisles around them. I guess they had people from their TV shows signing. HJ: They seemed to. I kept stumbling into people. You wander around one corner and there's Peter Mayhew of Chewbacca fame sitting there, and Will Frakes suddenly would pop up at another table. Neither was particularly advertised. Then there were all the advertised autographed stuff. There were a lot of people there that you would know in another context. KT: I don't know how you would find out about all of those things in advance. I don't think Lynda Barry was listed in the program as doing autographs, but she was at the Drawn and Quarterly booth at certain times. I missed her entirely. I got her autograph because I was sitting in the audience before her presentation and she sat down beside me. HJ: They seemed to have a certain number of people who were there to do autographs, but then there were all these other people randomly. I guess you had to follow a particular company and maybe they posted on the Web. KT: Yes, I was doing autographs at certain times for my book, and it was just on TheOneRing.net and The Frodo Franchise. You have to really investigate, go in with a plan. HJ: It seems to be the case: The more you plan, the more you can get out of the experience. KT: We were selling copies of my book at this very small booth, and I was there for an hour at different times of day on three days. I think almost everyone, if not everyone, who bought a copy came to the booth specifically to buy it. There were no impulse purchases. I don't think people buy books at Comic-Con. HJ: I looked at comics while I was there, but I would buy them from my dealer back in Boston or online at Amazon or Mile High Comics. Why I would weigh my suitcase down with comics in the age when it's so easy to buy stuff digitally? KT: Not new ones. HJ: Not new ones. Collectibles, sure. KT: Unless you have them signed. Fan Culture hangs on at Comic-Con KT: Though technically speaking, it is run by fans; there's a committee. HJ: There were still places and niches and corners where the fan stuff still ruled. You wouldn't see fanzines there, but then you wouldn't see them at most fan-run cons these days, since everything's moved to the Web. KT: Well, there's Artists' Alley, which is way over in the corner. That seems to be fans who are aspiring to be pros but haven't really made it yet. HJ: Well, it was a mix. I mean, you'd see Paul Chadwick there [author of Concrete series, published by Dark Horse Comics] or Kim Deitch [author of graphic novels such as The Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Shadowland], who were independent and weren't necessarily going to be there with a company, but yeah, it's definitely a lot of wannabes in some of that space. And then fans show themselves through costumes. For all the jokes about women in Princess Leia costumes--and I saw maybe a dozen Princess Leia slave-girl outfits--it was still a way in which fans asserted their presence. There were some quite remarkable pieces of fan performance going on there. There was someone doing Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, which had quite a spectacular Beast costume--a little more arty than one expects at a fan con. Genre KT mentioned having seen Focus Features' Hamlet 2 preview. HJ: The role of comedy here interests me a lot. I'm always intrigued: What're the borders of what a fan text is and what isn't a fan text? Here comedy seems to creep into fandom in a more definitive way than I've seen elsewhere. So there was the focus on Hamlet 2, there was Harold and Kumar, The Big Bang Theory [TV series, 2007-08], but then just a bunch of panels on writing for sit-coms. So it's probably just the industry's priorities, but it's interesting that it doesn't extend to drama. You can imagine a lot of people there being into The Wire or The Shield or some equivalent, and it didn't cross over in that direction. KT: I suppose it's what the studios think the fans want. It's true there was a lot of comedies, and martial arts, and war material. HJ: I think martial arts probably has crept into fandom pretty definitively over time. But it's interesting to see where the boundaries are. We stumbled across one booth that had just a porn star signing her pictures, and it sort of outraged my son. Pornography isn't fandom in his world view, but he thought nothing of going up to get wrestlers to sign autographs. Probably in any other fan con, the strong presence of wrestling performers would be out of keeping with fandom. The Economics of It KT: I was struck by how cheap it is, basically. How much was it for a single day pass? HJ: Twenty-five dollars for a single day pass. It's not bad at all for the scale of what you get. [Four-day passes are $75.] KT: Some of the smaller tables rented for something like $380 for the full period, which I thought was kind of cheap. But obviously they need both sides of it. They need the exhibitors to attract the people and they need the people to attract the exhibitors, so keeping the cost down makes perfect sense. HJ: The scale at which companies brought in people was also truly remarkable. I certainly have been to cons where they might have two or three performers from a show, but they brought the entire regulars of Heroes down, as well as the entire writing team. And Heroes is a large, large cast. They scarcely had time for anyone to say anything, but all lined up there on a panel, it was a pretty spectacular display. And Watchmen did pretty much the same thing. All the main characters in Watchmen were there with the director. KT: That reminds me of the coverage that the film events and I suppose the television events, too, get in the trade press. I'm sure you read some of these articles about how, 'Oh, it's all becoming so much Hollywood. The big media companies are coming in and taking over,' and so on. It struck me that Hall H is really kind of a world unto itself. HJ: It is. KT: It's separate. You have to go out of the building and get in this line, and then you have to go out of the building when you exit. It's quite a hike to get there if you're around D or C in the exhibition hall. I think probably they don't see much of the rest of the con. HJ: It does seem largely cut off. That's the sort of classic place where people camp. And so there's almost an interesting tactical advantage in being one of the filler programs between the main events, if you can really maneuver into that. It's like being right after a hit TV show or between two hit TV shows. You're going to get exposure to people who wouldn't otherwise. Yesterday Chuck was between Battlestar Gallactica and the Fringe panel. I've never seen Chuck, but I wanted to see Battlestar and I wanted to see J. J. Abrams [executive producer of Lost and one episode of Fringe], so we stuck through it. And we'll probably give Chuck a shot come fall as a result of being exposed to it in that way. There's lots of things that get sandwiched in that probably get a boost off of this. Or they could hurt themselves. KT: Bring the wrong scenes or whatever. HJ: Wrong scenes or just the people are inarticulate. There's certainly a range of comfort level up there. KT: Yes, for the films there's no doubt about its publicity value. I just think that if the big entertainment journalists plant themselves in Hall H and don't pay a lot of attention, then you get coverage that makes it sound as though the movies are just taking over everything. < strong>HJ: It's odd. It's certainly every bit as spectacular a place to do TV as it is to do film. And comics. I couldn't believe the betrayal I was committing in not seeing the full writers of Mad magazine in the 1960s or seeing Forrest J. Ackerman and his staff--things that were really significant to me as a kid. But they were competing with other things that I valued even more. So there are things that you would have killed to get to in any other context that you pass up because there's so much going on at once. You can't get to it all. The Gender Composition of the Attendees and the Industry HJ: One of the things that struck me was the gender composition here was much--well, certainly there were more guys than girls, but compared to, say, E3 or many other cons I've gone to, the gender balance was surprisingly solid. There were an awful lot of women there. KT: Yeah, they remarked on that on the Harry Potter panel this morning, saying that, unlike those cons, there were probably more women than men in that particular room. HJ: That makes sense. KT: When I went to the One Ring Celebration, it was maybe 95% women. I suspect it's partly a factor of whether a con has gaming facilities. Gamers will come, and they're mostly going to be guys, although probably not as much as it used to be. HJ: Historically, if you go to Creation cons, which are more star-centered, men turn out much more, whereas if you go to a fan-driven con, which is fanzine oriented, women turn out much more. But because this combines everything, you've got just such a spread of people. I've seen people argue that Comic-Con is becoming powerful and it's exaggerating the power of fan men at the expense of fan women, that the fan-boy mafia is taking over the entertainment industry. Certainly you see it on the producers' side, that an awful lot of the guys onstage would have been in the audience a decade before--and they're mostly guys. But what's interesting is to see the audiences that they're trying to respond to and engage with has a large female component, and that's got to have an impact over time on what plays here and what doesn't. KT: One of the people on the 'Masters of the Web' panel on Thursday morning was making the point that now the younger studio executives are either people who had their own Websites a few years ago or they were in college when the big Websites were being formed. Now they've grown up into adulthood reading that stuff, and they're now in position of power and will continue to be in the industry. HJ: It was fascinating just to watch the producers, writers, stars, to see which ones were really comfortable in the space and which ones weren't. Someone like Joss Whedon just grew up in that space. That's his world. He was totally in his element, and he would understand what questions were being asked and how to respond to them and could use in-joke references to the culture, whereas someone like Alan Ball (executive producer), who no doubt in another context would be totally articulate and interesting, seemed to feel uncomfortable. Moving from Six Feet Under to True Blood, he doesn't yet know how to "speak fan." On the other hand, Zack Snyder [director of 300] has got to be the most totally inarticulate person I've seen on a stage in a long time. Watchmen is going to be his second movie, and he totally works with images, but the ability to use words did not seem to be his strong suit. Some of them who have done multiple fan shows seem really comfortable, and others just looked in shellshock up there.
June 23, 2008
"Fighting Evil -- So You Don't Have To"So, this post is mostly me going all fan boy on you, so if you have a low threshold for the freaky and geeky aspects of this blog, you may want to move along. But if you are looking for something fun to check out this summer, then let me recommend a new series, The MiddleMan, which has shown up on ABC Family, of all places.
There's three graphic novels worth of The Middleman comics out there, which I grabbed from my local shop after watching the premier episode of the series last week. I basically inhaled the three books on the first leg of a trip to Australia, still wrapped up in the afterglow of what turned out to be a really good first episode of what I hope is going to be a very fan-worthy television series. Don't worry if you missed the first episode because it is available online from ABC Family for free (if you call being forced to watch almost a dozen commercials for the American Girl movie in a row "free") or from iTunes for a modest fee. You might also simply read the first graphic novel, given that the opening episode is an incredible faithful, more or less line by line recreation of the story from the comics. How do I explain what this series is about? The Middleman is an all-American hero, a former Navy SEAL, who works for what the comics calls O2STK, The Organization Too Secret To Know. His job: "fighting evil -- so you don't have to." As he explains to the series female lead, Wendy, "Ever read comic books?....You know how there's all kinds of mad scientists and aliens and androids and monsters and all of them want to either destroy or take over the world. It's all true." Wendy is a snarky young art student temping at a scientific research center who finds herself staring eyeball to tentacle with a massive bug-eyed monster and she doesn't blink: she grabs a letter opener and fights back. Her plucky and matter of fact response to the stuff that makes most people turn inside out wins her the respect of the Middleman, who offers her a job as his assistant when it is clear that she's been blackballed from all other temp companies in the aftermath of the firey explosion that blows up her previous place of employment. From there, things get a little weird -- although nothing that a regular reader of indie comics can't handle. In the opening episode, she confronts a hyperintelligent monkey who has based his whole world view on contemporary gangster movies like Scarface and Goodfellas and wants to rule the mob realm. After all, everyone knows that us comic fan boys go ape over super-intelligent apes. In the graphic novels, each book parodies a different genre, with the second volume devoted to a spoof of Mexican wrestling culture and the third book taking down every cliche from the James Bond franchise and a few from giant robot anime. The scripts for the series, not to mention the comics, are full of one laugh out loud one-liner after another, most of them playing on precise and pithy references to popular culture: I haven't seen a script this dense with injokes since early Joss Whedon. The opening episode draws a strong parallel between the central protagonists and The Avengers (Emma Peale, not Marvel), and it's a hoot watching the ape tell us to "say hello to my little friend." The tone manages to be campy without being too campy: it doesn't take itself seriously but it also manages to make you care about the lead characters, which include not only the Middleman, who "Javi" aptly describes as "Dirk Squarejaw", and Wendy, but also Wendy's "not gay -- just a film student" boyfriend, her sex kitten and performance artist roommate, her seriously weird next door neighbor who speaks in lyrics from Johnny Cash songs, and Ida, the android who has gotten permanently stuck in the persona of a little old librarian with an attitude. (If the television version is half as good as what they do with Ida in the comics, we are in for a big treat.) The performances consistently live up to the quality of the script: everyone gets a few memorable lines and moments in the spotlight in the opening episode and I can't wait to see where the characters go from here. While the opening episode is straight from the comics, it sounds like the second episode, which airs Monday night, will be original, best I can tell from the spoilers out on the web. I might have guessed this anyway because I don't think ABC Family is going to allow them the budget to do the spectacular battle royale featuring a legion of Mexican wrestlers from book 2 or depict the slug-fest between giant robots or the genetically engineered shark man from book 3 of the comics series. I wish I had something really profound to tell you about this series, but it's hard to reach profundity after only one episode (not to mention while sitting jetlaged in a hotel in Brisbane.) But I did want to share my current fan boy excitement with those of you who regularly read this blog and may be looking for something fresh and a little different. When The Middleman asks Wendy if she reads comics, she rattles off "Astro City, Box Office Poison, Demo, Hellboy, Dead@17..." Those aren't bad as a set of cultural coordinates. I'd say that if you read and enjoy any of these books, then you should probably give this series a shot. And if you don't read comics, think Ghostbusters or Men in Black with a bit more hardcore indie edge than either of those Hollywood blockbusters. You can get a taste of the performers and the show's sense of humor from these mock PSAs promoting the series. Here's Wendy: And here's The Middleman:
June 16, 2008
Is Obama a Secret Vulcan?The following is adapted from my opening remarks at the Future of Civic Media conference we hosted at MIT last week. A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by National Public Radio about Star Trek's Mr. Spock for their "In Character" series. Midway through the interview, the reporter asked me a question which in retrospect was an obvious one but which I had never really given much thought before: What contemporary figure has the same qualities as Mr. Spock? The fan boy in me immediately went searching through contemporary science fiction television. I considered and then discarded Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica as probably too obscure to make sense to an NPR audience. I thought about Syler from Heroes as another prospect, no doubt influenced by the casting of Zachary Quinto to play Spock for the forthcoming Star Trek prequel movie. In both cases, you had characters who are defined through their otherworldly intelligence. Syler, like Spock, is someone who can bitch slap you with his brain. And in both cases, there is a deep distrust of that intelligence and their rationality is seen not as impartial but as self-absorbed and antisocial. But, then, my mind went in a very different direction and before I quite knew what I was saying, I found myself talking about Barack Obama. Now, I grant you, I've got Obama on the mind these days but hear me out. At the time, my main point was that Spock was an explicitly mixed race character on American television at a time when most programs hadn't come to grips with identity politics. Star Trek's Spock was born of a human mother and a Vulcan father. Throughout the course of the series and especially in the feature films, he struggles to make his peace with the conflicting pulls on his identity. And because he is a man literally of two worlds, he is seen as being capable of translating between Terrans and many of the other races they encounter as they "boldly go where no man [one] has gone before." A similar construction of multiracial identity has taken shape around Obama who has sought to construct himself as not only post-partisan but also post-racial. It's striking what a high percentage of media coverage of Obama describes him as African-American, despite the fact that he has a white mother. Early on, there was a lot of press about whether he would be "black enough" to gain the support of African-American voters, just as the press was quick to remind us that Toni Morrison had once described Bill Clinton as the first Black President (a phrase now totally removed from its context). Now, the press is trying hard to get us worried about whether white voters are ready to support an African-American candidate for president. But, if you look at how Obama has constructed himself, it is as someone at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator, and thus he is someone who can help America work through some of its racial divides. This was very much a subtext in his speech about race in the wake of the Rev. Wright controversy and it is precisely this sense of Obama as a man of two worlds which was called into crisis by those videos. Listen to the speech which Amanda, Spock's mother, delivers in the NPR broadcast about being beaten up as a child because the others don't think he's Vulcan enough and you will hear echoes there of some of the stories we've heard about Obama's struggle to figure out who he was growing up. I've been surprised by how quickly the blogosphere picked up on the Spock/Obama comparison. Almost immediately, I started to see people construct graphics around the Spock/Obama theme, which clearly resonated with people other than myself.
This image predates the interview and was submitted to a contest to depict what would happen if Trekkers ruled the world, so I am certainly not the only one to see a connection.
I have to say I would have chosen a picture where Obama wasn't smiling. A smiling Vulcan is just plain creepy!
But from there, we can see more complex analogies: for example, might we see his search for his spiritual identity in an Afro-centric church as a parallel to Spock's return to Vulcan to participate in the purifying ritual of Kolinahr as a way of reclaiming his roots in his father's culture? Is there any question that McCoy sees Spock as an "elitist," because he is frightened by his intelligence and because he is uncomfortable making small talk? And surely we can see Obama as the living embodiment of the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC ("Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination"?) Gene Roddenberry, the producer behind the classic Star Trek series, consciously modeled James T. Kirk (JTK) after the qualities that he admired in John F. Kennedy (JFK) and that he saw the series as a way of keeping the ideal of "Camelot" alive during the more cynical LBJ era. Kirk is the youngest captain in the history of Star Trek, much as Kennedy first burst of the national consciousness as a charismatic, courageous, P.T. Boat captain and was at the time the youngest person elected as president. The original Star Fleet was modeled in part on the Peace Corps and was also clearly intended to build on growing public interest in NASA's plans for putting a man on the moon, both aspects of the JFK agenda. And there's some possibility that the "Final Frontier" was a self conscious reworking of JFK's "New Frontier." Much as Kennedy's foreign policy sought to win over unaligned developing nations through "weapons of peace" in a cold war context, Classic Trek sees Star Fleet as doing ideological battle with the Romulan-Klingon Alliance and trying to hold onto the loyalty of unaligned and developing planets. So, in so far as people are reading Obama in relation to our shared myths about the Kennedy era, then it also makes sense to think of his campaign through the lens of Star Trek. For me, the connection makes sense on a somewhat deeper and more personal level. I am a first generation Star Trek fan and I've long argued that many of my deepest political convictions - especially those surrounding equality and diversity - emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the Civil Rights era. In many ways, my commitments to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by Star Trek. Star Trek did this not through the explicit and heavy handed social commentary in episodes like "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" which featured aliens who were half white and half black (in the most literal sense) but because of the idealized image of a multiracial community depicted on the series. Later generations have looked upon the figure of Uhura as tokenism, pointing out rightly that she never got to do anything more than tell the captain that "hailing frequencies" were open. Yet, Nichols has long told the story of talking with Martin Luther King during a civil rights march and being told that her mere presence on the Bridge was a visual reminder that his dream might come true in the future. Star Trek featured the first inter-racial kiss on American television. My colleague, Shigeru Miyagawa, tells the story of growing up in Alabama and having Sulu be the only Asian-American character he saw on American television. And then there's Chekov, a Russian character on American television, in the midst of the Cold War - a friendly acknowledgement of the Soviet contributions to space exploration. So, we should read Spock in this context - as one more example of the ability of the Enterprise crew to embrace diversity. The program often fell short of its ideals, then and in subsequent decades, and it is easy to find points to criticize Star Trek's racial politics. For a good discussion of these issues, check out Daniel Bernardi's Star Trek and History: Race-Ing Toward a White Future. But for me and many others of my generation, it held up a set of ideals; it encouraged us to imagine a more utopian society which escaped the limitations which I saw all around me growing up in a South which was actively struggling with the legacy of segregation. And I have found through that years that this idealized image of a multiracial and multicultural, hell, multiplanetary community, was part of what Star Trek meant to a large number of first generation fans of the series. For more discussion of this theme, check out my essay on the Gaylaxians movement, originally in Science Fiction Audiences, later reprinted in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. In its own small way, Star Trek and Spock may have helped to prepare the way for Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries, helping us to imagine a different set of relationships between the races. Nowhere was this social utopian vision more fully expressed than the "great friendship" between Kirk and Spock and so we can see some legacy of this theme of acceptance across racial boundaries emerging through the slash fan fiction which became one of the major legacies of early Star Trek fan culture. The other "non-white" characters may have been more suggestions than fully developed figures - at least on the original series - but Spock was someone we got to know and care about because, not despite, his differences. This is one reason why so many fans of my generation were upset when Kirk praises Spock for being "the most human" person he has ever known during his funeral eulogy in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Can you imagine the uproar if someone praised Obana's "whiteness"? Of course, Roddenberry's embrace of science fiction as a vehicle for the utopian imagination was itself informed by more than a century of science fiction being deployed as a political tool - going back to the novels of H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy, taking shape around 1950s novels like Space Merchants and City, and extending into the feminist science fiction of the 1960s, all of which shaped Star Trek in one way or another. Given this tradition, it was scarcely a surprise when I stumbled onto a whole line of SF-themed shirts supporting Obama, including not only one linking him with Spock, but also those connecting him with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix. And surely, we can see the political uses of science fiction when we see how the Anonymous movement is deploying Guy Fawlkes masks clearly inspired by V for Vendetta. Or, for that matter, is it any accident that Rolling Stone describes Obama as "A New Hope," evoking the title of the original Star Wars film. I wish I could say all of this flashed in my mind when I started babbling about Spock and Obama. In reality, I was improvising, but the more I've thought about it, the more helpful the analogy has become as a way of thinking about why Obama's candidacy has so sparked my imagination.
May 30, 2008
More Transmedia NewsI've been meaning to do another post on this topic for a while. First, I was inspired by a story in Fast Company, sent to me by Jesse Alexander, which described a gathering of Hollywood's fan boy elite to talk about the futures of cross-platform storytelling: Tim Kring, the lanky, goateed guy at the head of the table, created Heroes, NBC's hit television show about superpowered people. To his right, in a black hoodie and narrow black-framed glasses is Damon Lindelof, cocreator of Lost, ABC's island-fantasy juggernaut, as well as producer of next year's eagerly anticipated Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams. Across the way is Lindelof's buddy Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of Heroes (formerly of Lost and the pioneering she-geek hit Alias). Nearby is Rob Letterman, the self-described nerdy director of DreamWorks' next mega-franchise movie, Monsters vs. Aliens. He's chatting up video-game creator Matt Wolf, who's developing a project with Alexander....The long-haired bearded guy pouring straight bourbon is Ron Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel's acclaimed reimagining of the classic series. The guy eating pizza on the couch is Javier Grillo-Marxauch, a veteran producer of Lost and NBC's paranormal series Medium, who's now having his own fantasy graphic novel, Middleman, turned into a series on ABC Family.so, how come I never get invited to parties like this? The article goes on to introduce the concept of transmedia entertainment and to suggest that it is one of the hotest topics in the entertainment world today: "In five years," Kring is saying, "the idea of broadcast will be gone." The article offers a pretty good snapshot of where the industry's thinking is at in terms of transmedia properties and certainly offers an up date on my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture. This week, the New York Times reported on the plans to release a suplamentary dvd to more or less coincide with the release of the Watchmen movie next year: The second film, tentatively called Tales of the Black Freighter, follows a side Watchmen storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called Under the Hood that will delve into the characters' backstories. Those of you who have read Alan Moore's original graphic novel will recognize both of those titles as materials which are complexly woven into the narrative, offering us a glimpse into the way popular culture might have evolved -- towards pirate comics -- in a world where superheroes are real (Black Freighter) and a sense of the ways superheroes might be covered as cultural celebrities (Under the Hood). As the producers have striped down Watchmen for the screen, they have pushed these elements to the margins. In another era, they would have been left on the cutting room floor, but instead, they are becoming the backbone of Warner Brother's transmedia strategy for the film. The article also noted: In addition, the studio plans a dozen 22- to 26-minute Webisodes to help make the complex story easier for the uninitiated to digest. Called "The Watchmen Motion Comic," it will be a panel-by-panel slide show of the graphic novel narrated by an actor.Keep in mind that Warner Brothers was the studio which sponsored the Wachowski Brothers's transmedia development around the Matrix franchise. All of this suggests how central transmedia entertainment has become to the thinking inside Hollywood today. So it is great to have a chance to share with my readers some insights from a real master of this practice.
May 30, 2008
Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (Part Two)How important do you think hardcore fans are to the success of genre entertainment? How do such fans create value around your properties?
What do you see as the downsides of generating such passionate consumers?
As some of these genres have become more commercially viable, the San Diego Comic Con has emerged as an important media marketplace. Can you speak to the role this gathering plays in the marketing of your properties?
