Console-ing Passions 2008

Last weekend I attended the Console-ing Passions conference at UC Santa Barbara. The event, focusing on feminist media studies, has been held roughly every two years since 1992. While it is still primarily concerned with television (as it started as a counter to the predominance of film studies in the 1980s), it has always welcomed papers and presentations on a wide array of media. However, and despite occasional calls to broaden its official purview, it still importantly maintains its central focus on feminist analysis and politics. This focus has helped it maintain a particular sensibility and community over the years, and this year’s event was no exception. Indeed, it was easily one of the best conferences I’ve attended in recent years.

I should say upfront that much of this was due to the setting. Santa Barbara is one of those supernaturally beautiful places, with mountains, the Pacific Ocean, lush vegetation, and near-perfect weather. The UCSB campus, like every other UC campus I’ve ever been to, makes the best of use of this environment, with open spaces, winding walkways, low-slung buildings, and sunlit rooms. The event organizers, UCSB Film and Media Studies professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks, shrewdly planned the schedule to make the most of this setting, with extended breaks between some sessions, over an hour for lunch each day, and two outdoor receptions (including one on Goleta Beach, adjacent to UCSB).

I bring all this up because it makes a qualitative difference in the conference experience. The best conferences are about what happens in the spaces between the panels: in hallways, restaurants, hotel bars, and (yes) beaches. I’m not as up on my Richard Florida as I should be in this regard, but there’s clearly something about the effective organization of time and space that foster greater intellectual and creative energies. It’s a lesson I hope the leaders of SCMS heed as that conference continues to expand.

The theme for this year’s CP, broadly speaking, was gender and production. Most panels took this issue head-on, presenting work ranging from the theorization of “production” per se, to representations of media production on television, to the conditions and practices of actual media production. This focus indicates the growing expansion of media studies’ objects and methods of study. The days when entire conferences would consist of dozens of individual “readings” of particular films or TV series are thankfully long gone. Instead, effective media scholarship-i.e., “doing” media studies-requires interaction with (if not mastery of) a wide array of theories, methods, media forms, texts, producers, and users. Despite the increased expectations this places on media scholars, students, and practitioners, this is how it should be. Media is too chaotic and important to be carved only into arbitrary approaches or areas of focus. There is so much to learn-about methodologies, about industrial practices, about different formal paradigms, about reception communities-that can benefit us all in ways, I think, that our present moment, with its cultural, economic, technological, political and even biological uncertainties, demands.

That said, CP’s feminist ethos still provides an effective, and critically important, banner under which the new media studies can productively work. At CP, feminism is not so much a discrete approach (as it still tends to be taught) as an overarching principle: i.e., advancing work that broadens our understanding of gendered categories, and contributes to the improvement of the lives of real women and men. Here as well the organization of the event contributed to this goal, as not only media scholars but media producers and media fans interacted in this space; I saw presentations and/or chit-chatted with women television writers, studio executives, porn producers, and media acafen throughout the weekend. As someone who otherwise occupies several central social positions of contemporary American heteronormative patriarchy (white, middle-aged, straight, married, and parenting), I feel it’s important to listen to and engage in these discussions as much as possible.

(That said, I don’t mean to suggest that this makes it all or only “work”