Comic Con International in San Diego plays a more and more pivotal role in heralding, marketing and launching new genre efforts. In the midst of negotiating with executives at The Walt Disney Company for a job working with one of their largest franchises, Starlight Runner took them on a tour of the Comic Con exhibition floor. Many of the "worlds" we helped to develop were on spectacular display: Mattel's Hot Wheels universe, the fantasy realms of Magic: The Gathering, high priced back issues of Valiant Comics, and the announcements for new video games and comic books based on Turok and our own "Team GoRizer" at Disney's own booth! Suffice to say, a deal was quickly sealed! The Christian community might be read as another kind of niche public for media properties -- often alienated from mainstream content, deeply interested in providing alternative forms of entertainment for their families. What are the challenges of reaching these consumers, and can their tastes be reconciled by the demands of the mass audience? Like any niche audience, the Christian community wants to enjoy entertainment that reflects their values and sensibilities. Interestingly, the classic Hollywood ethos reflects Judeo-Christian values: good usually wins out over evil, the hero triumphs after embracing the just and moral path. The problem is actually rooted in how the studios choose to communicate with them. To extend the religious metaphor of "cult media," do you see cult fans as playing a particularly important role in proselytizing for the content, "evangelizing" the brand? Fan "apostles" often play an instrumental role in spreading the word and drawing attention to niche content. Many studios and publishers of genre entertainment are currently developing programs to secure relationships with the fan community (or various subsections thereof). While this is not easy to do and often brings on headaches large companies would rather avoid, it is becoming inevitable. After all, without evangelists, how can new religions (or tentpole franchises) spread? Some have suggested that media producers with strong niche followings might be able to develop alternative distribution models for their entertainment content, marketing their properties directly to the public through subscriptions or downloads, rather than negotiating with networks or film studios. How realistic do you think this scenario is within the current marketplace? What do you think are the obstacles of establishing such a direct relationship between producers and their fans? There has never been a better time to explore and establish alternative distribution models for niche entertainment content, but these opportunities are still not easy to exploit and may not last forever. It takes a cocktail of money, talent, timing and pure luck to build a major head with direct digital distribution of entertainment content, particularly if your resources are limited compared with those of a Hollywood studio or entertainment firm.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 28, 2008
Talking Transmedia: An Interview With Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (part one)Jeff Gomez, the chief executive officer of Starlight Runner entertainment, spoke at Futures of Entertainment last fall as part of a panel discussion on Cult Media, which also included transmedia creator Danny Bilson, Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander, ; and Gordon Tichell from Walden Media, the company which produces the Narnia films. Not surprisingly, given I was moderator, the session quickly became a geek out festival mostly centered around issues of transmedia entertainment. You can enjoy the podcast of the event here. As we were preparing for the session, we distributed a set of questions to the speakers, some of which were covered during the panel, some of which were not. Gomez recently wrote to send me his further reflections on many of those questions in the hopes to continue public conversation around recent developments in transmedia entertainment. Here's a bio on Gomez: As the Chief Executive Officer of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff Gomez is a leading creator of highly successful fictional worlds. He is an expert at cross-platform intellectual property development and transmedia storytelling, as well as at extending niche properties such as toys, animation or video game titles into the global mass market. Let's start by examining the concept of "cult media." What does this phrase mean to you, and do you think it accurately describes the kinds of projects you've worked on? Why or why not? To me "cult media" is exemplified by the slow crumbling of traditional media content aimed at huge swathes of the population, down to the more contemporary approach of designing content to engage subsections of that population or even smaller "niches." The idea of cult media historically referred to films that appealed to a fairly small niche of consumers. But many genres, which once were regarded as cult -- fantasy, science fiction, superheroes -- have emerged as increasingly mainstream. What's changing? What accounts for the mainstreaming of niche media? There are five factors that seem to be contributing to the "coming out" of cult media:What do you see as the challenges of generating content that appeals to both niche and mass publics at the same time? Like any good story, content designed for genre-lovers or niche markets should contain strong characters, evocative issues and clear, accessible throughlines. Story arcs must be designed from the outset to feel complete and deliver on their promise. What kinds of trade-offs have to occur in order to broaden the appeal of media properties? Studios and entertainment companies are now learning that fewer and fewer trade-offs are necessary to broaden the appeal of niche or "cult media" properties. Contemporary audiences are now primed for high quality genre entertainment across all media platforms. So long as marketing efforts place focus on a driving platform, the launch platform and complementary content can be used to build anticipation, educate audience "gatekeepers" about the property, and enrich the overall experience. What are the risks involved in alienating the base of your audience? Franchises are built on the energy and loyalty of their hardcore fan bases. While these bases are often a fraction of the size of the total audience, they are indispensable, because they are vocal, passionate and active. A tiny fraction of the genre television series Jericho sent tons of jars of peanuts to the network that had just cancelled the program--moving them to reinstate the series. A small group of fans that gathered at conventions and shared amateur publications centered on the original Star Trek series managed to bridge the period between that series' cancellation and the Star Wars-inspired relaunch of the franchise in the late 1970s.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:20 PM | Permalink
May 26, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Four)Forms Stretched to Their Limits In this intensified comic atmosphere, it should be no surprise that bodies - whether that of live comic performers or cartoon characters - were reduced to, in a phrase associated with Jack Coles, "forms stretched to their limits." Vaudeville's performer centered mode of production and its emphasis on constant novelty and heterogeniety pushed its stars to develop a range of performance skills and to exploit as many of them in any given performance as possible. This push towards intensification resulting in such specialties as the protean or quick change artist who might transform his identity dozens of times in the course of a performance, trying to play all of the parts in the enactment of a Shakespearean drama or an adaptation of War and Peace. It also resulted in the tradition of the eccentric dancer, whose performance would include back-flipping acrobatics and rubber legged dance moves, which often defy our normal assumptions about human anatomy. One can see remarkable examples of this tradition in the preserved segments from Spike Jone's TV work. In "I Like to Sock Myself in the Face," Peter James, a regular member of Jone's stock company, sings a rapid patter song which proclaims the masochistic pleasures of self-directed violence. The clown, dressed in an over-sized checkered suit which defies every advice ever given about what to wear on early black and white television, races onto the stage, hurls himself up the curtains, bobs up and down in rhythm to the music, before proceeding to slap and kick himself in the face, run circles around the bandleader, winding up his legs and kicking in all directions, and turning back flips. He flings himself on all fours, bouncing up and down on the floor. All of the above is performed live by the breathlessly enthusiastic entertainer and unveiled for us in a series of long takes which make it clear that there is no trickery involved. Such a performance might well be called "cartoonish" and that's precisely the point - it offers us the illusion that a live performer's body may be as elastic and protean as that of a cartoon or comic book character. There is little separating Peter James's proclaimed joy in socking himself in the face and the prolonged sequences of Wolfie's equally intense gyrations and contortions in response to Red Hot Riding Hood in Avery's cartoons. Wolfy gets shown going stiff as a board, stretching his arm across the auditorium to pull his beloved off the stage, banging himself in the face with hammers, whistling and pounding on the table, popping his eyes out of his head, and shooting himself in his desperate and uncontrollable expressions of erotic desire. These hyberbolic reactions became the primary source of comedy for extended sequences in the film and such displays are often what people remember most vividly about Avery's cartoons. Art Spiegelman finds a similar fascination with hyperbolic extensions of the human body in Jack Cole and his most famous creation, Plastic Man: "Plastic Man had all the crackling intensity of the life force transferred to paper....Plas literally embodied the comic book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its boyishness, and its only partially sublimated sexuality."The pleasure of reading a Cole comic was watching his protagonist stretch and pull in all directions, changing shape and identity at will, often anchored only by our recognition of the red, black, and yellow coloring of his costume. In yet another analogy to modernist art, Spiegelman argues that the character "personified George Bataille's notion of the body on the brink of dissolving its borders," suggesting a sexual charge to images of Plas's bulbous head at the end of his extending, flaccid or erect neck, or at the suggestion that any body part might take any shape at a moment's notice. The same might be said of the characters depicted by Basil Wolverton, whom art critic Doug Harvey has linked to a much larger tradition of grotesque caricature, again drawing on references to surrealism, expressionism, and dada: "Wolverton's obsessively detailed images of impossibly distended organs, alarming proliferations of extra limbs, seething oceans of twisted, sagging,and diseased integument, and traumatic and impractical fusions of man and machine in which man inevitably got the painful end of the stick.... His work has a singularity of focus and vertiginous sense of exhilaration that verges on nausea, and it has continued to be vital and grown increasingly relevant, from the days of vaudeville through to the post-McLuhan mediascape. And if it makes your sister puke, it's done its job." Spigelman has emphasized the kinetic qualities of Cole's artwork, tracing the ways that Plas moves from left to right, top to bottom, from panel to panel, forcing the reader to scan his eyes rapidly from place to place within the frame: " Plastic Man's S-curved body ...loops around one pedestrian in the distance and extends between two lovers about to kiss - lipstick traces are on his elongated neck as he passes them - to swoop up between an old man's legs like an enormous penis wearing sunglasses and stare into his startled face."Wolverton achieves a similarly kinetic quality within single images as mouths, eyelids, hair, wrinkles, all seem on the verge of drooping and sagging, like so much meat ready to fall off the bone or where a man might tied his neck into a knot to avoid the temptations of drink or another might attach a fan to his nose to disperse the stinch of his buddy's garlicky breath. One character may be all mouth, another all nose, another might have four or five chins, each so butt ugly that we stare at the page like rubber neckers at a car accident, unable to take our eyes away even as we feel mounting disgust. This gagging sensation is suggested by the moment at the end of the above quote where Harvey breaks from the sanctifying language of the art critic to acknowledge a much more adolescent and masculine pleasure in watching his sister's retching. For the most part, the 'vulgar modernists' were misbehaving schoolboys, running amuck, seeking to shock their teachers, mothers, and sisters with their willingness to transgress norms of taste and decorum. There was an inherent tension between all of this frantic activity and any sense of spatial orientation. Jack Cole's Plas zigzags across the page. Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper makes expressive use of speed lines which seem to swoop upon us from all sides. Peter James races, leaps and tumbles around every corner of the stage. Olsen and Johnson walk through a series of movie sets with each match on action revealing them wearing a different period costume. A chase scene in Tex Avery's Who Killed Who shows multiple versions of the same characters racing around different parts of the space at the same instant. Another gag shows the detective falling down a trap door in the bottom of the frame and then falling into the same shot from above. Don't expect spatial relations to make sense, don't expect the world to cohere, just sit back and watch as they rip the screen apart and put it back together again. We can celebrate their formal inventiveness , the giddy excitement created by such unfettered movements, their expressive graphics, yet we also have to acknowledge how much of this humor was directed at women -- literally in the case of Avery's representations of the wolf's pyrotechnic desire or figuratively, in the ways that the works associate all of that ballet, opera, and classical piano music we've described with a feminized realm of high culture. In a world where men display phallic energy through their ability to extend their bodies in all directions, women are often depicted as fixed and static - witness the use of rotoscoping to give Red a much more realistic appearance than Wolfy in the Avery cartoons. There are exceptions, such as Martha Raye's character in Hellzapoppin who shows an ability to freeze frame and reverse the action at one in one particular musical number. Yet, for the most part, male characters enjoy much greater freedom of movement and fluidity of identity. One could argue that such male-centered pleasures are consistent with the analogies to modernism, given how often, say, critics have pointed to the masculine assumptions which shaped artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollack. Indeed, high and popular artists may be complicit in reinforcing this particular set of gendered relations. Consider the case of Lena the Heyena, Wolverton's most famous work. The drawing was produced in response to a contest hosted by Al Capp's Little Abner and judged by a panel that included Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dali. The image won out over those produced by such comic book rivals as Jack Cole and Carl Banks, first appearing in Abner and later recycled for a famous early cover for Mad Magazine. Here, high meets low on equal terms, with Dali recognizing and rewarding the "surrealistic" elements in Wolverton's decisively more lowbrow work. We should not be surprised, then, that alongside Dali or Hoberman, the most famous patron of the "vulgar modernists" was Hugh Heffner who sought to recruit many of those discussed here, including Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Elder, to work for Playboy. While the temptation is to talk about the "no holds barred" nature of their postwar work, we can see the kinds on invisible constraints that shaped their work if we look at the much more sexually explicit but formally similar work Elder and Kurtzman did on "Little Annie Fannie" for Playboy a decade or so later. Biographers describe the cartoonists' discomfort with the more explicit imagery and subject matter Hef expected them to produce for his men's magazine, even as he provided them more creative freedom to fill panels with "chicken fat" gags, to introduce intertextual elements, or to shatter the frame borders. (The recent reprinting of Little Annie Fannie includes an extensive set of annotations in the back trying to explain the numerous topical references that ran through the series. ) In the end, we don't know whether the sexuality was sublimated in their postwar works or whether the sexual explicitness of their later work was forced in their efforts to remain relevant to the sensibilities of a different generation. Basil Wolverton's grotesques informed later underground comicbook artists like R. Crumb. A famous portrait of Crumb, his legs twisted and tangled, bears unmistakable similarities to a Wolverton drawing showing a similar contorted male figure. Crumb would give the grotesque elements of Wolverton's work a political charge: Crumb used images of contorted human figures to push back against what he and others in the counterculture saw as the state's repressive control over their bodies, offering up much more aggressive representations of racial difference as a challenge to a sexist and racist society (in effect, taking the 'innocent' ethnic types found in the earlier work and shoving it back into the shocked faces of a generation which had been too complacent about racial inequalities). Reading the "vulgar modernists" alongside Crumb, one seems just how good natured and complacent they were, how much they observed limits and respected norms, even as they sought to enact their disruption and transgression. While the comedy rests on our acceptance that they hold nothing sacred, there is, in fact, much that remains sacred and protected within the humor of the 1940s and 1950s. While Kurtzman and Gaines faced rebuke before the Kefauver committee for their role in creating E.C. horror comics, Mad was seen as a safer alternative to which they retreated in the aftermath. If it was not exactly exhaulted, it never faced government scrutiny. None of these clowns or comic artists were blacklisted during the McCarthy era; their formal transgressiveness and sublimated eroticism would have felt much more comfortable in the context of their times while overt ideological critique would have been much less acceptable. Hoberman was drawn to these artist at a time when politically engaged filmmakers and cultural critics saw reflexivity as a way out of the illusionism of classical Hollywood cinema, seeing shattering textual codes and conventions as the beginning of a different kind of relationship to spectators. When they looked at the films of Tex Avery, say, they could find many examples of this kind of formal transgression. Avery's films sent characters flying outside the frame or showed them straddling a line separating black and white and technocolor. One character in Batty Baseball (1944) stops the picture and demands that they go back and show the lion roar and provide opening credits, while the dog begs for the picture to end after being beaten mercilessly by Screwball Squirrel. The character at the start of Who Killed Who is reading a book "based on the cartoon of the same title," turns to the audience, and explains that if the cartoon is anything like the book, he's about to be murdered. Screwball Squirrel lifts up the bottom of the frame and takes a peak into the next scene to see what he's supposed to do next. And we could go on and on. As Dana Polan notes in an essay principally focused on another "vulgar modernist" text, Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck (1953), there is a difference between reflexivity as a formal practice designed to defamiliarize various textual codes and conventions and reflexivity as a political practice designed to critique real world institutions and practices. One takes pleasure in pulling the rug out from Hollywood conventions, while the other teaches us a new way to see the world or offers us new perspectives on the realm beyond the movie house. Reading Mad magazine taught the coming generation to be skeptical of political authorities or the influence of Madison Avenue, but they would have to push its humor up several notches before they could find a mode of comedy well suited to the politics of the counterculture. These artists paved the way for everything that came yet they might have been the last generation of American humorists who could transgress wildly and yet still hold a place within the consensus culture. They were, in short, marginal but not outside the frame of mainstream culture. From a critical perspective, then, the question is whether we should allow ideological criteria to always trump aesthetic ones. Modernism, in the high art sense, was certainly divided between artists, or even works within the body of the same artist's careers, which were more focused on formal innovation and ideological critique, and we have found a way to accommodate both strands in the cannon of western art. Cannons often get defined in terms of the lasting impressions and continued influence of an artist's body of work and by that criteria, these artists continue to exert a strong influence on our culture down to the present day. As Doug Harvey writes in regard to Wolverton, "generations of comic creators, from Will Elder, Gahan Wilson, R. Crumb and Gary Panter to Peter Bagge, Drew Friedman, and Charles Burns, have been influences by his meticulous technique and pictorial audacity. Artists from the world of 'fine' or 'high' art, such as Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Kenny Scharf, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, and many others turned Wolverton's pop-culture monstrosities into museum-worthy artifacts."Similarly, Tex Avery's influence is explicitly acknowledge through Jim Carrey's performance in The Mask, through the opening sequences of Who Frame Roger Rabbit?, or throughout Tiny Tunes, Ren and Stimpy, and Animaniacs while it is hard to conceive of the world depicted in The Simpsons or South Park in the absence of Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Hoberman's essay ends with the suggestion that "what was once oppositional in vulgar modernism has largely been co-opted by the culture industry" (pointing to the then contemporary examples of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Saturday Night Live.) I have argued the opposite here-- that their containment within commercial culture worked to mute any overt political statements they might have made and that subsequent generations, following their example, have often pushed their transgressiveness much further. Perhaps these later works are consistent with Hoberman's closing call for a "vulgar postmodernism" though I will leave to someone else the always thankless task of policing the borders between modernism and postmodernism. That these works are a living presence in our culture makes the project of revisiting Hoberman's essay and reassessing this body of work that much more urgent. We have been able to only start the project of a comparative or cross-media analysis of "vulgar modernism" and its place in American culture. Hoberman's intuitive grouping of these artists proves rewarding whether we address the question in terms of biographical details or close textual analysis. These artists were fellow travelers in an artistic project none of them sought to articulate but all of them sought to demonstrate. It was a project whose roots could be traced back to vaudeville but which has been read in relation to a range of modern art movements, caught eternally in a struggle between competing claims of low-brow audacity and high art respectability. Calling them vulgar may oversell their transgressiveness, calling them modernist may overstate their avant garde impulses, yet the reality lies somewhere in the tension between the two. Whatever we want to say about them, they were artists who experimented with the basic building blocks of their respective media and taught a generation a new way to look at the world around them. When Powerhouse Pepper nonchalantly tells us in the final panel of a rather freakish comic story that certain specified pages were a dream sequence, when Startchie explains to a friend that the hearts flying around his paramour's head might mean simply platonic friendship in "cartoon language," they depict a world whose characters (and through extension, their readers) understand themselves as being constructed through recognized artistic conventions. When, in Symphony in Slang, Avery constructs a whole film around literalized metaphors, then we can see him inviting us to reflect on the role of language in shaping how we see the world. And, yes, they could make your sister puke, your mother blush, and your teacher sputter. Not bad for a day's work.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:35 AM | Permalink
May 23, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Three)Chicken Fat If Avery used the opera singer and the magician as comic stand-ins for the text's struggle between norms and their disruptions, the aesthetics of early Mad Magazine can be read through a more literal conflict, or at least competition, between writer Harvery Kurtzman and artist Will Elder for the attention of the reader. Elder liked to cram his panels with what he called "chicken fat," extraneous gags and signs which pulled our attention from story actions in the foreground to seemingly irrelevant background details. As Elder explained, "chicken fat is the part of the soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious pleasure." For the most part, these background gags were Elder's own additions, not dictated by Kurtzman's script, though some have suggested Kurtzman increasingly created opportunities for such elements. At other times, the writer expressed frustration when these gags overwhelmed the basic building blocks of his narrative or upstaged his verbal humor. Readers would linger on a single panel, scanning for more comic elements, rather than following the forward momentum of the plot. One frequent form of "chicken fat" were advertising signs or graphiiti, texts which often annotated the action or offered conflicting ideological perspectives on the events. Throughout Elder's "Startchy," (Mad, 12) background details hint at a much harsher social milieu than depicted in the Archie Andrews comic books. Yet, Elder can not resist putting a Burma Shave rhyme on the butts of a series of background figures in one panel. A scene from "Shadow!" (Mad, 4), showing a young woman falling down a flight of stairs, places a different advertising slogan on each step, while the natives in "Ping Pong" (Mad, 6) defend themselves with the Blue Shield and Knights of Pythias icons, playing cards, board games, roulette wheel, and surf boards . Such images need not be consistent from frame to frame, as in "Sooperdooperman" (Mad, 4) where a different icon appears on the chest of battling caped crusaders, in each panel, further undermining any conception of a coherent or consistent fictional world. Elder's contemporary, Basil Wolverton, is similarly known for his use of background details and signs which distract us from the main action. Consider the range of different signs depicted on the cover of a single issue of Powerhouse Pepper: "Fighters: Don't Mope on the Rope," "Seconds don't count. The Referee does!," "Don't Pile in this aisle!," "Tonight: Powerhouse Pepper vs. Doug Slugmug," "Next Week: Rush Crushmush vs. Bopper Sloppermopper," "If you must smoke, light up with genuine boxing matches." A heckler from the crowd asks via a word balloon, "How's to sell you life insurance?" while the protagonist is distracted from punching down his over-sized opponent by a shapely woman walking down the aisle. A semiotician would have a blast interpreting the various functions of such signs (promotional, regulatory, informative) within the fictional world as well as the ways that their language, especially the rhyming slang which was Wolverton's trademark, become a source of pleasure well beyond any meaningful function they might serve within the depicted space. Wolverton similarly deploys sound effects graphics as a source of pleasure in and of themselves, often using them to distract from rather than reinforce the main action. One illustrated essay. "Acoustics in the Comics," captures the cartoonist's fascinations with sound effects. Wolverton begins the essay describing his uncertainty as he tries to figure out the best way to graphically convey the sound of a horse stepping on someone's head. Responding to critics of his often wild and crazy images, Wolverton embodies such criticisms through the figure of an editor who insists on "realistic" sound effects. Across a series of misadventures, he depicts the cartoonist as trying to identify the precise sounds required to represent a range of unlikely experiences, so that flup represents the sound of "dropping your uppers on a gob of putty," Jworch as the sound of a safe falling on a man, Koyp as the noise a skin pore makes with it snaps shut upon contact with cold air, and soop as the sound of "a octopus tentacle slapping a bald bean" assuming the head is round (though it makes a "spoip" sound If the head is flat. These acoustic gags play upon the ways that Wolverton's art refused to abide by realist or classical expectations, preferring to draw his readers in more zany and improbable directions. Wolverton was interested in how wacky or improbably sounds might disrupt the norms of a classically constructed text; many of his best graphics engulf his frazzled protagonists with textual representations of their disruptive and distracting sonic surroundings. One representation of artists at work included the sounds of pens scratching on the sketchpad, of someone pulling on his hair, and the astonished response of critics and readers asked to make sense of what the artist is depicting. Another shows an anxious man trying to watch a movie surrounded by other patrons chomping popcorn, popping gum, and rocking in their chairs. A Good Humor truck appears alongside a tank brigade. A sign pops out of the top of a flame thrower promising "I don't want to set the world on fire." The Hitler-like Big Bad Wolf steps out of a truck which bears the label, "Der Fewer (Der Better)," and holds up a sign to the camera, "Go on and Hiss! Who cares!" (which gets pelted with tomatos by the picture house audience.) When the Wolf's Der Mechanized Huffer Und Puffer blow the little pigs's house down, it reveals a sign reading "Gone with the Wind" before the camera pans to show a second sign, "Corny Gag, isn't it?" An endless pan up the barrel of an alied weapon pauses long enough to let us read the words on yet another sign, "Long darn thing, isn't it?" and when the weapon fires, it whips out a graphic representing Japan and yet another sign drops down from off-screen space informing us that "Doolittle Dood it!" Again and again, such signs destabilize our relations to the represented actions, sometimes suggesting that the characters are themselves aware that they are appearing within a cartoon which we are currently watching (as in the wolf's direct address to the audience) and to which we may respond (as in hurled fruit) and other times speaking on behalf of an unseen narrator, who feels compelled to comment on the depicted actions (including labeling gags as "corny"). Avery also often based gags on the disjunction between sound and images. Consider three examples from Screwball Squirrel. In the first, Screwball closes the door to a phone booth before letting loose with a prolonged raspberry, a sequence designed to call attention to the act of censorship which represses some of his more bodily humor. (This particular rude noise is specifically prohibited in the Production Code). In the second, the camera pulls back from the canine antagonist rolling down the hill in a barrel to show what we might have first read as non-diegetic musical accompaniment as having a source in the fiction: Screwball is making appropriate sounds using drums, timpani, and bird whistles. At another point, as the dog relentlessly chases the squirrel, we begin to hear repeated noises on the soundtrack and the image gets caught into a loop, which suggests the recycling of stills that go on routinely in animated shorts. The image freezes, the Squirrel steps away, hits the needle of a phonograph, gets the music on track, and then, steps back into his place in the chase. In all three cases, Avery refuses to allow us to take the relations between sound and images for granted. Like Jones and Wolverton, Avery sees noise as the source of comic disruptions of the well constructed texts, finding pleasure in the breakdown of normal codes and conventions. Terry Gilliam has described what he values most about Will Elder's work: "the way he filled every inch of the thing with, just stuff....jokes on jokes on jokes." Such visual clutter and comic density is especially visible in the expanded panels which open many of Elder's Mad parodies. One such panel for "Is This Your Life?" (Mad, 24) tries to engulf all of 1950s American culture, into a single crammed and cramped image, including fictional characters (the Lone Ranger, Donald Duck), news casters (Edward R. Murrow) and political personalities (Nikita Khrushev, Richard Nixon), television and film stars (Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe), and brand icons (Aunt Jemima, The Smith Brothers, the Quaker Oats man, Snap, Crackle, and Pop), on and on. The opening of "Starchie," shows Blondie and Little Orphan Annie as another two students attending Riverdale High, while Annie carries a textbook, "Freud is a Fraud by Freed" which pulls us into another discursive field altogether. Such plays with intertextual references are also common to the work of Tex Avery (see Who Killed Who, 1943, where Santa Clause pops out of a closet and pulverizes the protagonist for failing to respect a sign warning him not to open the door before Xmas) or in Hellzapoppin (where Johnson bumps into a sled marked Rosebud and mumbles that he thought they had burned that thing or where the Frankenstein monster pops out of the audience and hurls Martha Raye back on stage during the disrupted ballet sequence described earlier.) All of this suggests that what Hoberman described as the "encyclopedic" nature of Frank Tashlin's comedy, "an elaborately cross-referenced Bartlett's of mass media quotations"[p.34] or the "collage-like" qualities of Will Elder's comics [p.37] might be extended to describe the tradition as a whole. These artists borrowed freely across media, genres, modalities, and cultural hierarchies. Moreover, these artists saw visual density as a source of pleasure in and of itself. Often, the specific details are less funny than the sense of their accumulation, of so many unlikely things occurring in the same space at the same time. Consider Hoberman's description of the opening image of "Ping Pong,"(Mad, 6) Elder's parody of King Kong: "a giant slobbering ape towering above the mass of screaming humanity that flees before it on vehicles ranging from flying carpets to pogo sticks. Although the overall effect is monumentally static, the image yields a dozen miniature emblems of exaggerated panic: one man is running with a bathtub clutched around his middle, another's eyes have just popped from his sockets, someone else appears to have plunged his hand through the back of the head in front of him so that it emerges, flailing, through its mouth. Meanwhile, Ping - brushing off the scaffolding that has suspended itself from his underarm in an attempt to plaster a 'Post No Bills' sign across his torso - is being attacked by a cannon firing puffed rice, a parachutist with a peashooter, a machine-gunner suspended in a diaper that is carried by a stork, and an army helicopter whose rear propeller has unobtrusively pulverized a portion of the frame line."(p.37) This dense image seems appropriate for a post-war era where critics were commenting on the struggle of Madison Avenue executives to grab our attention in an increasing noisy and distracting visual landscape. We can't take it all in. No two readers see the same thing. And indeed part of the pleasure is the promise of comic effects beyond comprehension. The Hell sequence at the start of Hellzapoppin is as visually dense as anything Elder ever created with acrobats leaping and flying in every direction, with people walking in between jugglers hurling flying sticks back and forth, with elements thrust into the frame from every possible off-screen space, and with gag elements appearing and then vanishing again with no real explanation. The introduction of Olsen and Johnson gets heralded by a menagerie of chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, and dogs, in a scene which includes everything but the kitchen sink (which, have no fear, gets brought in for comic effect in one of the film's later scenes.) At the risk of a bad pun, this "devil may care" attitude reflects a sense of old vaudeville, burlesque, and joke book gags, being pulled out of moth balls, for one last play, with everyone involved recognizing how tired or hokey these devices may be individually but hoping that if they throw enough things at the screen at once something will produce a laugh or a sense of wonderment. And when the word play gets too bad, one can just step outside of the joke altogether: "corny, isn't it?" These comic artists flag their jokes the way Babe Ruth point out his homeruns: we know where they are going to go but it's still amazing to watch them get there.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 21, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Two)
Hoberman's most important contribution is the way that his essay takes artists who are often discussed as idiosyncratic within their own medium and reads them collectively and comparatively as part of a larger artistic project that took shape across and between media in the post-war period. There is still a lot we do not know about these artists and how they might be related to each other, but it is increasingly clear that Hoberman's intuitive sense of their fit with each other reflects some behind the scenes collaborations. Let's take for example the musician Spike Jones. Jordan R. Young's biography of Jones, The Man Who Murdered Music, traces his migrations across different media (stage, radio, live action and animated cinema, comics, television, and records) as well as his collaborations with a range of other artists often associated with 'vulgar modernism': Jones sought advice from Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin on gags for his various film and television performances, contributed material to Ernie Kovacs' television series, and published pieces in early Mad magazine. All signs are that these artists knew each other socially and professionally, were informed by each other's work, drew on the same aesthetic roots, and in every other sense, constituted what we might describe as a circle. They did not adopt a shared label or issue manifestos to describe their motivations. Basil Wolverton, for example, did speak, tongue in check, of himself as belonging to the "spaghetti and meatball" school of art, a term which reflected his own low-brow aspirations and to the particular way in which he drew flesh and hair, but this term never extended to the others in this circle. Over the past decade or so, each of the artists associated with "vulgar modernism" have undergone a rediscovery with new books published on Will Elder and Jack Cole, a recent coffee table book reprinting sketches and published works by Basil Wolverton, and the reissue of some long-lost television and radio performances of Spike Jones on dvd. This essay draws heavily on this new material to reconsider the Vulgar Modernists, attempting to offer a more systematic mapping of their shared aesthetic vision. I will define what they had in common and why it is productive to draw comparisons between works produced across such a broad array of different media. For the moment, I am accepting Hoberman's 'vulgar modernism' as an inherited and problematic term, which reflects the ways a generation of critics has talked about these works I write this essay in the hopes of sparking further evaluation rather than making a definitive statement. My focus is going to be on Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Olsen and Johnson, Will Elder, Jack Coles, and Basil Wolverton, but for space considerations, I am not taking on Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Tashlin, and many others who would also belong in a more thorough discussion of vulgar modernism. My focus here is primarily formal, though there are important ideological questions, having to do with their representations of race, gender, sexuality, wartime propaganda and postwar advertising, censorship and regulation and so forth, which will need to be confronted in any larger discussion. In short, this essay opens a can of worms, hoping more people will pay attention to these artists and their contributions to American culture. But then, comedy is always messy business. Enough throat-clearing. Let's begin with a consideration of one of the emblematic moments from Tex Avery's oeuvre, the opening sequence from Screwball Squirrel. The streetwise protagonist highjacks "the picture" from his cloying counterpart, Sammy. Sammy's big eyes, fluttering eyelashes, baby talk, coy gestures, and sentimentalized music stands in sharp contrast to Screwball's aggressive manners, broad gestures, nasally voice, slangy language, elastic body, and slapstick gags. Sammy and all of his "cute little furry friends in the forest" are no match for Screwball who takes the more effeminate squirell behind a tree and knocks the crap out of him, turning to the camera to explain "you wouldn't have liked that picture anyway" and promising "funny stuff" as soon as the phone rings. Animation scholars have correctly identified this moment as a critical confrontation between two schools of American animation, though most of them have incorrectly aligned Sammy with Walt Disney, where-as read in the context of Tex Avery's recent move from Warner Brothers to MGM to take over the animation division, it is more likely that the immediate reference point was to Harmon-Isling his predecessors. We can read the gesture as acknowledging the changing of the guards at Metro, much as Avery began his first MGM cartoon, Blitz Wolf, by offering a syncopated version of the MGM Lion's opening roar. Both moments mark a repudiation of the past and signal that nothing was going to be taken seriously in the Avery era. There were, of course, other works by the Vulgar Modernists which more explicitly took on Disney, such as Will Elder's "Mickey Rodent", which opens with a panel depicting, among other thinks, the Fox walking a naked Pinocchio on a leash and Horace Horszneck being taken away by goons from Walt Dizzy because he went outside without his white gloves. Basil Wolvertoon created two sketches for his own amusement showing Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto confronting the kind of grotesque creatures which were his own stock and trade. Perhaps more broadly, we can see these artists as taking on what Mark Langer has called the West Coast school of American animation with its middle class ideology, middlebrow taste, and classical aesthetic, in favor of a style which took nothing sacred, including the norms of classical cinema, and which saw itself as more "adult" at a time when American cinema in general was re-inventing itself to reflect the sensibilities of a post-war audience. Langer, himself, contrasts the West Coast school with the New York School, which he associates with the Fleischer Brothers. Many of the defining traits of the New York School carry over to this post-war generation of artists, including a focus on transgression of social norms, an emphasis on the artificiality of the characters and their drawn nature," the use of "exaggerated effects" which call attention to the "artificial" and "manufactured" nature of cartoons, and a "polyphonic and heterogeneous" mixture of elements. Many of the 'vulgar modernists", however, come from the middle parts of the country, not from the coastal cities, and fell outside both urban sophistication and middle class propriety. Yet, like the Fleischer Brothers, their work was informed through borrowings from the vaudeville tradition where so many of them got their start. Indeed, there is a long tradition of confusing the kinds of transgressions found in vaudeville with devices associated with modernist distanciation, but it's worth remembering that the devices are deployed here to very different effect: to intensify rather than diminish our emotional experience. We might understand the opening of Screwball Squirrel in relation to a widespread vaudeville trope, the interrupted act. In another essay, which traces this motif across Buster Keaton's film career, I describe the functions this device played in variety entertainment: " The interrupted performance was a common act structure within the vaudeville tradition, seeming to hold open the prospect of onstage action as spontaneous, unrehearsed, improvisational. Vaudeville sought to maintain the illusion - and it was only partially an illusion - that the audience's response shaped the performance. In a theatrical tradition described by one Chicago critic as 'the field of the expert,' there was a certain pleasure in watching a performance go awry, witnessing events disrupt and threaten the performer's mastery over stagecraft, only to see order restored once again."Such moments enact the tensions between narrative and spectacle or between normality and transgressions which are central to this school of comedy. We take pleasure in the disruptions and interruptions even as we hope for order to be restored. In their stage show, Hellzappopin, Olsen and Johnson took this principle of the interrupted performance to the absolute limits, resulting in a show which was able to sustain the longest run of any Broadway production up until that point on the promise of the unexpected and the spontaneous: " During Hellzapoppin, the audience had bananas, beans, 'pottie-seats,' eggs, and live chickens hurled at them; loud shots exploded; planted hecklers raised a rumpus; a ticket scalper cavorted up and down the aisles with tickets for a rival show; a clown tried to extricate himself from a straightjacket for the show's duration; an elderly woman, outraged that her dress had been lifted by a trick gust of air from under the stage, attacked the entire cast with her umbrella...A woman persisted in bellowing 'Oscar, Oscar'; the audience was bombarded with rubber snakes and spiders; and a whirling madness of cacophonous pandemonium and blatant boorishness engulfed the theater."Universal brought the production to the screen as one of the last gasps of the 1930s anarchistic comedy tradition, resulting in what Hoberman described as "an alternative universe as might have been scripted by Victor Shklovsky under the influence of mescaline." The opening sequence literally pulls the floor out from under a high class musical number, sending a chorus line dressed in fine evening clothes and singing about heaven, falling gracelessly towards the pits of hell. The film concludes with Olsen and Johnson's elaborate attempts to disrupt the performance of a play within a play, destroying a ballet sequence, for example, through the tactical deployment of sneezing powder, sticky paper, men in bear suits, and thumb tacks, among other things. While some of the running gags carry over from the stage, Hellzapoppin also finds cinematic equivalents for the play's disruptions of the theatrical experience, introducing, for example, an ongoing battle between the characters in the film and a projectionist (played by Shemp Howard), who grumbles about being forced to become an onscreen actor, mixes up the reels, jolts the projector sending shockwaves through the fictional world and in a gag which confuses the role of cameraman and projectionist, refuses to pan to follow the action but prefers to remain focused on a bathing beauty extra. In discussing the Comedian Comedy tradition, Steve Seidman and Frank Krutnik have argued that both social and formal transgressions get articulated around the figure of the central comedian whose normalization and social integration by the final reel shuts down the possibilities for reflexivity. In Hellzapoppin, this formal transgression can get dispersed across a range of different performers (here, including not just Olsen and Johnson but also Shemp Howard, Martha Raye, Hugh Herbert, and others). A woman crying out for "Oscar" interrupts Olsen and Johnson so many times that they demand someone do something about her, a request accompanied by off-screen sounds of gunshot and then silence. A title asking Stinky Miller to go home is projected over the action of a musical number, which ultimately has to stop dead until the silhouette of an audience member passes out of the theater. Hugh Herbert bombards Olsen, Johnson, and Raye with arrows during one particularly exposition-heavy conversation, with characters nonchalantly dodging or plucking away the projectiles whizzing all around them. Just as disruption of the stage performance of Hellzapoppin could come from any direction and could exploit any aspect of stagecraft, the film version promises us a world where "anything can happen and probably will." Hellzappopin embodies this tension between the textual and the extratextual in the recurring gag of the distracted and increasingly antagonistic projectionist. In one sequence, a fight in the projection booth jolts the projector, causing the characters to bounce uneasily on the screen; their attempts to restore balance by adjusting the frame line throws the image further off kilter bringing the film itself out of alignment; one character's head gets repeated slammed against the frame bar as they try desperately to right themselves; and then, the characters get thrown into another film altogether, a western spliced in the middle of their reel, where they must battle Indians, before finally arriving back in their proper place in the film. After all, an opening title warns us that Hellzapoppin will bear no resemblance to any actual motion picture. This interrupted performance structure was the stock and trade of another 'vulgar modernist,' Spike Jones. Literary modernist Thomas Pynchon emphasizes these elements in an essay written in tribute to the man known for his contributions to "music depreciation," "Spike's preferred structure was first to state the theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as possible, then subversively descend into restatement by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot jazz, the very idiom Spikes Jones and his Five Tacks had begun with back in high school, to the great displeasure of their parents."Jones and His Cityslickers produced a range of fractured recordings of classical music but could also directed these auditory challenges at middle brow lounge music, as might be suggested by his best-known work, "Cocktails for Two." One widely circulated recording of the song opens with a few bars on the piano and a humming chorus, gradually complimented by strings and a male vocalist who valiantly tries to maintain his decorum as the band adds gunshots, clinking glasses, slide whistles, kettle drums, fire bells, gasps, coughs, hiccups, and belches. It is a classic showdown between music, which defines the high, and noise, which defines the low. Many modern listeners know the audio recording of "Cocktails for Two" which was a favorite on the Doctor Demento radio show but the stage performances relied as much on sight gags as on comic sounds, including the use of drunken midgets, two headed men, acrobats, and a range of other activities which upstage and engulf the soloist (as can be seen on recently reissued kinoscopes of his television series). Members of the Spike Jones troope always emphasize the highly structured nature of these comic disruptions - describing how they had to be taught to burp with the beat, if not in tune with the music. As Dick Webster explains, "The things that seemed so crazy on stage were intensely worked out. It looked like bedlam but it was organized bedlam." The dvds give us access to multiple versions of "Cocktails for Two," each sharing common elements, but each also including novel additions, suggesting a structured but still open space for improvisation within each performance. From "Cocktails for Two," it is not hard to find our way back to Tex Avery's The Magical Maestro, which depicts the showdown that occurs when a carny magician , knocks out an orchestra conductor and takes his place, waging war on an opera singer who is offering a fairly straight rendition of a classical aria. The maestro does everything he can to distract his high class rival, including magical transformations of his identity, turning him into, among many others, a ballet dancer, a football player, an Indian chief, a convict, a black-faced minstrel, a South Seas Islander, and a Chinaman. These disruptions include both visual gags (proliferating Rabbits) and sound-based gags, including abrupt shifts in musical genre (including Hillbilly, Hawaiian and Minstrel performances). While the film offers a narrative frame for the interrupted act, disruptions, as in Hellzapoppin, also occur from outside the narrative space, such as hair which seems to get caught up in the film's projector and lingers until the opera singer plucks it away. Once again, the interrupted performance structure allows us to pit high culture against low, music against noise, and professional polish against liberating improvisation. (To Be Continued)
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:45 PM | Permalink
May 14, 2008
Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!This past week, I contributed a post to In Media Res, a site which I have mentioned several times before, where academics share clips of contemporary and historic media content with critical commentary. Each week, In Media Res adopts a specific theme and invites in five scholars who come at that theme from different angles. Last week's theme was "Toys," and the result was an interesting series of explorations of how toy branding and advertising connects to issues of gender, practices of childrearing, collector culture, and transmedia entertainment. Raiford Guins, State University of New York, Stony Brook, extends Roland Barthes' analysis of the move from wood to plastic in toys to examine collector culture and the practices which are designed to preserve value by keeping toys in their original packaging. Caryn Murphy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares a segment from Good Morning, America on Disney's "Princess" franchise, which she reads through a consideration of media conglomeration (reflected as much by what the piece doesn't say as in what it does). Derek Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares some early animated commercials for G.I. Joe, which he describes as a prototype for the subsequent cartoon series; interestingly, these spots were developed for Marvel's G.I. Joe comics in order to skirt regulatory restrictions on the use of animation in toy commercials, representing one of the few times that comics have been directly advertised on television. And Avi Santo, Old Dominion University, shares some examples of cross-universe branding -- advertisements for Underoos and for action figures which mix and match characters from several different media companies, a practice common enough in actual play but far less common in the marketing of franchise related toys. As for my own piece, I've reposted it below since I thought it would be of interest to my regular readers. It is closely related to a series of essays I've been writing off and on for the past decade on post-war children's culture and its relationship to permissive childrearing. If you are interested in this line of investigation, you can find an essay on Benajmin Spock's ideas about child sexuality in The Children's Culture Reader, on Doctor Seuss and debates about the family as a seedbed for democracy in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, on the ways Hank Ketchem's Dennis the Menace retooled the "Bad Boy" tradition in The Revolution Wasn't Televised, and how Lassie got retooled to reflect shifting understandings of childhood and parenting in The Wow Climax. Someday, I hope to pull together a book which deals with the figure of the boy in the striped shirt as an embodiment of a particular conception of boyhood which shaped the baby boom generation. Needless to say, this involves looking closely at media texts, toys, and cultural practice which shaped my own boyhood through a historical and cultural lens.
These three commercials from the 1960's suggest the roles popular culture played in promoting some of the core premises of what I am calling Permissive Child Rearing Doctrine, a set of ideas most closely associated with Dr. Benjamin Spock, but which were shaped by a much broader array of post-war advice literature. Writing in the 1950's, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a culture of production (with its demands for discipline and regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with its expectations of a "fun morality") as a major force shaping child-rearing practices in the twentieth century. The emergence of permissiveness in the postwar era, she argues, was partially a response to the expansion of the consumer market place and the prospect of suburban affluence, both themes which should be clear from these sample commercials. Permissive conceptions of the child embraced pleasure as a positive motivation for exploration and learning. The home was being redesigned to accommodate children's impulses and urges. The family was being redirected from a Father-Centered to a Child-Centered model. Fathers were being taught to become tolerant and indulging playmates for their children. Mothers were being instructed to deploy pleasure to get children to do what was expected of them. All of this is wonderfully summed up in this Madison Avenue fable of a mother who sees her pogo-stick-playing children as kangaroos bouncing through her kitchen. A previous generation would certainly have believed that they could, in fact, "change" their family through discipline and regimentation; she's being told, instead, to change her floor wax and otherwise create a space which can tolerate their rambunctiousness. Similarly, consider the ways that Trik-Trak assumes the children will be able to play "all over the house" and that their father will be happy to have their toys racing under his feet even as he reads the evening newspaper. The Dick Tracy radio watch commercial extends the children's play environment from the home into the entire suburban neighborhood, reflecting the freedom of movement experienced by the post-war generation. Sociologists in the early 1970's estimated that suburban boys enjoyed a free range of 1,200 yards while their sisters might travel only 760 yards without adult permission. By the end of the decade, conservative cultural critics, such as Spiro Agnew, will be blaming Spock for the counterculture's anti-authoritarian views, suggesting that anti-war protestors should have been spanked when they were little boys and girls. Later child-rearing experts have rejected "permissiveness" in favor of more "authoritative" models for the relations between children and adults, insisting that adults need to set firmer limits on what happens in their homes. But, in the early 1960's, these commercials were selling permissiveness as much as they were selling particular toys and products. We can see these assumptions at play from a historical distance. But, how are contemporary models of child-rearing impacting the ways children's toys are designed and marketed?
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:36 AM | Permalink
May 8, 2008
What's Behind 'The Glass'?Over the years, I have often been asked to explain the appeal of slash to people who really don't have a clue what the genre is all about. The topic crops up in class as I am teaching my work on fandom; in conversations with journalists doing the now obligatory fan fiction story; and with strangers who learn what I research and want to know why. I know many other aca-fen face this same question and that a range of different strategies have emerged for talking about it. My approach has been to try to connect them with an iconic moment from the history of fandom, one where the original text clearly expresses issues of desire and affection between two men, and one which historically packs an emotional wallop even for non-fans. I reproduced my basic argument in the essay, "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," which was reproduced in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. This past weekend, I was delighted to learn that the passage in question had inspired a fan vidder, thingswithwings to produce an original work based around the iconography of the glass wall. The Glass does what the best vids do: it not only demonstrates an interpretation of the original work through the manipulation and mobilization of visual evidence; it also makes us "feel" that interpretation from the inside out by tapping the emotional power of that original imagery and upping it a few levels through its juxtaposition through editing and the soundtrack. We've had several discussions here of vidding in the past for those of you who are not familiar with the form. But this is a particularly vivid example of how an idea might move from theory into artistic practice. In the process, the artist has expanded my original insight about Star Trek to show how persistent this image has become across a range of fannish texts. It seems that fans are not the only ones who find the forced isolation of characters as a situation which produces intense longing and which gives physical expression to the emotional bonds between characters. Just wanted to share this particularly interesting example of the flow of ideas within the aca-fan world. Thanks to thingswithwings for giving me permission to share her work with you.
May 5, 2008
Spy StoriesThis is the fifth in a series of "intimate critiques" developed by CMS Masters Students as part of my Media Theory and Methods Proseminar. Here, Xiaochang Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!) Spy Stories Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves. And in the weeks following, as if anticipating my arrival, footage of the Berlin Wall being In those first long rudderless years within an aggressively unfamiliar landscape -- the Rewatching those episodes now, they are fraught with the almost too-obvious appeals But Maxwell's advantage was not in his ability, his comic incompetence, but the very As I got older, the pressures of fitting in drew me further and further into narratives of In fourth grade, a classmate explained to me patiently, "You could never be president On TV, Sydney Bristow embodied a vision of individual agency, and the pleasure of As such, she became too the fantasy of a preservable sense of self, despite the Through her, blending in, passing, became not a denial of history but a tactical and The problem, of course, is this: I am no Sydney Bristow, and I've had more than one The allegory of racial assimilation as espionage a nice fantasy, a neat justification, but it Because in the end, all of this conflicted, contested, treacherous allegory of identity Xiaochang Li Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn. Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.
April 9, 2008
A Critfan Yearns for the World As It WasOne of the more unorthodox policy decisions we've made at the Comparative Media A CRIT-FAN WHO'S YEARNING FOR THE WORLD AS IT WAS
They're watching As the World Turns, a show I've watched since it premiered in 1956, the year I started kindergarten. But they're watching and studying ATWT as it exists today; I'm watching the same show and yearning for the show it used to be. So when a student comments on how certain characters are either actors or reactors, I hesitate to respond. I could reiterate Sam's point that characters often switch between actor and reactor depending on the circumstances. He's absolutely right. But that barely scratches the surface; what I really want to tell them is that there used to be a time on soap opera when characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation. It's been a good long while since that happened on ATWT, certainly not in the time that they've been watching. So long in fact, that I'm hard-pressed to think of a specific example to give them, one downside of the sheer volume of soaps' text. Then, is there available video, or do you have to try to explain the context? And even with video, how to capture the full depth of a story that ran over months, if not years, by showing just a few isolated episodes? All of which brings me to Ryan's Hope, a show that ran from 1975-89, and is currently shown on SOAPnet, a digital cable channel created by ABC to rebroadcast their soaps. (How the channel has evolved from its original mission is a subject for further discussion.)A few months ago, just as when the RH's 1982 episodes were to begin, the show went back to its 1975 premiere. There was a huge hew and cry from viewers; SOAPnet claimed that they couldn't clear the rights to the music used in shows after 1982. While I appreciated the outrage, I was thrilled; RH was a show I'd dipped into now and then over the years, but had never really watched. When it premiered in 1975, I had a fulltime job, no VCR and had just begun working on my undergraduate degree at night. I could barely keep tabs on ATWT, but could depend on my mother to fill me in - Guiding Light, too. Since I'd already been watching RH for a while before the switch, there was little about the actual opening story that surprised me since I already knew how much of it had turned out. What did shock me was just how awful the first few episodes looked - flat and dull - dreadful lighting. The graphics were amateurish, and have only slightly improved. And, I have to say, Frank Ryan, the show's ersatz hero, in a coma for weeks on end was less than scintillating storytelling. But that first day, when Mary Ryan met Jack Fenelli in her family's bar, I was in for the duration. As I write this (March 2008), what's currently on screen is just over a year into the show's run. I have to say, as much of a pleasure it's been to watch the first year of RH, it's been a bittersweet experience since in that year's worth of episodes (they run two a night Monday-Friday) I've seen more genuine soap opera drama than I have in I don't know how many years of ATWT and, occasionally, GL. In the soap opera of recent memory, I have to settle for a moment here, some subtext there. In RH, I get to see fully-developed characters and fully-integrated storytelling - albeit, 30-years old. But, has it ever held up. However, what's truly jarring - surreal, actually - is the juxtaposition between the down-to-earth Ryans, et al - characters who actually wear coats and scarves in the winter - and the SOAPnet promos featuring the current crop of soap opera characters where women's most important piece of clothing is a pushup bra and men often go shirtless - regardless of the weather. And then there are the promo taglines: "Ruthless people who will do anything to get what they want." That one's for Y&R. The OC's described as "Pretty people, pretty messed up." This is not to say there aren't ruthless people on Ryan's Hope: Roger Coleridge comes to mind. But the insecurity that underlies Roger's behavior is so transparent, it's hard to think of what he's doing as pure ruthlessness. Even the local gangster (and neighborhood undertaker), Nick Szabo is clearly a devoted and loving, if infuriating, father and when a major character died, he behaved decently and compassionately. And there are certainly pretty people on Ryan's Hope, and yes, some of them are pretty messed up, but messed up in ways that real people can identify with, not just watch agog. Anyone who grew up without a family can understand the behavior of those characters on the outside looking in: Jack, who's been so traumatized by growing up in an orphanage that he never misses an chance to sabotage his relationship with Mary and her family - a tension the writers continued to play years down the road as Mary's father, Johnny, never forgot how much pain Jack's fears created for Mary, and her mother, Maeve, never forgot the cause of Jack's fears. I always wondered if those early conversations between Johnny and Maeve discussing their concerns about Jack resembled conversations my own parents has about my boyfriends And then there's Delia, who also lost her parents young. Dee's so unhappy in her marriage to Frank Ryan (and who can blame her, he was cheating on her for years, yet being the golden boy, no one ever really blamed him), so in need of the love that Roger Coleridge wants to share with her (cruel as some of Roger's actions seem, he really does love her), and yet she's willing to give it up to remain a Ryan. But my all-time (thus far) favorite juxtaposition between Ryan's Hope and the SOAPnet promos came during the most recent mindless bloodbath on General Hospital. Bruce Weitz, best know as Mick Belker on Hill Street Blues, played Anthony Zacchara, leader of said bloodbath. Back in 1976, Weitz also had a one-day gig on RH playing an assistant district attorney prosecuting a euthanasia case (the love story between Seneca and Nell Beaulac remains a powerful testament to forgiveness, reconciliation, and the real meaning of love between grown-ups). In a single conversation with Seneca's lawyer, Jill Coleridge a very young and smooth-faced Weitz expressed compassion for, and understanding of, a tragic situation while making it clear he intended to win the case. I had really looked forward to seeing how Weitz would play the trial and was disappointed to see another actor playing the role. Seeing Weitz as Zacchara in the GH promos stood in stark contrast to the depth and complexity he brought to his one day on RH. The issues underlying those juxtapositions explain a lot about the current sorry state of soap opera and I'll be writing more about how down the road. But back to my initial point: how characters might switch between actor and reactor in the course of a single conversation. I've always believed that the higher one's tolerance for ambiguity, the better one can experience the full emotional impact of soap opera. What happed on RH recently provides a perfect example: Frank has found out about Delia's affair with Roger and wants to use that information to divorce her and win custody of their son, Little John. Except that Frank cheated on Dee with Jillian first, but since Dee took him back she can't use that first adultery to block the divorce Frank wants so desperately. So she enlists Frank's brother Pat (they were an item in high school), to find evidence that Frank has resumed his affair with Jillian. The repercussions play out among all the characters, including the deeply-Catholic Johnny and Maeve, who don't believe in divorce, yet know that the marriage was never right. They want to defend Frank and blame Dee, but Pat never lets his parents forget that it was Frank who cheated first. These scenes are long enough (another big change; the short choppy scenes currently on ATWT and GL make me dizzy) that the characters move from actor to reactor seamlessly, and the camera shows each character's ambivalence in the reaction shots. And viewers get to experience the real life emotions of characters far more real than those on any reality show. I know these kinds of moments happened on As the World Turns in the past, most recently, during the Douglas Marland era. Marland was ATWT's headwriter from 1985 until his untimely death in 1993. One of his best stories involved legacy characters Bob and Kim Hughes, Kim's ex-husband, John Dixon, their son, Andy Dixon and Susan Stewart, a longtime rival of Kim's. I've always believed that the most powerful and compelling drama is created when all of the characters involved in a storyline are trying to do the right thing - the right thing for the situation, not necessarily the right thing for their character - and it's their efforts that come into conflict. The situation in this case was John and Kim's son, Andy's alcoholism. So, of course Kim and John were spending time together; their son was in trouble. And, of course, Bob wanted to help, but he wasn't Andy's father; John was. Susan may have been a troublemaker in the past, but here, she was Andy's AA sponsor. And so when Bob and Susan finally hit the sheets, viewers were sighing to themselves, "oh no," not screaming, "what the fuck!," as is all too often the case with current daytime soaps. Sad to say (sad for soap viewers, anyway), these days the only place to see this kind of character-driven drama routinely played out, with the depth and intimacy that used to be the hallmark of soaps, is on primetime: Friday Night Lights; Ugly Betty and Dirty Sexy Money are three examples of the best of what primetime has to offer. In these shows, as in the soaps of old, conflicts between and among characters begin with the emotional conflicts within the characters; as the audience watches the former unfold, they are never permitted to lose sight of the latter. The question of whether these primetime shows are in fact soaps came up last summer in the follow-up to a discussion between Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea here, which led to further discussion on Just TV here and C3, here. And Sam has opened up a discussion with his students as to what exactly defines a soap opera here. Given the deep-rooted stigma long attached to daytime soaps, it's not too surprising that fans of primetime serials invest time and effort parsing the textual and structural differences between daytime and nighttime soaps. What did surprise me, though, was the resistance that came from within daytime, in particular the daytime media. One daytime critic actually said, "Daytime drama and primetime drama are two very different genres with two very different audiences," an understandable, albeit specious, argument. I would argue (and will in an essay for the book Sam, Abigail and C. Lee Harrington are co-editing that grew of last summer's discussion) that daytime would do well to understand what is working on primetime soaps, and why, because it's what used to be working on daytime. And right now, daytime soaps are in so much trouble that none of us can afford to be territorial if it stands in the way of figuring out how to save this long-marginalized segment of popular culture. Lynn Liccardo began writing about nursing after graduating from Harvard
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:58 PM | Permalink
March 10, 2008
If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest...On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics. For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free. If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software. I discussed the concept of collective intelligence in relation to Wikipedia in this post, which is an early draft of an article which will appear soon in The Journal of Media Literacy. For the distinction I raised between "collective intelligence" and "the Wisdom of the crowds," you might read this post which considers how both might be tapped through serious games. Steven and I chatted a bit on the relative merits of The Wire (which I described as one of the best shows "inside the box") and Lost (which I characterized as one of the best shows "outside the box"). Here's an earlier discussion of Lost in relation to shifts in how we process television content. For a fuller consideration of Lost as a new form of television, you might check out CMS alum Ivan Askwith's Masters Thesis on engagement television. For an interesting take on The Wire, see Jason Mittell's essay here. And of course, Johnson's own Everything Bad is Good For You brought the debate about complexity in popular culture to a much larger public. I spoke at some length about Harry Potter fandom. These ideas are more fully developed in the "Why Heather Can Write" chapter of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I expanded my thinking on Harry Potter fandom this summer here at the blog. The remarks on Harry Potter were inspired in part by the fact that I appear in a new film (which I still haven't seen), We are Wizards, which was premiering at the South by Southwest film festival. I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.) We talked about the Obama campaign and its relationship to collective intelligence and social networks, a topic that I explored in my blog very recently. From there, we extended to talk about the concept of civic media, a topic which allowed Steve to talk about his new project, Outside.in, and for me to talk about the work we are doing through the newly launched Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. In response to a question from the audience, I spoke about the newly created Organization for Transformative Works, a project by and for fans, in response to the commercial exploitation and legal threats surrounding their culture. It's a good example of how we can use the mechanics of participatory culture to exert pressure back on other institutions. And if you want to hear my conversation last year with danah boyd, you can find it here. For those of you who are new to this blog, welcome. Explore the backlog of posts. Stick around for more conversations on participatory culture, collective intelligence, and new media literacies.
February 29, 2008
Is Ally McBeal a Thing of Beauty?: An Interview with Greg M. Smith (Part One)Greg M. Smith (Georgia State University) argues that there is no word more "obscene" in television studies than "beauty." Television studies has run away from aesthetic claims from its inception and in so doing, they contribute to (or at least do nothing to combat) the wide spread public perception that mainstream television has little or no aesthetic value. In his new book, Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal, Smith offers a sustained reading of a single television series, demonstrating how key themes and images unfold over time, and how the intriguing parts add up to a most satisfying whole. Smith doesn't avoid issues of gender and sexuality which have concerned earlier writers who have discussed this series, but he shows the complex ways that these issues get worked through across the entire run of the series, rather than pulling out one "representative" episode as standing for the work as a whole. Smith insists that we need to respect the particular character of television series as a kind of long form storytelling even if doing so places serious demands on a critic, especially in discussing a series which ran for more than a hundred episodes. A died-in-the-wool formalist in the Wisconsin tradition, Smith is utterly fearless in his defense of applying aesthetic standards to talk about popular art both here and his other work (which deals with topics as diverse as the cognitive theory of emotion, the formal experimentation of Myst, the functions of dialog in the Final Fantasy series, the visual style of The West Wing, and the adaptation of The Maxx from comics to cartoon series). As this list suggests, Smith has been willing to apply his skills at textual analysis to film, television, games, and comics. Some years ago, Smith wrote one of the best answers I've ever read to the oft-heard protest of undergrads taking Introduction to Cinema classes: "But it's just a movie!" Smith has by now become accustomed to people asking "Why Ally McBeal?" It's a question which he deftly discusses in the book's introduction and in the interview below, he offers at least some of the rationale for this selection. In this first installment, Smith discusses the place of aesthetic evaluation in television studies, makes an argument for why we need to expand our canon as a field to include works which do not necessarily seem "cool" to our students or "worthy" to our colleagues, and offers a new take on the relationship between formal and ideological analysis. In tomorrow's installment, we will explore more fully the lasting impact of Ally McBeal on American television. You open the book with the observation, "Complexity of narrative or the beauty of construction can justify critical consideration of a novel or a film, but when a television show is no longer au courant, those considerations matter little." Why do you think this double standard has persisted for so long and Television's low critical status is eroding, but like all erosion, the process is erratic. You've also been critical, though, of the formation of a cannon of "cool television" shows within the field of media studies, asking why we don't study series, such as Jag, which are extremely successful over a long period of time but do not appeal to the same aesthetic criteria as those shows academics like to watch. Explain. Television studies is a small field, and like any small town, there's a tendency to be a bit insular. If you poll TV scholars, there's a remarkable consistency in what we watch. We watch hip stuff like Lost and 30 Rock. And so when we write, we naturally tend to write about the shows that appeal to that particular sensibility.
When I was first writing this book, I sincerely tried to make it all about aesthetics and narrative just to prove that such an approach could be done. But I couldn't do it, partly because of my training. Cultural studies has changed how we study film and television, and we can't pretend that aesthetics exists in a timeless vacuum outside of culture. I realize that if I wanted to show an alternative to a cultural studies approach to television, I shouldn't artificially ignore culture but instead should restore a balance to dealing with the text.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
October 2, 2007
Announcing Futures of EntertainmentMany readers attended last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, which brought together leading figures from film, television, games and virtual worlds, advertising, comics, and other media industries for an indepth discussion of some of the trends impacting our contemporary mediascape. If you missed this event,you can check out the podcasts here and read a report on it written by Jesse Walker for Reason online here. Well, we were so excited by the quality of last year's event that we decided to host a second Futures of Entertainment conference with new topics and a new cast of characters. The event is sponsored by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's some of the details: The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. 'Engagement' is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success. Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. Co-hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Futures of Entertainment 2 (FoE2) takes place Friday, Nov. 16, and Saturday, Nov. 17, at the Bartos Theater, in the Wiesner Building at MIT. This year's conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, audience measurement, cultural labor, fan relations, and mobile platform development. The conference works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. This is not simply another industry gathering. The goal is not a Speakers featured at FoE2 include: Mobile Media: Marc Davis, Yahoo!; Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting; Francesco Cara, Nokia Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile's "killer app". This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?
As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can "count" engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?
There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers. What do we know now about the "architecture of participation" (to borrow Kevin O'Reilly's formulation) that we didn't know a year ago? What have been the classic mistakes which Web 2.0 companies have made in their interactions with their customers? What do we gain by applying a theory of labor to think about the invisible work performed by fans and other consumers within the new media economy? Advertising and Convergence Culture: Mike Rubenstein, The Barbarian Group; Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday; Tina Wells, Buzz Marketing Group; Faris Yakob, Naked Communications; Bill Fox, Fidelity Investments Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same time, campaigns that respond by capitalizing on the creativity of audiences prompt questions about the continuing role for creatives. This panel looks at the unfolding role for advertisers within convergence culture, looking at questions about the nature of agencies, transmedia planning and the increasing circulation of advertising as entertainment content. Does the agency structure need to be rethought? What are the implications of breaking down the distinction between content and advertising? What are effective ways to collaborate with creative audiences? How is convergence culture changing the value of different advertising sites? Cult Media: Danny Bilson, transmedia creator; Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner; Jesse
Opening Remarks by Henry Jenkins, MIT; Joshua Green, MIT; Jonathan Gray, Fordham With fewer than 200 seats open for the conference, FoE2 emphasizes discussion amongst Drawing a mixed academic and industry crowd, the conference boasts broad coverage of It provides a unique opportunity to partake in a focussed discussion on the issues The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) is a research consortium at MIT exploring The Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT (CMS) is a graduate and undergraduate The Wiesner Building is located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, in Cambridge, Mass. nbc's heroes: "appointment tv" to "engagement tv"?
Abstract The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this Forum, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshow, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audience. I hope to see many of my regular readers in Cambridge for these exciting events.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:02 AM | Permalink
September 21, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part Two): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKeeart, Art, and aesthetics DK: Other acafen have told me that my fan fiction tastes are highbrow and shaped by external literary standards (see below), and my lack of appreciation for id vortex stories -- that is, stories which revel in extreme emotional connections to pain, romance, torment, and the like in ways that can be deeply satisfying to a reader but which we have been taught to despise as over-the-top -- is a weakness in understanding, appreciating, or analyzing fan fiction. AM: This is a good example of my current obsession (as you'll know from the book) - the forms of discrimination used by non-academic consumers. It fascinates - and appalls - me that so much cultural theory - Left and well as Right leaning - is predicated on the assumption that non-academics consume indiscriminately. It makes me angry to read authors such as Habermas and Adorno claiming that non-academic consumers will take whatever they're given, and that the level of 'trash' in culture is due the producers forcing their wares onto a helpless public. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has analysed everyday purchasing decisions and shown the level of intellectual work that goes into deciding to choose, say, one band of meat pie over another. Fan cultures fascinate me because they provide well documented examples of such decisions, and particularly their aesthetic elements. Because there's much discussion between members about these decisions, the systems are both complex and accessible. What you're talking about here is clear example of an aesthetic system generated within fandom - not from within academia, but in direct response to it. Which is interesting. My own fan interests - Doctor Who is the strongest, and the fan culture with which I am most familiar - don't have anything like the same sense of resentment to 'traditional' literary forms of analysis. They don't really show up much in our aesthetic systems, either as good or bad objects. Although there's a lot of fun to be had making fun of Tulloch and Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, which is seen to be full of jargon, and to take the program far too seriously ... DK: Nobody has told me that my taste in comics are too highbrow but I have to admit that I've been known to be unattractively smug that most of my comics are indies. Even more unattractively, if a trip to the comic book store has me buying only DC/Marvel comics, I've been known to pick up an independent comic that was lower on my shopping list just so I wouldn't be seen buying only mainstream publishers in a shopping trip (I will do the same thing if I realize that all of comics I've bought are written by men, and pick up something on my list which was written by a woman). Interestingly, it's not the act I find unattractive but my rationale. Making sure I'm supporting independent comic book publishers and female creators is admirable, but doing so because I don't want the cashier of my favorite store to think that I am a lowbrow reader is fairly ugly. (That being said, I've also been told that my taste in fantasy and science fiction books is entirely lowbrow. I don't have much of a taste for the classics, for the grand old wizards of science fiction. If you tell me to read Ursula Le Guin I'll pick Wizard of Earthsea (lowbrow simply by nature of being written for children, and don't even get me started on that problematic valuation) over The Dispossessed in a heartbeat. I prefer early David Eddings to Stephen R. Donaldson. I want my books to have happy endings, and can you get more lowbrow than that?) AM: I often describe what I'm looking for in a film as 'singing, dancing and a happy ending'. I think that's one of the main differences between entertainment and art. And given the choice, I'll always go for the former. DK: Though I absolutely love it when something is both! AM: Ah. Here we go. The old definition - 'What is art'. I mean, I'm happy to say that the Buffy season 5 finale, 'The Gift' is art. DK: Well, duh, she interjects, proving herself intellectually. AM: A definition which simply means anything that is beautifully done on its own terms. But in the more institutional definition of 'art' - ie, that which is taught in Art History courses at University, or for which one can get an Arts Council grant - then I would have to demur. That kind of 'art' does everything in its power to make sure that it's never entertainment. Which is why I hate it so much. (have a look at this for a laugh - http://flowtv.org/?p=107) DK: See, I agree with your Flow essay, but not with the way you phrase it here. I think a lot of the art which gets you an Arts Council grant is quite wonderful, and is often entertainment. For all my bragging about how lowbrow I am, I adored ballet as a child, and not just The Nutcracker Suite, but everything from Balanchine to modern dance. Just because The National Endowment for the Arts decided it was worth funding, doesn't mean it isn't Entertainment. The focus in your Flow essay is more the inverse, which I do agree with -- just because it doesn't get National Endowment for the Arts funding doesn't mean it isn't Art. AM: But I think that when Art becomes entertaining, the ideological apparatuses that manage the sector swing into play to start stripping it of its status. There's a great chapter on opera in Jim Collins's collection High Pop. It points out that when Nessum Dorma was used to sell the soccer World Cup in 1990, and became massively popular, many opera critics despaired. The music had become familiar and unchallenging - in short, entertaining - and was therefore, no longer Art! DK: There's this fascinating bit of Walter Benjamin where he makes the usual arts/entertainment division (regarding Germany's reading habits in the 1920s) -- and then goes on to attack criticism for being wholly concerned with the literature of the public sphere. It's exactly the same dichotomy we have now except with the critical lens focused in the opposite direction. Kristina Busse and I have had a number of conversations that went something like this (and keep in mind I am paraphrasing her -- her end of the conversation is much more intelligent than I am probably making it sound here): Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction -- So in some senses I am insufficiently aligned to the fangirl axis, or I am too brainwashed by the patriarchal academy. (Of course, when I phrase it this way with Kristina she gets rightfully disgruntled because that's not what she's accusing me of at all, but I'm speaking hyperbolically. Kristina, I hope you forgive me for any misrepresentations!) AM: A better response would be: 'No - YOU'RE a brainwash victim'. And she would have said 'No - YOU are'. And so on, until you fell out and stopped being BFF... DK: Oh, of course it is pleasurable! Because the act of coming to terms with definitions and their flaws is itself a joyous part of literary analysis for me. Unsolvable, but so much fun. AM: Exactly! It provides a space in which it is possible for the two of you to keep on talking about the common object which is one of the things that holds you together. In the conversation you cite, I see two points of possible friction. The first is the use of the term 'quality'. I've been tracing the uses of that word for some time now, and it seems to function quite explicitly as a synonym for 'highbrow'. And with that comes a simultaneous denigration of its implied opposite - 'trash'. It's tricky to try to explain why you think something is good, without denigrating other points of view - but it is possible. I think it involves a playfulness, not taking yourself too seriously. That's more possible when dealing with lowbrow culture than highbrow culture, simply because we know, as we discuss who is the best gay porn director, that there's something a bit silly about talking in those terms. DK: And yet it's so meaningful, and as you point out in Beautiful Things, everybody does it every day. I could tell you what I think is the best porn, gay or otherwise, without even having to stop and think -- and it doesn't correspond to highbrow artistic style mapped onto the porn genre You're right, too, that this phrasing -- "highest quality porn director" -- provokes a double take. This moment of cognitive dissonance makes apparent the disturbing correlation between "quality" and our ideas of "highbrow". AM: I think that when you start pulling in the language of the oppressors - which I think 'quality' is - it becomes harder to do that playfulness. From an empirical point of view, there's almost a 100% guarantee that when somebody says that something is 'quality' - quality television, quality film, quality writing, quality journalism - I know that I'm not going to like it. Whereas, if it is described as 'trash', there's a high probability it's going to engage, delight and excite me. DK: Definitely. And if in my humorous paraphrase above I represented Kristina as someone who would denigrate someone else's pleasures, that is about the most extreme misrepresentation of her I can conceive of. But we have different tastes, different aesthetic senses, and it's valuable to me to be challenged on my definitions of objective quality. It's always startling to me to discover I have these; on the one hand I'm a relativist and a social constructionist, and on the other hand I'm a book reviewer who makes absolutist statements about the value of a text. I'm telling you, there's nothing that can shock a good deconstructionist literary theorist into analyzing her own assumptions more than being called a New Critic. *shudders* AM: Which raises an interesting point. The only place that I make fully absolutist statements about the value of texts is in doing academic book reviews and refereeing journal papers (leaving the marking of student essays to one side - not because it's not important or relevant, but just because, as they say 'Don't get me started on that'. It's a whole other book about power, authority and knowledge). And even there, I have to admit, I'm getting more and more relativist. I learned a lot from editing an academic journal for eight years. Often I would send a paper off for blind refereeing, and get back one report that said 'Publish exactly as is', and one that said 'Must never be published, this is crap'. Getting that response, over and over again, was an eye opener ... so now I tend to say, 'This is a very good example of its genre ...' or 'The paper does not have a clear linear argument, but you may not feel that this is important'. On this last point, I'm a huge fan of the clearly made linear argument supported by evidence - but of course, that means that whenever I get a paper of cultural theory to referee, my first response is just to tick the box marked 'This is a load of nonsense'. DK: One day I will send you this self-published science-fiction novel I had to review. Just when I think I am getting relativist about the aesthetic quality of texts I get a complete and utter pile of rubbish sent to me for judgment. (On the other hand, I work closely with a teacher who brings many of the young adult novels I review into her seventh grade classroom. Although for the most part I think her students are excellent readers with what I would call in any other conversation "excellent taste", I do get continuous reports about books I found mediocre which get gobbled up, and books which I found sublime which get ignored. Which brings me back to questioning what it means to be a reviewer, what it means to make objective statements about texts which are really more objective statements about my own taste.) AM: ['excellent taste' = 'taste just like mine'. In my definition of the term anyway]. My response to this point is an anthropological one with a commitment to conversation. The decisions about what is good and what is bad can be entirely subjective - but if you are the only person who thinks that way, then we call you mad ('Gigli is the best movie ever made!'). But it gets interesting when you start looking at what communities of people agree are good and bad. And those decisions are never final, and change over time. Criteria alter. Finnegans Wake, for example, fails to be a good book on every criterion that is normally used to make those judgements. But there is a community of people who can make an argument that it is a good book in quite another way. At the moment, there may not be a single person who agrees that the utter pile of rubbish you had to review was anything other than an utter pile of rubbish. But it may be that in fifty years time it will have been rediscovered as a forgotten classic that showed us a completely different way to write such a novel. Or it may remain an utter pile of rubbish. You can't tell from the text itself. Which isn't to say that "anything goes". It depends on what the communities discussing the texts decide, and no individual has control over those. Your job as a reviewer is to play your part in this debate, to offer interesting and insightful and intelligent comments about the texts that other people can then engage with, and thus keep the whole game ongoing - the game of a community making sense of the world. And - importantly - don't get angry when people disagree with you. Delight in it and take it as an opportunity to make contact with the thinking of another human being. Which brings joy and makes life worth living. For me, at least. DK: That does it, I'm sending you this book. Trust me, you will agree that there is at least one book in the world about which absolutist statements of quality are true. (Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek; what you are saying is very true. And yet if in fifty years time this particular book has been rediscovered as a forgotten classic, I despair for the future.) You conclude here with what for me is the most important part of any intellectual debate, conversation, or interaction. Delight, joy, the opportunity to interact with others and learn from them. Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender DK: I don't think there's anywhere to go with this unrelated thread, but reading the other conversations has gotten me interested in one other fandom with which I identify myself (and possibly the only fandom for which I am a participant but not a scholar): baseball. I am a proud and true citizen of Red Sox Nation, and the fact that it is a fandom I didn't choose but was born into by virtue of geography doesn't make it any less real and visceral for me. I think I fall in a place between highbrow (which in baseball fandom I would identify as following statistics, knowing what's going on off the team, reading all of the sports news and being aware of potential trades) and lowbrow (which I would identify as wearing "Yankees Suck" T-shirts and spilling beer all over a residential street). I'm fanatic about the team but without participating in any of either highbrow or lowbrow activities. Several years ago, when I lost my old blue Red Sox hat, I decided to buy a pink one. I was in the mode of branching out from my youthful "pink and high heels represent all that is evil about women's fashion" fashion consciousness, and I thought it was fun to have a pink hat. I came to love that hat, which I still have and wear. And then about three years ago, the Boston sports media went on a rampage about the "pink hat brigade". The basic argument goes like this: Only women wear pink baseball caps. Women don't really like baseball, and they are only here because the team is winning and because they think that Jason Varitek has a really nice ass. [Editor's note: he does. He is also a fantastic catcher.] Fans who are here for the wrong reasons ruin the sport. If a woman says "I wear a pink hat and I have loved the sport and followed it religiously since you were a glint in the postman's eye, you asshat", she is required to prove her "real fan" nature by reeling off some statistics about players. At this point, if it is a public conversation and not a newspaper article, somebody else usually burst in with "well, I like the pink hat brigade, because they are eye candy." Now, letting aside the fact that I HAVE followed the sport religiously for many, many years, I do find it interesting how gendered the assumptions of what ruins a sport become. Very few people rail against the legions of male fans who didn't start paying attention to baseball until the Red Sox won the World Series, and then bought up a factory's worth of "Yankees suck" T-shirts instead of "Red Sox world champions" T-shirts. Which makes me wonder if I looked around the much more female space of livejournal fandom if I would find people attacking practices that they think are particularly male. I don't think so, actually. Far more of the practices that get attacked based on unwarranted assumptions of the "bad fans" backgrounds assume that the bad fans in question are 16-year-old girls. AM: So sports and academic cultures both attack feminised fan practices - I think that's true. Again, the Doctor Who comparison is interesting. I think there are gendered practices here too. I've never heard a female Doctor Who fan recite the production story codes for every episode of the program, but I know boys who can do it. And in the latest revamp of the program, the showrunner, Russell T Davies, made a point of introducing more emotional content to the drama as a way of locking in a female audience that previously hadn't been so interested in the show.[Of course, it's important to say in relation to this that some of the best known fan work has undermined these general trends, with the two most important fan writers who introduced emotional content to the program being Kate Orman and Paul Cornell, the latter of whom is definitely male - and, surprisingly, a heterosexual one at that]. DK: I'm fascinated to see you say that. Mostly I've avoided online Doctor Who fandom since the new series began. I know the quirks of the female fan community which has adopted the show wholeheartedly, and I remember the craziness of rec.arts.drwho, and I was looking forward to watching those two communities meet like matter and antimatter. I know that there have been enough conflicts in my own off-line life between those who are fans of the old show and new show both, and those who discovered the show with the new series. Primarily we argue about 'shipping, about relationships and whether or not the Doctor can be romantically involved with a human Companion (the Eighth Doctor movie never happened I've got my fingers in my ears I can't hear you la la la la). And I know from tidbits I've picked up that our conflicts mirror many of the conflicts between old-school fans and new-school fans of the show in general. But I have to admit I would have assumed the conflict would be more gendered in tone. After all, you've got a fandom that (me notwithstanding) is primarily male, heavily gay. And suddenly it's interacting with a new group of fans who are primarily female, many of whom eroticize male homosexuality. I guess I would just expect that to turn into a gendered conflict. I'm also interested in your characterization of the new-school fans as "young". In the places where I've seen new-school Doctor Who fans, they're not necessarily any younger than the male fans -- they are just new to Doctor Who. I admit I see a very small corner of fandom, and like I said, I'm generally avoiding online Doctor Who fandom. AM: You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a national difference here. The new Doctor Who isn't huge in Australia, but it's absolutely massive in the UK - always in the Top Twenty programs for the week on telly, often in the Top Ten, often the number one rating non-soap drama. And it's marketed as, watched as, and known as, a 'family' program - ie, the core audience are kids, with their parents watching alongside. I suspect that this isn't true in the US? Probably because of its positioning on the Sci Fi Channel - and also because there is a pre-existing community of female SF fans in the US into which Doctor Who can enter? DK: That makes perfect sense, though I admit it's an unexamined point. It's not a "cool" show here, except among geeks, and I'd be surprised if it had a large child audience. But you're right, in the UK I know it's very much a family show. So my assumption is that any new fans are adult female media fans -- the pink hatters, I suppose, allegedly looking for attractive stars instead of good scripts. I assume, based on my unexamined hypothesis about the audience, and that the new viewers will fall into a certain demographic and any conflicts will follow from that demographic. But if I were in the UK I think I would have a very different set of assumptions. AM: We have to leave it there. In closing, I'd just like to thank you for a conversation that was exactly what, I think, aesthetic discussions should be like. We don't agree on everything, but we've treated the differences between us as points of interest that we wanted to learn more about. You've made me think, you've made me laugh, you've delighted me by coming up with ideas and jokes that I wouldn't have seen myself. It's been a genuine pleasure. Thank you. DK: And thank you, for exactly the same thing.
September 20, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part One): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKeeIntroductions DK: I'm Deborah Kaplan, and I'm not actually working as an academic; for the last several years I've been employed in university digital libraries and digital archives. More than most in this conversation, I exemplify the insider/outsider, amateur/professional divide with which Karen opened the first-round and which Kristina later discussed as well. I'm one of the few in this detente without a Ph.D. or on track to get one. I have a Master of Arts from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College (as well as a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the same institution, but I think of that as a professional degree more than an academic degree). I've published and presented on children's literature, fan studies, and media studies, and I've taught children's literature both to undergraduates and to Ph.D. candidates. Like Karen, I've found that not having an affiliation to place on paper submissions has resulted in confusion, and at conferences, I have found that having a name tag which says "independent scholar" leads to other academics being sweetly and patronizingly (and I'm sure well-meaningly) supportive. For this reason, I've started putting the names of my university employers as my affiliation, even though, as a librarian, I get no institutional support for my scholarship. AM: And I'm Alan McKee. I'm a fully traditional academic - PhD, series of tenured academic positions at Universities, publications with University Presses. I'm not proud of that, although I do love having a regular income. And I appreciate exactly what Deborah is talking about - there's an authority and security that comes with being credentialed, and speaking from a tenured academic position. It means you don't have to fight so hard to have your voice heard - in the media as much as in intellectual circles. I believe that many very intelligent people don't work in the university sector, and many stupid people do. My research interests involve popular media, particularly television. The thrust of my work is bringing vernacular thinking into intellectual debates. Although we are finally getting female and Black voices in cultural theory, I'm particularly interested in the way that working class voices are still excluded, by means of a methodological inequality. We approach Art, Literature and Philosophy through the methodology of exegesis - let's explore the ideas presented here. And we approach soap operas, romance novels and pop music through ideological criticism - what are the hidden relations of power? I'd like to swap those around. Learn useful insights about how culture works from romance novels - and deconstruct Adorno for his hidden, ugly prejudices ... Lowbrow culture DK: Reading Beautiful Things shone an interesting light on many of my own experiences with consumption. I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children's and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don't watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people's) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don't read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women's literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I'm fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don't listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations. And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow. When I discuss romances academically, I've been told by some that because I primarily read romances by a particular group of highly educated, highly literate, occasionally-to-highly subversive romance novelists (Jennie Cruisie, Julia Quinn, Suzanne Robinson), my experiences of the genre are incomplete. As a reviewer and a children's literature scholar, I've been told that the books I recommend (Peeps, Queen of Attolia, Flora Segunda) are highbrow and high-quality but not what children actually read, since they would definitely prefer to read Captain Underpants (this, incidentally, is demonstratably untrue; young readers are extremely discerning about what they read but the measures they used to decide what is, in your words (or your mother's, in Beautiful Things), "shit" and what is not are their own and cross highbrow/lowbrow boundaries easily). AM. I don't get the same comments. My tastes are pretty standard - my favourite Doctor Who stories are usually in the top ten as voted by fans, and my tastes in gay porn are pretty standard (eg, I avoid Genet). This raises an interesting point for me. There's a useful article by Simon Frith and Jon Savage called, 'Pearls and swine' (New Left Review 1993) which chastised academics who did fan studies for pretending to be just like other fans, and called on them to acknowledge that they are different. That never made sense to me. I know that I'm an academic - after many years of resisting the label, I've now come out and admitted it to myself and others (although I still don't put it on my Gaydar profile, as it does put guys off wanting to have sex with you). But for me, the difference this involves from other fans is in terms of the time I am granted to study these issues, the resources I have access to, and the authority my pronouncements are given. I don't see much evidence that my tastes or my engagements with the texts are that different from those of other people. I don't like opera, or philosophy, or literary fiction. I don't have to pretend to like Big Brother. I genuinely embrace it. And I often feel quite inadequate when I look at the amount of work done by non-academic fan scholars, whose knowledge of an area, their understanding of its relationship to wider culture, and the sheer amount of research they do makes my own work look shoddy by comparison. Fan expertise DK: As a scholar, I'm also often overwhelmed when I look at the incredibly intelligent responses nonacademic fans give to their favorite source text, whether it's a television show or a sports event. Certainly there are plenty of responses which aren't trying to be thoughtful, and I'm not saying every thoughtful post is brilliant. And certainly nonacademic fans often don't have access to prior discussions about the fields that interest them, but assuming that a fan's response is going to be less thoughtful than an academic's is asking for trouble. AM: Amen to that! I'm always amazed when I hear this argument - 'But a lot of fan writing is badly researched and badly written and poorly thought out'. Well, yeah. And so is a lot of academic writing (have you ever read any Adorno?). But some academic writing is insightful and full of interesting information and beautifully written. And so is some fan writing. Neither academics nor fans have any monopoly on bad writing about culture. DK: I remember a couple of years ago a segment of the livejournal fandom (the blog service livejournal.com, in which a female-dominated segment of media fandom has made its home) started asking "is there such a thing as queer heterosexuality" -- completely unaware of queer heterosexuality as an emerging, cutting-edge theme in queer theory. Fandom's thoughts on the topic are often as or more thoughtful than the scholarship I have seen. I'm not saying that every bit of meta-discussion that emerges from fan communities is useful or productive (nor is all of the scholarship which emerges from academic communities, to be fair). But I am saying that at last year's Popular Culture Association conference, I heard a number of papers on currently popular television shows which were less insightful than many a fannish reaction blog post. AM: And I recently refereed a paper written by an International Relations scholar about using TV programs to think about politics - interesting and thoughtful, and with no idea that cultural studies had been thinking about this topic for thirty years. And I'm sure that the same is true in reverse of cultural studies scholars who know nothing about the work taking place in other disciplines. Similarly, I think it would do no harm for academics interested in community, identity and politics to have to watch both seasons of the British version of Queer as Folk. If they haven't seen it I think they're well behind on thinking about the relationship of ambivalence, passion and love in community formation and politics. DK: This is reminding me of Peter Walsh's "Expert Paradigm". I'm not thinking of it as it's discussed in Convergence Culture, with traditional expertise held in opposition to the collective intelligence of the Internet -- the Wikipedia model, say. Rather, I'm thinking of the Internet's ability to both expose and hone the expertise of the non-credentialed. Exposure: surely a blog post gives a level of exposure unmatchable by presenting a paper to a room containing 16 overtired academics at an MLA conference. Honing expertise: a community of intelligent, thoughtful individuals sharing their cultural reactions acts like an advanced graduate seminar for the participants. I can't even count how many times I've seen teenagers on livejournal posts thoughts on culture or media which I couldn't have even approximated until graduate school. These communities, these discussion groups comprising teenagers, tenured faculty, professionals, laypeople who just like television -- all of their thoughts and responses feed in to this massive intellectual crucible, creating a wonderful, vibrant, dynamic pool of uncredentialed experts. DK: My first published essay, on the children's fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, reportedly provoked Jones herself to take the piss for my overly-academic interpretation of her work, and particularly for using the phrase "rooted in fluidity" (which was intentionally self-contradicting, I'll have you know!). I'm always trying to find a balance in my own scholarship between jargon and accessibility. My bias is towards accessibility but because I write in fields which are heavily denigrated by the academic establishment I always feel an invisible pressure to make my work seem more highbrow. My essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet is probably the most jargon-filled essay I've ever written, much to its detriment, because while writing I felt a hypersensitive need to prove myself as a serious scholar. Even within fan studies my work is unusual, in that I focus on texts rather than fans. (I'm not sure who I'm trying to prove myself to; one big advantage of being an outsider in academia is that I don't have to convince a tenure committee of anything.) AM: I'm going the opposite way. Probably my most jargon-ridden piece of writing was an article I published early in my career in Cultural Studies that drew on Baudrillard's notions of banality and fatality (everybody who knows the current version of me will be wearing shocked expressions right now - philosophy? Moi?). It was a necessary piece of badging (you can't get into Cultural Studies unless you 'do' jargon, preferably with some literary theory, focussed on a philosophical or art object). Now that I'm tenured Associate Professor, I don't need to do that any more. Now I work on the assumption that if you can't express at least the basic outline of an idea to first year students using everyday language then you don't really understand it.
September 17, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen , Part Two):Bob Rehak and Suzanne ScottRDM and Mrs. Ron or: How we can't seem to stop worrying about textual authority BR: Hmm - a paragraph or two can make all the difference, and for whatever reason I now find myself feeling more upbeat about fanification, complexification, and all those other n-ifications I was grumbling about earlier. I agree with you that the productive conversations coming out of Lost, and before it Buffy, and before that The X-Files (just to reiterate my own path of entry into acafandom) are to celebrated, not disparaged. Indeed, the work that you and I and our colleagues do is a crucial part of this. (Another dimension of acafans I'd love to address at some point is the function of a fan-oriented pedagogy: surely it's meaningful for undergraduates that they can now take courses in fan culture, soap opera, or videogame culture, with professors and graduate students who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.) But your question brings up one of the most interesting points of our initial conversation: our shared fascination with - and skepticism toward - the "author-gods" who seem increasingly to sit at the center of the textual webs we acafans explore: Tim Kring of Heroes, J. J. Abrams (or really, Cuse and Lindelof) of Lost, Russell T. Davies of Doctor Who, and of course Ronald D. Moore of BSG. We're both interested in RDM and the way he's positioned himself as both "the decider" of all things Galactica, and a regular ol' fan like - I suppose - us. Perhaps the notion of a fan-who-is-also-an-author is not as chimerical as it seems; I seem to recall us starting this chat by swearing that such binaries were a thing of the past. And Moore's fan/author hybridity might be said to echo the undecidable nature of the vast quilt that is the Galactica text, embroidered as it has been by so many different creators, critics, viewers, debaters, and celebrants over the years. At what point does the canonical give way to something more collaborative and open-ended? I'm not sure, but the diffusion is homologous to RDM's Janus-faced mode of authorship. That said, I don't trust him. He's got too much power: not just the power to make Lee fat or shuffle Baltar and the Cylons offstage for too much of season three or decree that the inside of a Basestar looks like a disco rec-room, edited like Last Year at Marienbad and accompanied by an endless loop of cheesy piano muzak. I don't trust him because in those blasted podcasts, to which I am more addicted than I am to Cheetos and Pringles combined, he insists on answering questions to which I kind of want to know the answers but really, on another level that likes to imagine possibilities freely, don't. Moore's not just an author-god, but a fan-god; he's like the friend I ate lunch with in high school who had memorized the complete text of The Lord of the Rings and who therefore possessed Neo-like argumentative skills. That guy's word was law, because he was acting as an agent for another kind of law, J. R. R. Tolkien's. RDM collapses the functions of author and interpreter into a single beast, and in so doing gets the final word on what a character was "really" thinking, or what "really" happened after that cutaway. But as I say: I do listen. I enjoy the sense of intimacy and participation that Moore's side-industry of authorial commentary gives off like narcotic fumes - I get a kind of contact high from the podcasts' immediacy, the sense that I too have am puffing on a cigar, sipping whiskey, and interacting with my kids when they walk through the room while I discourse about "my" show. So when you ask, Suzanne, whether you should focus on the enrichment and expansion of fan experience through producer-approved content, versus viewing it as just another guise of "access," I have to say: let's do both at the same time! The example of RDM, whose cunning is no less insidious for being so genuinely forthright and self-deprecating, demonstrates that de Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategies needs to be rethought along with everything else. And the class of being that RDM represents - the showrunner - marks a distinct evolution of ancestors like Gene Roddenberry and J. Michael Straczynski. (Does this model make Joss Whedon a missing link?) SS: Well, it's no secret that RDM was the author-god (or fan-god) I had in mind in my last post, as I share your addiction to his podcasts and your wariness of his self-positioning as both fan benefactor and textual authoritarian. Hearkening back to Cynthia Walker and Derek Kompare's discussion of the powers that be, I feel compelled (perhaps by my gender) to point out the boys club you've assembled above. Thus far, we haven't been tackling gender, because we both seem more concerned with the conditions under which contemporary fandom is functioning for everyone than how those conditions stand to effect fanboys and fangirls differently. As we've arrived at how TPTB are shaping these conditions, and RDM's podcasts in particular, I think a number of gender-specific issues need to be addressed. BR: Brilliant points, and I'm glad that gender is back on the table - I'm aware of my tendency to sideline the more challenging and politically provocative aspects of my chosen objects of study, lest they threaten my fanboy comfort zone. As Lacan pointed out in relation to Freudian parapraxes, multiple discourses are always contesting control of the tongue, and my appetite for digression clearly has its symptomatic side. Looking more closely at the RDM/Mrs. Ron dynamic, then, is it possible that what makes certain fans uncomfortable is the sense that some basic binary is being liquefied - a binary rightly or wrongly tied to gender difference? We confront with the uneasiness that Derrida observed of the zombie (both dead-and-alive) a entity both male-and-female. If the Moores really do bring together fanboyness and fangirlness at the Galactica text's point of origin, then this can be seen (fascinatingly, in my opinion) both as a strategy of incorporation (a text that is both male and female) and a tactic of resistance (a text that is always in conflict, or at least negotiation, with itself). In saying all this, I think it's important to keep the performative and culturally-constructed definition of gender uppermost: we are not talking about "real" men and women (or what was termed "biobodies" in an earlier post), but conventional understandings of what it means to relate to texts from male and female perspectives. I like to work from Judith Butler's performative definition of gender because it lets us talk about our fannish affiliations as themselves a kind of performance and identity play: my choice of text enables me to (temporarily) play at being a different kind of fan/boy/girl, as does the way I read the text and the relationships I form around that practice of reading. It's fandom as a kind of masquerade - of transvestism - with all the polymorphous perversity that dress-up gives us. So are BSG and the pair-of-Moores at its center emblematic of how gendered difference is being remapped, exploded, and/or reinforced by new media? Thanks to podcasts, webisodes, wikis, and other transformations of the commun(ication)al, Galactica permeates popular culture in a different way than, say, its late 70s prototype was able to. Looking back over our discussion, the image I see is that media evolution may have gotten us to a point where (A) many texts come pre-fitted for fannish investment (whether or not they are successful in seeding those investments is another question - cf. The Nine or Driven); (B) many audiences arrive at these texts already enculturated as fans, already liberated and "out of the closet" (and hence, as some critics have accused the beneficiaries of feminist and gay-rights struggles, no longer quite conscious of themselves as such); and (C) the tools and technologies of new media have both created spaces for the amplification of authorial control and riddled that authority with gaps from within. Amid these fundamental shifts and reorientations, gender increasingly seems to be up for grabs, even as it persists (for better and worse) as a way of getting our bearings. Speaking as aca-fans of the new millennium, is it presumptuous to compare transformations in gendered fandom to the way in which the chromed robot Cylons of the original series, so reliably identifiable as different, have been transformed in the new series into something much more subversive, omnipresent, and unsettling? SS: I'm fascinated by this analogy, especially given the cold/masculine force of the centurians on both incarnations of BSG and the current series' comparatively (and literally, check the sexy LED spinal cord) "warm" female skinjob models, with their alternating emphasis on their predatory sexuality and matriarchal attachment. But that's a whole other can of worms... BR: I second those sentiments wholeheartedly, Suzanne. This was a fun and exciting discussion that pushed me to think in new ways, even as I hauled some of my cherished axes out for a good grinding. And yes, let's stay in touch: Razor arrives soon, with the riveting Admiral Cain at its center - talk about grist for the gender mill!
August 24, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part Two): Catherine Driscoll and Matt HillsAnd Matt's Half-dozen Questions: 1. To what extent are other cultural differences as significant as gender when thinking about the forces that act on fandom and fan studies? Should we be debating class identities and fandom here, for example? CD: It seems clear to me that the significance of gender as a factor in fan experiences, fan identities, fan practices and fan communities depends a great deal on what we're discussing. For example, gender is crucial to a HPslash fan's experiences, identities, practices and communities in a way that's not necessarily true for a YouTube/MySpace-member who's a fan of The Decemberists. I'm not saying gender is ever irrelevant or even unimportant, but there are clearly degrees of importance. Or intensities, if you like. I think when we talk about "fandom" without acknowledging those differences we do it a disservice. Moreover, identity categories are far from the only factors that affect fandom. Taste, education and various types of literacy, for example, might be more important terms for thinking about what intensities matter to being part of some fandoms or fan communities than gender or class (and no I don't think taste, education and literacy can be reduced to class any more than to gender). MH: I agree that it remains important to think carefully and to an extent separately about the gendering in/of specific fandoms and the gendering in/of 'fan studies', insofar as this exists (since, as you point out, some of the work being done about fandom may often occur within or in relation to different academic subcommunities). And I feel that it would be (is?) a very real problem if certain types of work are becoming identified as primarily about, or primarily of interest to, women. Fanfic, whether it is slash or not, is something that has historically been of interest to those studying types of media fandom. My sense from lecturing and teaching on the subject is that actually, despite some mainstreaming of fan practices, the activity of creating fanfic - and most especially slash - is still viewed as somehow 'odd' or disreputable by both right-leaning and left-leaning students. It remains, in cultural common-sense or the cultural imaginary, something that students typically view with disdain, even those who are active fans in a variety of other ways. And this devaluing of fanfic is partly linked to gender lines - to the disparaging of feminised cultural sites and spaces - but it is also linked to what might be termed reactionary views on intellectual property, and to possibly even more ingrained concepts of 'originality' and 'authenticity' (as well as reactionary views of sexuality in some instances). To assume that any and all of these issues are primarily of interest only to women seems peculiar in the extreme. These are surely feminist-inflected (though not only that) concerns for any version of cultural studies and theory that remains interested in issues of cultural power - and for me, even if this is a 'game of greys' - I really liked your phrase to encapsulate that - then it's still a serious game, and it's still important to try to ascertain the different shades of grey involved. I also agree that the importance of gender can't just be taken for granted, or assumed in advance, and hence that this remains an empirical question for fandoms and practitioners of fan studies. I guess my question was really trying to put a whole set of other cultural differences on the agenda, because one of my feelings about this debate has been, and still is, that where academic communities are potentially divided by a form of cultural difference (i.e. gender) then that difference can tend to become highly visible. Hence this whole 'boy'/'girl' thing. But at the same time, where other cultural differences may not be as prevalent as lines of division or tension within academia (I'd hazard the guess - and this is purely speculation - that the vast majority of those writing 'fan studies' are broadly "middle-class") then this academic sameness produces analytical silence. Why aren't we all up in arms about issues linked to class? That's really my question. Is it because we live in classless societies? Is it hell. And I'm still reading texts on fandom which mutter about a lack of work on ethnicity and fandom too - why? Relative cultural sameness in the academy producing yet more silence? Probably. Getting worked up about one specific axis of cultural difference - and I am absolutely not denying the importance of thinking about gendered differences - may nevertheless be an indirect and unintended outcome of the cultural identities at stake for those taking part in the debate. May be Henry and others will organise blog debates on 'fandom and class' or 'fandom and ethnicity' next time out, who knows. My sense is that along with the variant intensities (nice word!) of gender, we still need to dwell with equal time, energy, and intellect on other axes of difference and cultural identity.
August 23, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One): Catherine Driscoll and Matt HillsI think the format of these exchanges calls for us both to introduce ourselves to the blog's readers. So, we are Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, paired up for the purposes of this debate by Henry's magical 'fan studies and gender' discussion-partnering machine. Here's a bit more information about each of us, and how we came to be interested in fan studies: CD: I'm currently Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I first became interested in fan cultures while writing my first book, Girls (Columbia UP, 2002), which discussed scholarly and popular images of girls as fans and fans as girls. Since then I've written essays on fanfiction for Helleksen & Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Jane Glaubman's forthcoming collection on the Harry Potter fandom. While my forthcoming Modernist Cultural Studies (University Press of Florida, 2008) is more interested in the practices and ideas that made fan cultures possible than in fans themselves, Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online - which I'm co-writing with Melissa Gregg at the University of Queensland - uses online fan practices as a key example for thinking about online culture today. MH: I'm currently a Reader in Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and my first published book was Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002). This was based on my 1999 doctorate from Sussex University, which in turn came about in part because I'd been a fan of various media texts, especially Doctor Who, since the age of about three. *** So, having set out that very brief bit of context, we've decided to offer 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' by virtue of each of us posing six questions that we wanted to ask of fandom and/or fan studies at this moment in time. These questions were deliberately designed to be as open as possible, and to spark discussion. They don't always refer directly to issues of gender, though they frequently give rise to reflections on that theme. Having each set six questions, we then let the other respond to them before taking the opportunity, in turn, to enter into a dialogue on the thoughts and arguments that had been thrown up. It would be fair to say that each of us has some hesitancy about being fully 'committed' in print, and for all posterity, to what we say here, and each of us wrote this material and responded to it under time pressures. But no doubt these things will have been true for almost all participants in this series, so in the final analysis, we can hardly claim any special indulgences or allowances. Catherine's Six Questions: 1. What is at stake in the way that fan studies either directly or by default returns to assessing degrees of resistance (or, by inference, conformity)? The words for this may change, such as talking about fan creativity rather than resistance per se, but there continues to be a fan studies investment in laying claim to something that amounts to social value in hierarchical oppositional terms where the opposite of creative/resistant/whatever seems taken for granted. Are we still thinking Culture Industry, or is it something else? MH: My sense is that this has started to shift a bit, as both my own Fan Cultures and Cornel Sandvoss's Fans have critiqued the 'resistance' paradigm, and of course Abercrombie and Longhurst were doing that long before either of us, in Audiences. And as Henry likes to point out from time to time, he was hardly without ambivalence in relation to what's been termed the 'Incorporation/Resistance Paradigm'. I think that this mode of thinking is very ingrained though, as it has formed a key part of cultural studies' sense of its own distinctive project and identity, the fact that it (and supposedly it alone) was able to read for 'resistance', or assess the cultural politics of primary texts and audiences' responsive, tertiary texts. Christine Scodari, for example, has strongly argued that fan studies should still very much be about this assessment and valorization of specific fan practices, viewing my position in Fan Cultures as an abdication of cultural studies' and fan studies' 'proper' responsibilities, I think. It is as if challenging the IRP is sometimes assumed to mean throwing out the baby, bathwater, and probably the whole bath with them. CD: Yes it's true that many people have now paid attention to the problems involved in assessing fan activities and identities in terms of resistance, and yet I feel as if resistance has been mostly displaced by less political synonyms for the same opposition. I guess that means that I agree there's something ingrained and thus very hard to shift about such a pattern of thought. Cultural studies does have a longstanding attachment to seeing something other than "the mass" in "the popular". But as it gets taken up in the terrain of fan studies (and cultural studies work on fans is pretty much as old as cultural studies itself) I feel as if "resistance" has remained such an attractive distraction from paying attention to the diversity of what goes on amongst fans that I'm constantly tripping over new forms of it. Yes, I think the answer is to have something other than an oppositional understanding whereby we just reverse which side of the binary is good and which is bad, but I don't just want to play a game of greys either, where such an opposition is reinforced but there's good and bad to be found on either side. Nor do I want to reinforce that opposition by showing how the (still separated) sides speak to one another. Instead, I would like to pay attention to the ways in which fans don't need to have a project or even a focused antagonism or call to arms in order to do something interesting. In which their relation to cultural forms is not perceived through an opposition between producers and consumers/users. That obviously misrepresents a range of important things, but in order to try and shake off the ingrained response I feel it's a worthwhile experiment. I like many of your questions here, therefore, it's just that I don't see them being asked very often except as an aside to more expected discussions of resistance. So in my experiment I'd like to do away with any and all talk of resistance or subversion when thinking about fans - just to see what happens. Nina Busse and I once had an exchange about fandom being "not_subversive" that even resulted in a community with that name, but it was mainly a place marker for academic conversation rather than a fan community. Since then I've tried just abandoning the resistance/conformity questions when talking about HP fanfiction communities and was a little surprised to find that fan audiences seem to understand and appreciate that a lot more than academic ones. Some fan communities have an investment in being "subversive", but even when they do they're marking that out as something that differs from most fans. I'm not saying fans are "conformist", or more conformist. I'm saying the question is not at all to the point at this time.
July 26, 2007
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part One): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCreaIntroductions Abigail Derecho: I am currently completing a dissertation at Northwestern University in the Comparative Literary Studies department. I am a media studies scholar, specializing in digital culture, and therefore, while most Comp Lit grad students at NU have a home department in a national language/lit (German, French, Slavic, etc.), my home department is Radio/Television/Film. My dissertation is called "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Early Digital Remix," and it focuses on two of the earliest remix genres and their origins in minority discourse. Digital sampling was innovated by African Americans, and online fan fiction was pioneered by women, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. I examine how both remix genres were subjected to a great deal of censorship, both external and internal, very soon after they appeared, and I tie the censorship of remix to censorship discourses that circulated in U.S. culture and society at the same time that remix was being invented (the crack/gangs/guns panic that fueled anti-rap and other anti-music campaigns, the anti-pornography movement whose arguments were echoed in flame wars around explicitly sexual fan fiction). I will begin a tenure-track position at Columbia College Chicago, in the Cultural Studies program, this fall. In addition to being an active fan and fan fiction author for many years, for the past two years I have been working on something called "Media Theater." I have written and produced two multimedia plays that are attempts to combine live performance with new media in ways that foreground how intricately multiple media are incorporated into the everyday lives of millions of people - how we perceive reality, how we form memories, how we learn to love and despise each other. Some of my fan fiction is accessible here. Some of my academic work, and information about my media theater productions, is accessible here. Also, I was fortunate enough to have an essay of mine, "Archontic Literature" (very kindly referenced in an earlier Round of this discussion by Catherine Tosenberger [Catherine, please e-mail me about your theory of "recursive" literature]) included in the terrific collection edited by K. Hellekson and K. Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I'd like to express my gratitude to Kristina Busse and Henry Jenkins for organizing this important discussion, and for inviting me to take part, and thanks also to all the participants in this discussion (past and future), including those who have posted or will post comments, for making this such a productive and valuable exchange. Christian McCrea: You may know me from such films as "Virtual Murder" (probably co-starring Micheal Nouri) and "The Second Life of Christian Lefebvre"....ahem. I am also in the twilight phase of a PhD dissertation, duly supervised by the very patient Angela Ndalianis in the Screen Studies department of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. My PhD is called "Playland: The Sensory Materialism of Computer and Videogames", which undertakes to form a critical account for the sometimes invisible but always vital relationship between the aesthetics of technologies and the cultural traces left by people using them. Using games as a point of first contact between the two, I am also deeply interested and invested in the cultures of technology, research into fan cultures, the poetics of technology, opportunities afforded by digital art and pranksterism, piracy and information control pressures, etc.
Derecho: I'd like to address gender bias in the media industry, in "mainstream fan" writing about media, and in academic writing about media. I'll give an example of bias in each of these fields: 1) I saw Live Free or Die Hard recently. As a "die hard" fan of the first film in the series, I thought LFoDH was a thoughtful and exciting return to the elements that made Die Hard a classic. Leaving the theater, though, I realized that one of the key aspects of the film that made it pleasurable for me was the character Lucy - John McClane's now-grown daughter - who, whlie serving as a key plot point (the usual "damsel in distress"), did not have very much screen time. Another part of the film I liked was the new character Matt Farrell, the hacker-geek who becomes McClane's sidekick. And I read several critics' reviews pointing out that Matt is basically the fans' stand-in. Matt expresses the awe, fear, and affection for McClane that the audience feels, and for the most part he is "tagging along for the ride," just like the audience does. Matt also gets to have a little hint of a romantic spark with Lucy McClane, who is basically a younger female version of her father. So I thought, Huh, Matt is a stand-in for all fans, male and female, b/c both men and women fans are techies, like Matt (much of fandom taking place on the Internet), and both men and women fans love McClane and want to go along for the ride. But only male fans get to see themselves up on that screen in the persona/avatar of Matt Farrell, and they get to see their stand-in "get" (romantically) a McClane of his own (we women used to have Holly, John's wife, to identify with, but since Die Hard 3, she's been literally out of the picture). Women fans, otoh, have to do the usual queer identification, seeing our desires acted out by a young male character. And/or, we can see ourselves in Lucy, whose persona and story we would have to greatly develop/augment using our own imaginations (by ourselves, in conversation with other fans, or in fanfic) due to her underdevelopment in the film. Either way, women fans don't get very much consideration in this, or most, action films. It's clear that our dollars, our attention, and our interest are being courted, and that Lucy, Matt, and their incipient romantic involvement, are, at least in part, aimed at us. But while male audience members get huge chunks of meaty text thrown at them, stuff they can relate to and easily identify with, stuff that reminds them of their own libidinal desires and fantasies and offers them vicarious fulfillment of these wants and needs, women in the audience get scraps. We make the most out of these scraps -- that's what imagination and fan productions are for -- but the studios, for the most part, doesn't think to throw us more than these. What troubles me about this long-standing situation is that women definitely go to, and love, action movies. Have we had an alternative in any given summer since Jaws and Star Wars? Either we love action blockbusters, or we don't go to the movies. So when I think about how women make the most of the few female characters and their supporting-role status in action films, I think we're doing a lot of work, and doing a great job creating a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of very little. All the female fan concentration on Arwen and Eowyn in the LoTR films, on Linda Hamilton's buff and awesome (but still supporting) character Sarah Connor in T2, on Rogue and Mystique and other X-Women, on Trinity in The Matrix, is about making the most of the tiny shout-outs to female audiences that big action movies - the biggest-grossing, and thus most important (for the industry) products generated by the motion picture industry today - give to their women and girl fans. Of course, lots of women don't care about whether there are well-written and significant women characters in a movie, they don't need that to have fun at a film. They are the lucky ones, since the movie industry is therefore giving them what they want and all they need. But the rest of us are grateful for the Alien series, for Keira Knightley's character in the PoTC movies, for Princess Leia, who is central to the plot of SW and always proactive (unlike her wimpy mother). If Disney, of all studios, knows enough about girl and women audience members to allow a character like Elizabeth Swann to develop and mature over the course of a trilogy, if Disney can allow a black woman to be a powerful goddess and can stand to have two women pirate captains (and one of them Chinese) in the council of pirates, then other studios and other producers can try just as hard. Jason Mittell, in Round One, Part One of this discussion, summarized what he called "the old saw about children's programming": "girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff." If this is true, then girls are by far the more valuable consumers of media (since they will be good customers of twice the volume of stuff as boys), and media corporations should take the wishes, proclivities, taste cultures, and interests of their best consumers into account. 2) In the latest issue of WIRED (July 2007), Optimus Prime, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon ever, Transformers, is on the cover. Here are some excerpts from the article about the new Transformers movie: "They started as toys for boys," "Boys ages 5 to 11 -- and it *was* boys -- faithfully tuned in week after week to watch the saga of these doughty bots," "For nearly two decades...sons of Prime waited for Papa Bot," "Thus [with Transformers] began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox," "man-children of a certain age look to this Transformers movie...for redemption, as men." So, I, a hard-core fan of Transformers ever since I was a little girl, am excluded over and over again by this article. It's not just this one article or writer that concerns me, it's the way this environment of geeky, technologically-themed, toy-oriented pleasure is often assumed to be a 100% masculine domain. I don't think the statement "Girls like robot characters" would surprise anyone. Girls like all kinds of characters; they play video games; they watch sci-fi/action/adventure movies and TV, they read comic books. And then they grow up to be women media-studies scholars ;). But the mainstream press, written by non-academic fans, consistently associates certain media - and I don't just mean films, here, but technology of all sorts, from Blackberries to C++ to robots - with masculinity. What is sad about this is how much potential mass media has for serving as common ground between people of differing genders, races, ages, nationalities, sexual orientations, geographic locations, political affiliations. When I read, in the Transformers WIRED article, the writer's opinion that "Prime practically step-parented the latchkey kids of the mid-80s," I related to that. I remember that feeling of being home alone, just me and the TV, and those awesome giant robots, and how Optimus Prime taught me so much about what was right and wrong, what was courage and what was cowardice, when to show mercy and when to be strong. I thought, If I met that writer, he and I would have a lot to talk about, since we have some deep and important childhood experiences in common. But when the writer went on to define Prime as exclusively a role model for young boys, I stopped having that thought of common ground and mutually resonant experiences. Mass media fandom can and should be the grounds for discussions in which many, many people (masses of people, in fact) can participate. But there are gender-based, race-based, nationality-based, and sexuality-based assumptions and stereotypes that permeate media journalism which cuts such possibilities short. 3) Some recent media scholarship also shows these biases. Last year, a well-respected media studies professor from a prestigious U.S. university visited Northwestern, and I heard his paper on how a critically acclaimed television serial drama resembled an intricate and complex game, because certain plot elements repeated every season (though in different guises), and because the viewer had to keep track of everything that had happened in the past in order to fully comprehend each new episode. I asked him how his "game theory" regarding this television show differed from the basic structure of daytime drama (soap opera). He had no answer for me. Why? Because he had not considered that the aspects that he most enjoyed of an Emmy-winning, "quality" primetime cable television program were actually appropriated from cultural productions that have much less cultural capital in the world of media studies: soap operas. I very much agree with C. Lee Harrington's statement in Round Six, Part One: "I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!!" I would like to see, in accordance with some of Kristina's arguments in her review of MiT5, more male media studies scholars engaging with media analyses of women's genres and women's styles of media consumption/engagement/participation. Of course, many men in media studies do this already. But currently, male scholars can still ignore huge areas of women-oriented media scholarship without thinking or blinking - their ignorance is still very normal. And to bring this back to the first example of gender bias I gave, that practiced by movie studios and media corporations: Daytime drama has undergone a serious decline in ratings over the past decade, and I attribute this mostly to network executives' lack of investment in, and lack of knowledge of, the soap genre. As a result, soap fans (of which I am one) have engaged in more heated battles, meaning mail/e-mail campaigns, phone campaigns, and massive flame wars online, over the last 10 years, than I have ever seen in any other fandoms. Soap fans fight TPTB (producers, writers, network execs) for story changes, and they fight with each other because they feel that no one is really getting the quality or kinds of storytelling that they want, so fan groups that have different interests are mutually regarded as "competition" for the networks' attention. So far, the networks haven't responded to fans' demands for improved (i.e., better-written) stories and for more respect for show history. The soaps continue to go down in quality, and viewers continue to tune out. Meanwhile, all of prime time has co-opted the technique of seriality which daytime dramas spent decades developing and enriching - all reality shows are soaps, most prime-time dramas are soaps or have some serial elements, and many prime-time sitcoms (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother) have multi-episode, sometimes multi-season story arcs. Millions of women fans spent years and years contributing to writers' knowledge of how to make seriality work. Their input and feedback, manifested in a multitude of activities from their mere viewership to their fannish activities, helped to build up that store of knowledge, helped to program those data banks. Not only do those fans get zero credit, but the soap-y shows that women now watch on prime-time - Prison Break, 24 - are much more geared towards male audiences and male interests than towards women audiences and women interests. Again (see my above point), it isn't that women can't or don't enjoy male-oriented programming. But women fans lost good soap operas, which were dramas dedicated to women's enjoyment, and we did not gain the equivalent in serial prime time.
July 24, 2007
Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is. You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
July 23, 2007
Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)Tonight, at 7 p.m. est, CNN will host a debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, aired live from South Carolina. There have already been several previous debates during which American citizens could get an early look at Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other contenders for the nomination. What makes this debate interesting is that average citizens were invited to submit their questions for the debate via YouTube. Last week, I appeared on Talk of the Nation with David Bohrman, the guy from CNN who has been given the task to select the questions that actually reach the air, and Joshua Levy, a political blogger (TechPresident.com). We learned that there had been, at that point, more than 1500 questions submitted and that the CNN staff was shifting through them to decide which ones should be asked the candidates. You might want to take some time today to sample the kinds of questions submitted in their raw form. They reflect two of the dominant modes of production for YouTube. On the one hand, there are straight to camera confessionals -- often deadly serious, frequently deeply personal, made by people who embody the issues they are discussing. These videos reflect the ways that Americans are taught, via television, to speak to presidential candidates and more often than not, they reflect the same agenda that has shaped previous debates. The CNN spokesperson did say that there were certain topics, Darfur for example, which cropped up much more often among viewers than among professional journalists. But, for the most part, these questions reflect the prevailing tone and style of American political discourse. The second set are parodies and satires -- often bitingly irreverent, borrowing the language of popular culture to challenge the pomposity of the debate format. Sometimes, they spoof the very idea that citizens should be made to embody their questions -- as in this video where a guy dressed like a Viking asks a question about immigration or consider this question from a LA based "celebrity". Sometimes, they make fun of what kinds of questions deserved discussion in this format -- as in this video about alien invasions. Sometimes, they make use of borrowed footage -- as in this JibJab style segment featuring a George W. impersonator. It is going to be interesting, then, to see what kinds of selections the network makes amongst all of this material: will they naturally go towards those that adopt the discourses of respectful citizens and identity politics? Will they ask more or less the same questions that we've heard in the previous debates, only this time spoken through the mouths of YouTube fans? Or will some of the more wacky segments make their way into the air? And if they do, how will the candidates react and how will the pundits respond? As I wrote last week, we are seeing a consistent insertion of the discourse of participatory culture into the political process this campaign season in an attempt to reach voters who would normally tune out debates and that's what makes this particular set of exchanges so interesting. To help us get into the spirit of the YouTube debate, I am featuring today an interview with Stephen Duncombe, the author of an important new book about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy which I have mentioned here several times already -- Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. I have incorporated this paragraph from Duncombe's book in a number of talks I've given over the last few months and it is suggestive of the provocative nature of his argument: Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it. Duncombe's previous books, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, have been important contributions to our understanding of contemporary cultural politics, albeit aimed at academic readers primarily. Duncombe himself has been active in a number of key political movements in New York City, where he teaches, and describes some of those experiences in Dream. With this book, he has produced a text which will be read well beyond the academic realm and could provide us with a handbook for understanding why this current campaign is making such vivid and interesting use of a rhetoric informed by our experiences with participatory culture. Check out his website for more information on the book. Throughout the book, you embrace a politics based on spectacle. How do you I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy. This definition covers what I call ethical spectacles, but also describes spectacles with less scruples: those engineered by the Nazis at Nuremberg, conjured up by creative directors on Madison Avenue or staged by Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.
July 13, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part Two): Sam Ford and C. Lee HarringtonSam Ford: I know that a lot of the people following this debate might not be that interested in soaps in particular, but I am interested in the differences in discussing fan culture when it shifts from being a conversation primarily about fan fiction, which many of the back-and-forths have so far. How do we measure creativity in relation to fan communities? My understanding is that most people would agree that fan fiction only retains its full meaning and resonance within the community that it is produced in, and the social specificity of creative output is no different in the soap opera fan communities we have been discussing, but the output is often much different--criticism, debate, parody, discussion, continuity-maintenance, historical perspective...these are very creative processes that seem to be the prevalent forms of fan output for soap opera fandom. C. Lee Harrington: One of the dimensions of creativity often left out of discussions is fan fantasies -- here I mean those that take place only in the confines of one's brain, not shared with others via discussion, fiction, debate, research interview, etc. We all know fantasizing exists but unless it manifests itself in some Most studies of fandom tend to rely on at least some form of visible expression. I wonder sometimes about the (in)accessibility of fans who experience and express their fandom only to their own selves......and I'm one of those people, mostly. I'd rather watch my favorite TV programs alone than with others, I don't talk about them online and rarely with friends (though our office staff and faculty have regular Wed morning discussions about Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, perhaps my proudest accomplishment as department chair), and I don't participate in most other creative activities that tend to be the hallmarks of fandom. I wonder if my own research design approach would capture me as a fan :-) Auto- ethnography, anyone...? To go back to the gender question, yes, the gender of scholars vs. gender of fans vs. gendered nature of texts etc. raise all sorts of complicated questions, and the discussions these past few weeks have been really illuminating. I guess I was thinking with celebrification (in the context of sport) that once we're down the road of transforming athletes into stars, we somehow move them from the world of sport to the world of celebrity, a gendered shift in many people's eyes. I'm remembering the Olympics a few rounds back (I'm forgetting the year) when the network (NBC?) for the first time did "behind the scenes" of athletes' lives to draw in female viewership. Novel at the time but it's obviously become standard because it altered demos exactly how producers wanted. Not hard to speculate how Emmitt Smith's appearance (and well-deserved win!) on Dancing altered his public perception and fan base. Obviously some of our readers out there know much more about celebrification in the sport context than I do.....
July 12, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part One): Sam Ford and C. Lee HarringtonC. Lee Harrington: Hi everyone. This has been an interesting set of discussions thus far -- Sam and I are happy to contribute. We'll follow the general norm by beginning with introductions. I've been engaged in audience/fan studies since the early 1990s, with most of my work co-authored with Denise Bielby. Our interest in fan studies grew out of our long term soap opera-watching habit. I don't remember how long Denise has been watching, but I started watching soaps in the late 1970s and have been an enthusiastic follower ever since (mostly ABC soaps, with some years watching DOOL). When I was in grad school at UCSB in the late 1980s (Denise is on the faculty there), we went to a General Hospital fan club luncheon, were fascinated by the entire experience, and decided to study the soap fan culture. Our book Soap Fans was published a few years after Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon- Smith's Enterprising Women, among other important work of the late 80s/early 90s, which heavily influenced the way I thought about audience/fans. We wrote the book in the pre-widespread-Internet-use era (some soap fans were on BBSs but not many), and soap fandom has changed a lot since then (as you write about, Sam). Since Soap Fans, I've done work on the Bianca coming-out storyline on All My Children and have recently worked on aspects of global fandom (with Denise and Kim Schimmel), among other projects. Inspired by Chris Scodari's work, I've also become interested in gerontological issues in soap operas, though my project is in the very early stages. I also have to say, as Sean Griffin mentioned several weeks ago, that I have not personally encountered the gender issues that launched this discussion series. I'm not quite sure why....maybe because most of my work is based on soap opera, maybe because the gender neutrality of my name leads lots of people to assume I'm male rather than female (a gender issue in its own right, obviously, and one I've dealt with all my life), maybe because I keep a very low profile at conferences and am a miserable networker, so don't end up engaged in some of the firestorms of academia. Sam Ford: I'm honored to be contributing to this conversation with Lee, who was among the scholars whose work I encountered regularly while working on my Master's thesis. I am a 2007 graduate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, and I think my personal background is important in positioning me in this discussion of fan studies, since I have a much shorter duration as a fan studies scholar.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:13 AM | Permalink
July 3, 2007
Catching Up on Fan Culture...
I have been hearing rumors for a while that Convergence Culture is being picked up and read by some of the Powers That Be (i.e. the producers and writers of cult television shows). This certainly seems to be the case on Heroes, according to this recent interview which Wonderland ran with Jesse Alexander, the Exec Producer of Alias, Lost and Heroes:
So you manage how the Heroes property moves through other mediums? The interview as a whole is worth reading. Alexander returns several times to the topic of transmedia entertainment and what it means in the context of a convergence culture:
Alexander also manages to name check Steven Johnson's work on complexity and Jane McGonigal's work on ARGS and collective intelligence. Regular readers know that I have been on the Heroes bandwagon since last summer -- having caught an advance peek at the series pilot before it reached the air. Pulling this post together, drew me back to that original piece which read Heroes as closer to an indie comic in its tone and structure than to the mainstream superhero comics that have shaped most other television and big screen stories in the genre. I offered some hints about where I thought the series might be going:
Throughout the year, I have admired the ways that the series has dispersed back story through imaginatively structured episodes and through the use of web comics as a platform of transmedia entertainment. And I was pleased that themes I saw in the characters from the pilot really took root and defined their interactions, including the prolonged focus on what it means to discover your powers and to define your "mission." So, I am personally very pleased to see Alexander describe my book as helping to shape his thinking on these issues. "Wiki-Media" I am always excited to see other academics who do important work in media or cultural studies get hit with the blogging bug. A case in point: Robert Kozinets. Kozinets is a marketing professor currently at ork University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Kozinets has done some of the ground-breaking work on brand communities and their relationship to fan communities. I served on his dissertation committee years ago -- his project centered around consumption and production within Star Trek fan culture. I rediscovered his work while doing research for Convergence Culture and his ideas informed my discussion of American Idol. More recently, Kozinets joined our Convergence Culture Consortium team and I was able to showcase his work on Star Trek fan cinema at the Society for Cinema Studies conference last spring. If you don't know his work, you should check out his blog. He's hit on several topics of relevance to my readers so far, including several posts which share his insights into the history of Star Trek fandom and Star Trek fan cinema, which he reads through the lens of more recent concepts such as "brand hijacking" (Alex Wipperfürth), Lead Users (Eric Von Hipple) and Wikinomics (Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams). He shares an interesting excerpt from an anthology he has co-edited, Consumer Tribes, one which uses wikipedia to develop an analogy for thinking about fan movie-makers: Star Trek has gone native or, better, it has gone wiki-it is now "wikimedia." Fans add to Star Trek and correct one another just like Wikipedia encyclopedia contributors add to the famously expansive universe of the online encyclopedia. By the term "wikimedia" I mean to describe a distinct media content form that has, either deliberately or unintentionally, gone open source and begun spawning new content through the efforts of non-profit, do-it-yourself, collaborative media creators acting outside of the structure of corporate, institutional organization or sanction. The existence and notioning of wikimedia has major implications for our understanding of contemporary consumer culture.... Other posts to date have dealt with Philip K. Dick and Burning Man. Kozinet's blog will be worth following as he explores the social dimensions of brands and branded entertainment. I am going to be taking the rest of the week off: there's no new gender and fan studies content this week and I am going to be enjoying the 4th with my family.
June 29, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round Five, Part Two): Geoffrey Long and Catherine TosenbergerWhere the Wind Blows: The Matter of Authorship Geoffrey: Ah, so we've arrived at the point in this academic conversation when we both devolve into real, true fanboy/fangirl engagement -- what the hell is up with that Supernatural "prequel" comic anyway? The art is horrible and the writing isn't much better! I swear to God, I was so stoked when I found the first issue at my comic shop, but when I got it home and cracked it open I was so disappointed that I didn't even bother to finish reading it. Ugh. A-hem. Back to the topic at hand... I think this is one area where my own experience as a storyteller colors my attitude towards hierarchies of canon and authorship. When I tell a story, I'm creating a group of characters, a world in which they'll exist, and the series of events that will happen to them. I am the author of that story, and these are my creations. If someone else wants to tell a story featuring my characters, it feels like it should be up to me to determine whether or not the events they describe are actually 'canon' or not. If I accept those events as canon, I'm also granting that person the right to be considered an author of this narrative -- literally 'authorizing' them. If I don't, then I have options. I can sue, in an attempt to make sure that no one else plays with my toys, but I personally firmly believe that this is a bad way to go unless someone's making money off of my work illegally or that they're passing off what they're creating as official canon. A better option is to acknowledge the existence of that story as fan fiction, and recognize that it exists in a sort of orbit around the original creation. This is where things get particularly messy -- is it "equally viable as literature", or is it permanently tainted as a 'lesser' creation, since that person didn't invent that story from whole cloth? How much distance from the original creation is required for something to be considered viable as literature? Bookstores are filled with accepted literature that openly declare themselves to be reinterpretations of a classic, but there's still a distinct difference between Margaret Mitchell's 1939 novel Gone with the Wind, Alexandra Ripley's 1991 Scarlett, Alice Randall's 1992 The Wind Done Gone, and a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader. Interestingly, while both books hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller lists, Wikipedia includes Ripley's Scarlett, which is a direct continuation of Gone with the Wind, in the 'fan fiction' category and Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of the story from the point of view of the slaves, in the 'parodies' category. This suggests that the popular perception of both works is as 'second-tier' creations, despite the fact that Publisher's Weekly referred to The Wind Done Gone as "a spirited reimagination of Mitchell's world, dependent on its predecessor for its context but independent in form and voice". To my mind, The Wind Done Gone is still lessened somewhat by its not being a wholly independent creation, but it is executed with enough originality and style that it can be considered viable as literature. In other words, it can stand on its own two feet. Scarlett, on the other hand, can't make the same claim, and therefore suffers from the same drop in perceived validity as most fan fiction. Were I Margaret Mitchell, I would most likely insist that Scarlett is an unauthorized piece of fanfic and should only be distributed via unofficial channels, but that The Wind Done Gone is different enough that it's a sort of 'alternate reality' spin on my characters. I might still ask for a cut of the profits, since Randall is still using my copyrighted work as a jump-off point, but that it's a distinct enough creation that it's unlikely to be confused for my own stuff... Maybe. It's a fascinating hypothetical. Regarding the Scarlett/Vader slash, I think that such a thing would be hard to take seriously unless it was done very, very, very, very well. (Bonus points to the first reader who posts such a mash-up to YouTube.) As for how transmedia narratives affect these interpretations, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. I tend to look at transmedia extensions along a primarily timeline-based set of axes, so that negative capability tends to refer to events in characters' pasts or futures that haven't been explored by the story yet. To my mind, most slash fiction isn't meant to be considered in-canon, whereas transmedia narratives use negative capability to hint at events that have happened (or will happen) in-canon. In particular, most slash fiction that I've seen doesn't aim to fill in chronological gaps so much as posit a kind of "What If?" re-interpretation, but I'm not at all comfortable making sweeping claims about this. What do you think?
Catherine: Oh, god, if we're going to talk about the comics, we'll be here till next MONTH at least. So I shall wrench myself away and ask, devolve? I'm usually in that headspace of fangirl enthusiasm, only changing my language to reflect the audience and circumstances; or maybe that's just my excuse for sticking a, well, "discussion" might be overstating it, but a something about "Luscious" Malfoy and his pimp cane into my dissertation. Pimp canes aside, I'm uncomfortable with drawing a strict demarcation between "academic" responses and "fannish" responses, because at least for me, they're really not all that different -- I respond intellectually *and* emotionally *and* libidinally *and* et cetera to things I'm interested in; as I said, the issue is one of language, and the context in which I use that language -- I pretty freely mix up stereotypically "academic" and "fannish" modes of discourse in both settings, usually unconsciously. (My academic writing has been criticized for being flippant, but I don't think that has anything to do with some kind of "inappropriate" leakage of fan discourse; my non-fannish dissertation director has a similar style, which means he doesn't stop me when I do it.) And I really wonder if we can even talk about fannish discourse as if it's a coherent thing -- there's the stereotype of pure emotionalism, sure, but intellectual engagement is as much a part of fandom as lustful/geekish squeeing. Fan discourse contains multitudes of acceptable dicourses, and the ratio of analysis to squee (or whatever) is determined by context and the individual fan.
June 22, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part Two):Will Brooker and Ksenia PrasolovaGender and Cult Texts[KP] Nina suggests that even when men and women (or would that be fanboys and fangirls) watch the same show, they may focus on different aspects. So I will speak of the shows I know... When I watched Firefly I vaguely wondered what slash pairing Mal/Simon would make, but honestly, I stopped looking for clues pretty early into the show and kept enjoying the adventures and witty banter just like the next guy. I certainly want more of this content, but I can't really bring myself to look into fandom (apart from mildly tapping into it), because I really am pretty satisfied with the source. Moreover, I would rather re-watch the series in a company of friends laughing at jokes we know are there than read a steaming fanfic featuring one of the likely pairings. Does it make me a fanboy of Firefly? Because I definitely display more stereotypically fangirlish behavior in my reaction to Heroes (even before I finished watching it I already started seeking out lj-based communities, fan sites with fannish content and so on.) My Harry Potter experience started with me being a 'fanboy', went through my reluctance to even admit I was one of the 'fangirls', and ended up with my engaging more with 'fangirl' practices. [WB] I like Firefly and Serenity too... someone can tell me if that is a "boy" or a "girl" text, and whether having a man-crush on Nathan Fillion makes me some kind of subversive! [KP] Well, Firefly (and Serenity) is a Sci-Fi western and adventure story, so as a source text is very male-oriented (I am only saying this because it is supposed that boys like guns and adventures, while girls like romance and amassing Barbie merchandise). However, the hints of romance (mostly unresolved) and very engaging male characters portrayed by exceptionally cute actors make it very easy prey for female fans, stereotypically speaking. [WB] Let's not fall into the trap (as you suggest, it's stereotypical) of thinking that the only women who like Firefly and Serenity are "fans", and more specifically, fan-slashers. What about the women who watch the show but don't have any interest in or knowledge of slash? I think we should resist any assumption (again, I think it is becoming a stereotype in fan-academia) that women's only entry into cult texts, or cult texts that are generically male-coded (Western, Science Fiction) is through trying to pair up the main male characters. [KP] Actually, I didn't say a word in my previous passage about any male/male pairings or writing slash back into the story. [WB] Good point - looks like it was me who fell into that trap! I automatically jumped from "female-fans-fancying-cute-actors" to "slash"... my bad. Maybe it says something about how accustomed we are to talking about this visible tip of the fan iceberg - that we only really tend to study the active, creative fans like slashers, not the millions of men and women who just sit there admiring cute actors, maybe discussing it with their friends, but not recording any of it in a concrete form: the watercooler fans, not the Livejournal ones. The advantage of online fandom, for scholars, is that conversation about cult texts becomes so easy to quote, analyse and discuss; ephemeral talk becomes solid text. But there are, again, millions of conversations going on in workplaces and homes about cult texts that never attain that more permanent status, and never enter our radar - because if they don't take place on the internet, they rarely cross that line between the personal and the public.
June 21, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part One): Will Brooker and Ksenia PrasolovaFan and Academic IdentitiesWill Brooker [WB] wrote three books between 1999 and 2004, on stuff he loved as a kid: Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon; Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans; and Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. He is currently head of the Film and Television degree programmes at Kingston University, London. His most recent articles include "A Sort of Homecoming: Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage" in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and Lee Harrington's edited collection Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York University Press, 2007), "Everywhere and Nowhere: Vancouver, Fan Pilgrimage and the Urban Imaginary" (forthcoming in the International Journal of Cultural Studies) and "Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows On Download", scheduled to appear in an edited collection on Lost. His interests include cities, superheroes, online communities and television overflow; he also writes fiction.
Finally, Kristina (Nina) Busse was our invisible third interlocutor in the debate, at times performing the curious role of Greek Chorus. She was already talking with both Will and Ksenia when they started talking to one another and somehow she became both conduit and the representative of gender constructions they'd both argue against. In a way, then, the conversation is clearly a continuation of the discussion Will and Kristina had as well as the continuation of many debates Ksenia and Kristina have had about how fan fiction should or should not be studied (literature or cultural artifact), what role gender plays in fan studies (none or a huge role), all the way to the exemplarity or exceptionality of Harry Potter (and luckily the discussion below stayed away from that).
Gender Infiltration[WB] Just for starters, I should say now that I have some issues with this whole idea of "there's a war between boys and girls, let's try to dialog from opposing sides!" I find the notion of a conflict between "boys" and "girls" quite saddening and reductive. I also have reservations about calling any adult a boy or a girl, and the whole stereotypical pink (or red) vs blue color-coding is also kind of problematic to me. However, from my conversation with Kristina, I'm finding I tend to identify more with the "girl" side of this gendered approach to fandom -- if that side means an interest in creativity, confession, autoethnography, autobiography and community -- with a particular focus on slash, genfic and films. Those are the things I'm most interested in, in terms of fandom. So if that's the "girl" angle, it's fine by me but I think a lot of my work, in that case, challenges the perceived gender boundaries that are supposedly dividing aca-fandom. [KP] As it was already mentioned in discussion to the related post in Kristina's blog, 'fanboys' and 'fangirls', 'blue' and 'pink' etc. are signifiers of the going-ons in fandom - it is a fact that males tend to side with 'collecting', as it is a fact that females tend to side with 'creative' in fandom. I am not sure 'fanboys' and 'fangirls' are the most suitable terms in this case, but those are certainly the most handy ones to refer to a whole set of gendered assumptions and practices that are still very firmly in place. Or are they? [WB] I identified with what I was being *told* in these ongoing discussions was the "fangirl" side. When I talked about it with Kristina, I was actually quite surprised that the things central to my work on fandom - communities, discussion, slash, films, the way a text bonds people and provides them with a shared culture - are being grouped on the "pink" side. I've never thought of myself as being interested in "fangirl" stuff before. I felt it was ironic and amusing that on the evidence of my research, that seems to be the side of the divide I'm on - *according to the terms and territories I'm now being presented with*. [KP] Somehow the *terms* that are in place, the structure of society, the dominant discourse or something else brought about the curious statistical fact - more women like the 'creative' aspect of fandom than men do, more men like the 'collecting' aspect of fandom, and both genders are more or less equally involved in canon debates. It would stand to reason that the academics who come from within a certain practice (more likely, female scholars when it comes to fanvids, or male scholars when it comes to comic books) would feel comfortable using autoethnography to discuss the practice, and would probably occupy the stance of 'impartial observer' (who cannot help but objectify the study subject-matter) when they need to discuss practices they are not personally engaged in. [WB] It's true that you'd probably have to be a long-term comics fan to write reflectively and personally about them, and that as such, you'd probably be male. However, my own experiments with autoethnography (I am using this grand term for it... really I saw it as a kind of personal and reflective creative writing) can be found in my work on Blade Runner's city locations, Lewis Carroll's grave and Vancouver's streets, as well as the more obviously male-oriented Batman comics and Star Wars films. Also, though slash seems still to be a predominantly-female activity, before I wrote my chapter about slash, I wrote some slash. I wrote it anonymously and had it discussed on a slash community. It's not impossible to at least try to seek some experience of and personal engagement with the thing you're writing about, although this won't compensate for years of committed immersion. You don't have to be obliged into an "impartial observer" role about certain topics -- you can choose to become more of a participant. But maybe that was a kind of gender infiltration again. I didn't intend it that way. [KP] Likewise, Nina keeps on accusing me of not being a "good" fangirl. I've tried bunches of shows and disliked most of the ones that came highly recommended--even the ones that seem to have male and female audience appeal, like Buffy. [WB] Well... what we have here then is me, not a good representative for fanboys because my work is about creativity and community, and Ksenia, not a good representative for fangirls... doesn't this question whether the categories are of any use? Are Ksenia and I gender infiltrators, or gender traitors? Are we exceptional? [KP] I'd like to know, myself. While I can clearly see labels and gendered behavior etc. among fans (myself included), I still fail to see how fan scholars display the gendered behavior in their scholarly activities apart from falling into the obvious 'traps' of writing about what they know/like best, while their readers are falling into the obvious traps of thinking that the scholar has presented the situation objectively and in its entire diversity. I wonder if the fact that men were almost absent from the academic accounts of Star Trek fandom means that they were actually that absent from fandom itself.
June 4, 2007
Reading the UpFronts: A Conversation with Media Analysts Stacey Lynn Schulman and Alex ChisholmLast week, I previewed a CMS course description for the fall 2007 semester, Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the fall 2007 Television Ecosystem. As a follow-up, Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman, the course instructors, started a dialog around some of the dominant issues in the television marketplace as they create the syllabus. Much of the discussion here follows upon the recent upfronts, an annual event during which each of the networks announce their plans for the coming television season. Their perspectives illustrate both the urgency of change and the breadth of historical perspective these two will bring to students at MIT this fall. Characterizing the State of Primetime Television Performance AC: This year's television season was, at best, lackluster. Despite some really great promise, especially with the arrival of many new and expanded extension strategies, there wasn't much to get excited about. Viewers either tuned in or didn't show up at all -- there didn't seem to be much of other networks catching the "run off" when a proven or presumed hit didn't deliver. Even juggernaut hit American Idol ended the season down in year-to-year ratings despite a strong early showing. Ratings that used to guarantee a show would be cancelled (anywhere between 4.0 and 6.0) are now regarded as highly respectable (the CW seems to be sustaining a business with shows averaging 0.5-2.0). At face value it seems that the sky is falling... Meanwhile, with DVRs, online extensions, iTunes downloads, and advertiser-supported streaming video at network sites, we're seeing a significant shift in how people consume television content. While actual numbers aren't available because they're proprietary, SLS: The current season's performance is actually part trend, part business-as-usual. Keep in mind that new season successes are few and far between -- very few shows make it past the 4th quarter (October - December) and even fewer are picked up for the next season. Each year around this time I present the new season to advertisers and make the same point -- networks are in first place this year with ratings that would have left them in third place just a year before ... and what constitutes a "hit" is relative to the network (i.e. CW). This trend is unavoidable in a fragmented entertainment market where the average home receives 102 channels. So, these observations have been fairly standard in TV analysis over the past 15 years. In the past, the industry has blamed cable as both thief and benefactor of disenfranchised network TV viewers. What is different about this past season, as Alex correctly points out, are new challenges facing programmers in a universe of time- shifting and on-demand viewership. Nielsen reported in April that DVR penetration had reached nearly 18% of the TV population and networks began full-force efforts to provide multiple viewing windows on air (in repeats) or online (on demand) throughout the season. Subsequently, the "live" TV audience for many established hits appear to be waning - and new shows are being sampled, but in totally new ways. Unfortunately, without good cross-media metrics, we still can't tell whether the online (or alternative view) audience is the same or different from the TV audience ... and if their viewing once or multiple times. Here the question of actual audience size comes down to an old metric of reach and frequency ... how much of your audience is unique or unduplicated? And which environment is better for advertising - one in which you CAN skip the ads or one in which you CAN'T?
May 30, 2007
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media (Part Two)Yesterday, we ran the first part of an essay written by Sloan MBA candidate Eleanor Baird about the current fate and future branding of network television. Baird's work calls attention to shifts in the ways that networks measure their audiences, shifts which are going to be played out in dramatic ways as the networks launch their new season this fall. A team of MIT students -- graduate and undergraduate -- will be monitoring closely the week by week fluctuations in viewership figures and the ways that the networks are adjusting their programming strategies and branding practices in response. Here's the description of the course, which would be open to students from MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, thanks to our various exchange programs. I hope to report on some of their findings here throughout the term. Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the Fall 2007 Television Ecosystem Now for Part Two of Baird's essay: Digital downstream Even if audiences are not planning to sit in front of a network television affiliate for hours on end, networks hope, as they probably always have, that the consumer will be at least be engaged with the some of the content and keep coming back for more. The interactive, on-demand nature of the Internet seems to make it a natural medium for audience engagement for a consumer who could access the content from a wide variety of channels at a variety of times. Network executives and programmers hope that enhanced and more interactive experiences through the "ancillary channel" of the Internet will increase retention, engagement and, time spent viewing the show and related content and ultimately, revenue going back to the original program source. With a network branded site, this strategy is another opportunity to have consumers interact with the meta brand Caldwell argues that television styled itself a "pull" medium, while bidding to make the Internet a "viable 'push' medium" . The relationship between television and Internet may seem natural and complimentary in this way, but it is problematic in others, requiring the interaction of content created by a few and consumed by many to adapt to a medium where greater participation in consumption and production of the content and flow are the norm. Moreover, this relationship has implications for a network trying to maintain a clear brand identity in an environment where users expect to be able to repurpose content in ways that the producers may never have intended. In contrast to television, this medium gives the network far less control of the image of both the sub-brand (the content) but also the meta brand, then context in which the sub-brand is experienced (the network). So, although consumption of digital content may engage the viewer more, there is no guarantee, given the nature of the technology and the norms surrounding it, that the engagement will be with the network brand, the show's sub-brand, a combination of the two, or other factors entirely. That said, a recent study suggest that, if presented through a number of media channels, network affiliation awareness seems to grow stronger, echoing multiple studies on marketing messages and consumer retention. Although there is certainly potential for branding and revenue generation online, interactivity is not the silver bullet that will save the networks from a consumer standpoint either. Various companies have tried to launch costly interactive television initiatives since the 1970s, all of which failed because they overestimated the audience interest in the service. The public's interest in interactivity does not seem to be much better for network websites. Even though the vast majority of homes have a television and Internet penetration in U.S. households is quite high, there are estimates that as little as 5% of broadcast networks' viewers actually watch streaming video, in contrast to the 15% of cable channel viewers who do. A recent study of cable network website users found that they enjoyed using the website, but did not see it as the "Internet brand of the network" or as a "functional alternative to television". In fact, the usage of the cable television websites was heavily dependent on if they had been mentioned on air - a factor that accounted for about two thirds of visitors - and, not surprisingly, the popularity of a cable network's website mirrors the popularity of the network's broadcasts. This raises the question of the utility of focusing branding efforts on these channels at all. If the users are highly engaged "content junkies" who usually learn about the site through watching television anyway, is network brand development online a worthwhile area to explore?
May 17, 2007
When Fan Boys and Fan Girls Meet...There's an old joke that by the time a phenomenon gets the attention of one of the major national news magazines, it is probably already over. A few weeks ago, Time ran a story on the rising influence of "fan boy culture" and then this week, Entertainment Weekly used this same angle to talk about the success of the new Spider-Man movie. I've been so busy trying to wrap up the term that I haven't had a chance to comment before now. Time's article, in particular, was explicit about the gender-dimensions of its claims, titling the article, "Boys Who Like Toys," and opening with the following description: He's one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood, the guy behind the record-breaking success of 300, the hit status of NBC's Heroes and the reign of the Xbox 360 gaming console. He enjoys invitations to the Skywalker Ranch and hangs out with guys like Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino at conventions. He's zealously loyal, notoriously finicky and often aggressive with those who dare to disagree with him. Nope, there's no accident that all of the pronouns here are masculine. In part, this is because the article is focused on the San Diego Comic-Con, superhero comics, and their media spinoffs, not to mention a number of high profile fanboys -- Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, and the like -- who are exerting power and influence within the Hollywood establishment. The article can't avoid the usually cliches -- coming back in the end to the idea that "fanboys" are "outsiders" who may not adequately predict box office revenues except in the case of those films which are already targeted at niche or cult audiences. The other governing myth here is that fans are fickle and unpredictable; that one can go crazy trying to understand their tastes or listening to their criticism. Entertainment Weekly hits that second point especially hard. (Sorry but that article is only accessible to subscribers to the magazine and I bought my copy on the newstand, so no links.) EW writes about Spider-Man III: The opening also proves the studio can successfully premiere a movie that was scrutinized and dissected on the Internet throughout its entire production, probably more so than any other film in history. Such is the new reality for filmmakers behind high-profile comic-book adaptations and blockbuster sequels, who increasing depend on the Net as a vital marketing tool -- but must also contend with fans who rabidly pick apart, analyze, and leak early peeks at upcoming projects online. "I'm at a loss to know how to deal with that," says Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi, "But it's the world we live in. I just have to adapt." The article describes how studios have made their peace with the spoiling community, actively courting influential fans as grassroots intermediaries the way they once courted powerful gossip columnists in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- because they can help you if they like you and destroy you if they don't. EW calls it "befriending the enemy," a phrase which preserves the separation between consumers and producers, even as it describes the process by which that distinction is starting to break down. It's interesting, though, that EW describes fan culture entirely in terms of the consumption and circulation of information about commercially produced works and has nothing to say about the things that fans themselves create through their appropriation of the raw materials that commercial culture provides them. At least Time wrote about fans who "blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos." This media attention on "fan boy" culture comes at a moment of increasing debate within the aca-fan community about the gender dimensions of fan research. I wrote briefly about this topic a while back in response to some comments which got made at the Flow conference about the segregation of fan boy and fan girl scholars who are writing on similar topics but through different language, around different topics, and more often than not, on different panels. And I followed up a few days later with a second post on this topic. The discussion of topics such as the complexity of cult media narratives, transmedia storytelling, engagement, and convergence are being discussed seperately from long-standing work around fan fiction and fan culture more generally. There is some risk of taking up the industry's own atomistic conception of the fan rather than embracing the more collective vision represented by the concept of fandom. More generally, as I have written here before, phrases like "the architecture of participation" that surround web 2.0 suggest the degree to which network culture is really fan culture without the stigma. At the same time, some of these shifts may reflect growing pains in the ways fan culture gets studied as more men begin to write about their own experiences and interests as fans. We certainly do not want to lose the important insights which feminist scholarship contributed to our early understanding of fan culture -- and indeed, the consciousness-raising tradition of feminist scholarship made it possible for us to write about our own experiences as fans. Yet, if fan studies is going to remain a viable area of research, we necessarily need to broaden the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives which get brought to bear upon it. We need to expand the range of fan cultures we study and the kinds of fan productivity we talk about. It is also worth noting that this work is being produced in a larger context, one where at least some aspects of fan culture are gaining real visibility and influence, while others remain largely hidden from view. This is in part why I opened this post with a nod to Time and Entertainment Weekly, both of whom seem to understand the rise of fan influence in Hollywood along gender specific lines. Fan scholars may simply be reproducing, unconsciously in many cases, the dividing lines which structure the general culture's response to fan culture. A heated and yet highly productive discussion of these issues has been raging over at Kristina Busse's blog, where her somewhat angry response to the discussions of these issues at the Media in Transition conference has so far generated 83 responses from a range of leading fan girl and fan boy academics. I can't begin to do justice to this multi-layered discussion here. If you haven't been following it yourself, you should check it out. But I am concerned about the prospect that male and female scholars may be talking past each other rather than engaging with each other's work. The past few years have seen a range of new books on fan culture, including several important anthologies, that reflect the work of a new generation of fan scholars. So, earlier this week, I wrote to nearly 30 of the key researchers in this field and ask them if they would be willing to participate in what I am jokingly calling "Fan Boy/Fan Girl Detante." Throughout the summer, this blog will be hosting a series of conversations among male and female researchers doing work on fan productivity, participatory culture, cult media, transmedia narratives, and so forth, designed to try to better understand the common ground and gender differences in the ways they are approaching their topic. Kristina and I have been working together to select researchers from a range of disciplines and national contexts, whose research spans not simply science fiction and fantasy, but also soap operas, Bollywood, popular music, games, and a range of other forms of media. The entertainment industry loves big summer events: well, consider this to be a big summer event for those of us who are studying popular culture. While I will be spotlighting two scholars each week, many of the scholars have agreed to jump in both through the comments section here and through their own blogs to expand the conversation. I certainly hope that other fan researchers who have not been contacted about this first phase of the project will get in touch and let us know about the work they may be doing on these topics. Earlier this week, Sibauchi, a media studies graduate student from South Korea, wrote to ask us about the value of fan studies. I am hoping that this series of exchanges will provide many valuable answers for Sibauchi and anyone else who wants to enter into this thriving area of research. I am still hearing back from the scholars I contacted (so some of your favorite scholars may not be included here), but so far, the following folks who agreed to participate. For the Red Team: Nancy Baym, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of Rhiannon Bury, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Waterloo Kristina Busse (PhD) Independent Scholar Melissa Click, Assistant Professor, Communications, University of Missouri-Columbia Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor, English, Muhlenberg College Abigail Derecho, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literary Studies and Radio/Television/Film, Catherine Driscoll, Chair, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Karen Hellekson, (Ph.D.) Independent Scholar Lee Harrington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Miami University in Ohio. Deborah Kaplan, (M.A.) Independent Scholar Anne Kustritz Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture, University of Michigan Lisa Morimoto, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University Roberta Pearson Chair, Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham Ksenia Prassolova Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kaliningrad Julie Levin Russo Ph.D. Candidate, Brown Robin Anne Reid, Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M Louisa Stein, Assistant Professor, San Diego Rebecca Tushnet, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Law Center Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager disability and media technology blogger Cynthia W. Walker Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, St. Peter's College Editor's Note: I originally identified this as the Pink team but have changed it by popular demand.
Will Brooker, Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Kingston University Sam Ford M.A. CMS, MIT Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University Sean Griffin, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television Studies, Southern Methodist University Matt Hills Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University Mark Jancovich, Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia Derek Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison Robert Jones, Ph.D. NYU Dereck Kompare, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television, Southern Methodist University Robert Kozinets, Associate Professor, Marketing, York University Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Film & Media Culture, Middlebury Martyn Pedler, Independent Scholar Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Bob Rehak, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College All joking about Pink/Red and Blue teams, aside, my hope is that we will discover that there's more common ground and shared interest here than might first seem apparent to those reading this work in isolation. I hope we all learn things that will inform our work and pushes us in new directions. By pairing scholars on the basis of gender, we insure two things that are often missing from this discussion: we insure that gender remains central to the discussion throughout and we insure absolute equal numbers of male and female participants. I am personally hoping that one of the things which will come out of the discussion, however, is some challenge to the essentialism which can run through discussions of this kind. I don't think all of the work here is going to break down clearly into Red and Blue Teams at all. I welcome further suggestions about people who should participate actively in this discussion. I note, for example, that while this list is very inclusive in terms of gender, it does not yet feel very inclusive in terms of race and ethnicity. I'd love to find some more scholars of color who would like to join this conversation and am very open to suggestions. We will start the conversations here in a few weeks. I will post more details once they are known. By the way, I am posting this tonight from my hotel room in New Orleans where I am attending Phoenix Rising, a major conference of fans and academics who love Harry Potter. I hope to write more about the conference in my post later in the day tomorrow. If you happen to be here at the conference, say hey! I'd love to meet you.
May 3, 2007
Immersive Story Worlds (Part Two)Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two-part excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, focused around the concept of Immersive Story Worlds. The thrust of his thesis deals with issues of fan relations, brand integration, audience building, and transmedia storytelling in the realm of contemporary soap opera. But this passage compares soaps systematically with two other forms of expansive entertainment -- superhero comics and professional wrestling. Immersive Story Worlds Multiple Creators All three examples of immersive story worlds provided here are too large for any one creator to accomplish. Each of these worlds have passed through many creative hands over the years, with no one creator necessarily being THE defining vision of what this world means. In each case, there is a sense of the narrative world having a life of its own and being bigger than any particular creative regime. The fact that all three of these narrative worlds have stood the test of time is evidenced in the way they have weathered passing off from one creative hand to the other. Although Stan Lee is often credited with being a defining force in the initial creation of the modern Marvel Universe, along with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and others, many writers, artists, and editors have helped shape the trajectory of these characters through the following decades. Not only have various creative regimes had control of an individual series over the years, there are creative teams working on each title within the Marvel Universe at any one time, meaning that--although Marvel as a content producer has centralized control over the official narrative universe of its characters, there is still a decentralized process of creating the Marvel Universe and fleshing out all its corners, developed through the many creative forces who have passed through the company over what is now almost 50 years. Soap operas may have a defining creator, such as Irna Phillips and Bill Bell and Agnes Nixon, and the creative vision of each of these people have often helped define the long-term feel for many of these shows. However, the number of writers that work on a show at any one time, from the creative influence of the executive producer to the overall stories of the head writer(s) to the way that is broken down into scenes and dialogue, demonstrates the hundreds of creators who have had an influence on soaps stories through the years. Consider how much impact the thousands of actors who have appeared on these shows have had as well, in addition to directors and other creative forces, and there is certainly no clear "author" of any of these soap opera texts. Even if fans have particular writing teams that they have preferred over others or certain periods of a show that they consider "golden eras," there is no single writer that can be seen as the single defining source of a show, especially once it has been on the air for decades. As for pro wrestling, the fact that wrestling narratives often spilled over from territory to territory and that wrestlers who retain the copyright to their own characters would jump from one show to the other ensures that, in addition to the constant shifting of creative forces within the bookers of any particular wrestling organization, there was also a meta text that fans would follow which branched across every wrestling show in the country. In the regional days of wrestling, fans would follow characters as they moved across the country, being written by a variety of creative forces along the way. Now that the WWE is the major show left in wrestling, there are three WWE divisions, each with their own head writer; and there are still alternative wrestling promotions that often take characters who leave the WWE, like TNA wrestling on Spike TV. In addition, the wrestlers themselves are traditionally known for developing many of their own attributes, and the performance of the audience affects every show as well (and audiences often stray from the intent of the people who scripted the reactions they are "supposed" to have on live shows). It's hard to identify who "creates" the final product of any particular wrestling show, much less the ongoing narratives of the various characters.
May 2, 2007
Immersive Story Worlds (Part One)It's thesis time at the Comparative Media Studies Program -- always a period of great pride and intense stress for me, since I end up serving on an overwhelming number of committees and have the joy of watching my students complete projects which drew them to MIT two years ago. Over the next few weeks, for both reasons, I am going to be sharing with you some of the highlights of the work produced by these students. Doing so allows me to showcase some really exceptional students and it also allows me to shift a little of my focus away from maintaining the blog and onto my day job reviewing student work. Today and tomorrow, I am running an extended excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, "As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture." Some selections of this thesis have already appeared in my blog when Sam took over as guest host while I was traveling to Poland last fall. Ford has been the key person who maintains the Convergence Culture Consortium blog over the past two years, helping him to establish his own reputation as an important commentator on industry trends. He also taught our course this term on professional wrestling which we discussed in the blog a week or so back. Here, he draws on three of his interests -- soaps, wrestling, and superhero comics -- to extend on the concept of an immersive story world. You will see here as well some of the legacy of my assignment getting students to think about ways to draw more deeply on their own personal experiences as a source for their theoretical projects. Immersive Story Worlds My History with Immersive Story Worlds Growing up an only child with a stay-at-home mom, I spent my childhood days engrossed in what I have come to call immersive story worlds. In truth, I began my relationship with popular culture with no more than an antenna connection and a collection of toys. For me, it was G.I. Joe. I have never fancied being a military man and really do not remember too many playground days spent pretending to be a soldier, but the world of G.I. Joe fascinated me nonetheless. The dozens of characters I found for $2.97 apiece at Wal-Mart drove my interest in the alternate military reality these characters inhabited. Every toy included a biography of that character on the back, which I clipped and kept--in alphabetical order no less. I ended up with a group of friends who also collected and kept up with the world of G.I. Joe. My love for G.I. Joe soon spilled over into the Marvel G.I. Joe comic books, where these characters came to life. I read those comics until the covers fell off, hoping to learn everything I could about each character and apply that knowledge to the games I played as well. I soon became engaged with the whole Marvel comic book universe, and I spent most of my $10 weekly allowance following the weekly or monthly adventures of Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, and a slew of other colorful characters. Yet again, I found contemporaries at school who shared my interest in comic books. They wanted to be comic book artists, and I wanted to be a comics writer, so we set about to create a comic book universe of our own. At the same time, I was becoming familiar with another immersive story world, that of the superstars of the World Wrestling Federation, now known as WWE. My cousins had long told me the legends of Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior, but I didn't know where to tune in to glimpse into this universe from a syndication window. However, my parents' decision to get a VCR opened me up to a slew of videotapes my cousins mailed to me and the growing collection of wrestling shows available at the local rental shops and convenience stores. Finally, I even convinced my neighbors to let me come over and start watching the Monday night wrestling shows since they had cable television. The Marvel superhero universe and the World Wrestling Federation were my media fascinations, and they both fit into this category I now write about as immersive story worlds, a concept I will flesh out in the next couple of posts. Enter As the World Turns There was another immersive story world that I had been involved with as well, one that I was not completely cognizant of being a fan of at first. It was what my grandmother always referred to as "the story" and probably the narrative in which I first came to know a slew of familiar faces, an immersive story world that predated my interest in G.I. Joes, super heroes, or professional wrestling. That narrative was Procter & Gamble Productions' As the World Turns (ATWT), a daily daytime serial drama that has been on the air since 1956. For as long as I can remember, ATWT was a part of my weekday afternoon, and the familiar faces of the Hughes family, joined by the evil James Stenbeck, the scheming Dr. John Dixon, the incomparable Lucinda Walsh, the down-to-earth Snyders, the lively Lisa Grimaldi, and a host of other characters were regular parts of my childhood. I may not have realized that I was immersed in the fictional world of Oakdale, Illinois, until I started wondering what was happening to those characters when the school year began and I was no longer home in the afternoons. By the mid-1990s, I convinced my mom to record the show so I could watch it when I came home from elementary school every day. In fact, I was a somewhat closeted soap opera viewer all the way through most of high school. By my junior year, though, I had started a night job after school and lost contact with the residents of Oakdale. By the end of my senior year of high school, I was married. My distance from ATWT didn't last, though, and my wife and I were dedicated viewers of the soap opera again a couple of years into college. With so many familiar faces and back stories to remember, it was hard not to get pulled back into the narrative and eventually join fan communities to find out what had happened in the world of ATWT while I had been away. My continued interest in this show is closely connected to the social relationships I built around it. The conversations I would join with my mother and grandmother about "the story" have continued over dinner every night with my wife. In the process, I have come to understand soap viewing as a social activity, which helped tremendously in understanding and becoming a part of the fan community built around ATWT. Perhaps just as importantly, I have come to understand soap operas as primarily powered by character-driven storytelling. The strength of this genre lies in relationships, including the relationships characters have with one another, the relationships between these characters and the fans, and the relationships fans build around these texts. Soap operas are hindered by plot-driven storytelling because the permanent nature of the soap opera, with no off-season and 250 original hours of programming each year, emphasizes slow storytelling that examines the emotion and nuances of events rather than just "what happens." Comic books and pro wrestling are personality and character-driven genres as well, and good storytelling is consistently determined by the fan base of each genre as those in which the relationships among characters (and the performances of the actors or artists depicting those characters) are logical, well-written, and fleshed out. These three narrative types--the daytime serial drama, the pro wrestling world, and the DC and Marvel universes--share a set of similarities I have grouped under this category of immersive story worlds. By this term, I mean that these properties have a serial storytelling structure, multiple creative forces which author various parts of the story, a sense of long-term continuity, a deep character backlog, contemporary ties to the media property's complex history, and a sense of permanence. I will examine each of these aspects over the next few pages. This thesis concentrates particularly on the immersive story world of As the World Turns and its current status in a shifting media landscape. My interest in this soap opera text is heavily tied to my fascination with this type of immersive story world in general, in which one can never truly "master" the material. Immersive story worlds provide a space particularly rich for interaction between a text and a vibrant fan community that critiques, energizes, maintains, and fills in the gaps of that official canon. Further, as Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture, the "extension, synergy, and franchising (that) are pushing media industries to embrace convergence" have long been a part of these narrative worlds in one fashion or another, so that these marginalized texts have a lot to offer for informing other media producers. These worlds are unusually ripe for transmedia content, user-generated content, and a wealth of online fan forums. However, they also generate a distinct niche fan environment that is both energized by and suffers from being considered somewhat fringe, even as each has long been a massive cultural phenomenon. In order to understand exactly what is meant by immersive story worlds, however, it is important to examine each characteristic of this categorization.
April 3, 2007
Sanjaya Malakar, Leroy Jenkins, and The Power to Negate
As a long-time American Idol fan, I am watching the current controversy about Sanjaya Malakar with morbid fascination. For those of you who are not following the plot, Malakar is a relatively untalented contestant who is surviving week after week as much more widely praised rivals are biting the dust. Simon Cowell this week went so far as to suggest that nothing which the producers on the show said about his performance would make any difference in the outcome of the voting: "I don't think it matters anymore what we have to say, actually. I genuinely don't. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck!" Elsewhere, Cowell has fanned the flames by threatening to quit American Idol if Sanjaya wins. Regular readers of this blog will have already suspected some of the forces going on behind the scenes here to essentially "spoil" American Idol and can only imagine the choice words that Simon and the other judges are uttering behind the scenes. I reported here last summer about a group called Vote for the Worst which has adopted an interventionist stance towards reality television programs. The group has taken credit in the past for the surprising longevity of AI contestants, such as Scott Savol and Bucky Covington[See note at end of post], as well as having gotten a number of lackluster contestants onto Big Brother's All Stars series last summer. Here's what the group has posted over on their home page: Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained. They have a point: research suggests that American Idol attracts essentially two different viewerships. There are people who watch the first part of the series -- up until Hollywood -- enjoying the "gong show" like segments where bad singers get spotlighted. (That's why William Hung remains one of the most infamous contestants to ever appear on the show and why the producers consistently replay the footage of his mangled and tone-deaf performance of "She Bangs.") And then there are the people who tune in once the producers have gotten all of that out of their system to watch the talented few compete, get feedback, and try to win the hearts of the American public. So, it is hard for the producers to claim that "vote for the worst" is not in the spirit of the show. The Vote for the Worst fans are simply acting out of turn, asserting their own right to pick which bad singers should get on the air and how long they should last. Vote for the Worst, by itself, probably doesn't have the clout to really carry this very far, in the end, but this time around, the site has won the support of Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media," who is using his satellite radio program to encourage listeners to vote to keep Sanjaya on the show. Stern has drawn real blood in the past. In 1998, Stern ran a successful effort to get a regular on his program, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, selected as one of People Magazine's list of the most beautiful people in the world. This was an early experiment in the use of the web to encourage reader participation. Hank won over Leo DeCaprio, the pretty boy actor who was then riding high off his Titanic appearance, and the dwarf got a lot angrier and perhaps a little drunker when the magazine refused to feature him inside the print edition of their publication.
March 1, 2007
Awkward Conversations About Uncomfortable LaughterDear reader, please welcome me to the age of enlightenment. A few weeks ago, the MIT dorms, where I live, finally started to receive Comedy Central and I am now able to enjoy a daily dose of John Stewart and Steven Colbert rather than hoping that the hotels where I stay get the channel and that I can remember when they are on. (Of course, the MIT dorms, razzle frazzle, are no longer getting HBO or BBC America so it continues to be one step forward, two steps back). I am receiving Comedy Central just in time to see the early episodes of Sarah Silverman's new television series. So far, the series has not lived up to my hopes or expectations. It feels more like a female remake of Curve Your Enthusiasm about a woman whose self-centeredness becomes the basis of anti-social and politically incorrect conduct on a recurring basis (not that there's anything wrong with that from most people's point of view but I have never quite connected with Curve.) But the show is drawing very strong ratings so people out there seem to be liking what they are seeing. I have been long interested in Silverman's work and wrote something about her film, Jesus is Magic, for Flow a few years ago. While I am reproducing my essay here, you may want to follow this link back because the essay generated a pretty rich and far reaching response when it first appeared. Silverman's film uses comedy to ask questions about how we are dealing with issues of race in America today, questions which may only be asked by pushing hard on the borders between jokes and insults. She has, as a consequence, found herself the center of controversies about inappropriate jokes. I wish that were the problem with the new Comedy Central series which seems pretty tame compared to her earlier standup work. There were some moments which made me wince in an episode in which her character believes she's gotten AIDS and manages to turn efforts to combat the disease into a totally self-serving exercise, sending up the ways that celebrities gain status through attaching themselves to various causes or when she gets into a conversation with a zombie about the insensative ways that her people are portrayed in the media. But, in the end, the series falls back into safer sitcom territory rather than using comedy to probe our hot button issues as a society. What follows is the essay I wrote for Flow: In her book, Implicit Meanings, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the roles jokes play in mapping points of tension or transition within a culture. Only a thin line separates jokes and insults. The joke gives expressive form to an emergent perspective within a culture -- something which is widely felt but rarely said. When a joke expresses a view already widely accepted, it becomes banal and unfunny. When a joke says something the culture is not ready to hear, it gets read as an insult or an obscenity. The job of the clown is thus to continually map the borders between what can and can not be said. This is why a good comedy routine is accompanied as often by gasps as by laughter. I was reminded of Douglas's perspective on jokes when I recently participated in a screening and discussion of Sarah Silverman's new film, Jesus is Magic. For those of you who have not heard of her yet, Silverman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who sparked national controversy in 2001 when she told a joke about "chinks"Â on Conan and when she defended the joke on Bill Mahr's Politically Incorrect. The Silverman controversy has resurfaced in recent months both because of a rather memorable appearance in The Aristocrats and because of the release of a film documenting her standup comedy show. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and is currently shooting a pilot for her own series on Comedy Central. To understand the controversy, we have to return to the now infamous joke she told on Conan in 2001. She was explaining that her various efforts to escape jury duty and her friend's suggestion that she could try to come across as prejudiced on the questionnaire by writing "I hate chinks." Silverman pauses, suggesting that she would consider being embarrassed to make such a comment, even in jest, and so instead she wrote, "I LOOOVE Chinks -- and who wouldn't."Â Greg Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, argued that the network showed a double standard in allowing the word, "chink,"Â to air when it would almost certainly have bleeped "nigger."Â The network and host later apologized for the decision to air the joke but Silverman refused to apologize, contending "It's not a racist joke. It's a joke about racism." The controversy is one which looks differently depending on whether our focus is on the words used (Aoki rightly sees "chink"Â as a word deeply entwined in the history of racism in America) or the meaning behind them (Silverman is right that her comedy ultimately raises uncomfortable questions about how white people "play the race card."Â)
February 14, 2007
The Future of Television (Circa 1999)Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture. Everything from here is part of the original text: My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media: 1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.
January 18, 2007
The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses HouseMy son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes. These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions. The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge. So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers." Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist: I f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room? Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens. It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program. I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.
January 15, 2007
Supernatural: First ImpressionsLate last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:
Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two. I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.
December 18, 2006
My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)
Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.
The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0 My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.
There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.
November 30, 2006
When Fandom Goes Mainstream...The most recent issue of Flow includes a range of different responses to the Flow conference, which I referenced here a few weeks ago. One of the articles would seem to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, because it refers to the panel on "Watching Television Off-Television" which I helped to organize, because it addresses the shifting nature of fan engagement with contemporary media, and because it was written by Kristina Busse (co-editor of the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which was previously discussed here). Previously I have contrasted the context in which I wrote Textual Poachers (a world where fan culture was largely marginalized and hidden from view) and the context described in Convergence Culture (a world where fan participations are increasingly central to the production decisions shaping the current media landscape). Busse's question, though, is whether we are really talking about the same fan culture in the two instances. Here's part of what she has to say:
At least some fans have gained power and influence in the context of convergence culture. As I suggested here the other week, there are more fan friendly shows on the schedule. Shows which attract strong fan interests have a somewhat stronger chance of surviving. Producers interested in engaging with fans are generating more additional material which expands the fictional universe. We are seeing a thawing of the relations between media producers and fans as the studios are reassessing their attitudes towards even some of the more controversial aspects of fan culture. (We saw some signs of this détente during the Fan Culture panel at the Future of Entertainment conference.) And fannish modes of engagement with popular texts are spreading at a dramatic rate across more and more segments of the population. And that's part of what concerns Busse:
What gets lost as some of these fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public? Is there still a value in understanding fandom as a distinct subculture with its own cultural hierarchies and aesthetic norms, its own forms of social engagement, its own traditions of interpretation, its own system of genres for cultural production, and perhaps its own gender politics? Is this just another case of a subculture fearing a loss of "authenticity" as it moves into the mainstream? Or read from another angle, what happens to fan studies when it moves from the study of subcultural practices to the study of dominant or at least widespread forms of media consumption?
November 17, 2006
Pimp My Show!The title says it all. We are already a few months into the Fall 2006 television season -- some of the new series have already come and gone, others have started to develop solid fan followings. I wanted to invite my loyal readers to share with us which new shows have really caught your fancy and why. (Of course, it's always fun to hear which new shows have bored or disgusted you, too.) It's been a while since we've had a really good conversation going with the readers of this blog so I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and share with us what you think have been the most interesting new shows this season. And of course, since I've got lots of international readers, don't presume we are just talking about American shows. I'd love to hear about amazing shows out there in other countries which are generating fan interest. To get the ball rolling, I dug out some notes I sent to the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium this summer, before any of the shows had actually reached the air. I tried to predict which new shows would be "most fan friendly." It's interesting to see how well I did.
November 16, 2006
On Blogs, Lost, and Jag Studies...For those of you interested in the blogosophere (and I have to assume you are or you wouldn't be reading this blog), there are some fascinating statistics to be found on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere report. Technorati is now tracking 57 Million blogs -- with a growth of 100,000 new blogs added each day throughout the last quarter. The number of blogs doubles every five to seven months.
They publish an interesting chart which shows the peak moments in blog posting and their relationship to specific news events. On the one hand, this chart suggests how vital politics is to what motivates people to post and on the other, it suggests that the increased number of bloggers means that each major political event is likely to generate more traffic and discussion than the last. We can speculate whether all of this reaction to news is likely to be divisive as some critics have argued, leaving us more likely to read each new development through an ever narrower and more self righteous ideological frame or likely to enable real discussion and community building as others have argued because we have a greater understanding of how politics impacts the everyday lives of a diverse array of people. Blogs remain a highly decentralized mode of expression, even though some blogs (topped by Endgadget and Boing Boing) are beginning to compete directly with the websites offered by the major media companies in terms of traffic. Only three blogs make it to the top fifty most trafficked news sites while another nine make it into the second 50 most trafficked sites. The egotist in me was interested in their classification of blogs as influential based on the number of other blogs which link to them. By these criteria, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, which I launched in June, has already made its way into "the very high authority group," thanks no doubt to the number of "thought leaders" and fellow bloggers who read this site, since our readership numbers are a good deal lower than many of the other blogs to make it to this status. You are an elite, dear readers, and you work hard to spread the word about some of the information posted here. For this, I thank you very very much.
September 14, 2006
Multiplatform Entertainment: A View From ChinaLast week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download, call it what you will. One of the key lessons of media studies is that the same technology may get adopted in different ways and at different speeds in different cultures around the world. This is one of the real value of taking a global perspective on media change. My post inspired one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students, Rena Huang, to post some thoughts on her blog about how this same process is playing itself out in China and I asked her if I could repost these remarks here. Huang is a second year Masters student who is doing a thesis on the growth of the Chinese animation industry and is working with CMS faculty memberJing Wang, the Chair of the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, to construct a digital archive of Chinese animation in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy. She was also part of the team from our Convergence Culture Consortium who participated in Project Good Luck this summer helping to document mobile culture in China. For those who haven't checked that site in a bit, they are still uploading pictures and interviews from the trip, including an interesting exchange with the Back Dorm Boys, the Chinese students who became famous for their lip-sincing video at You-Tube.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink
September 6, 2006
Television Goes MultiplatformIt's hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that Apple launched the video Ipod and the ABC television group was the first to announce a serious commitment to make its top rated television shows accessible to consumers via legal downloads. Within a few weeks time, the other networks were forced to cut their own deals with Apple paving the way of a new era of rerun on demand. A document shared with me recently from one of our corporate research partners gave me a glimpse into just how dramatically the landscape of American television has changed, providing a breakdown network by network of the various platforms through which one could access their content.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins is available here. 
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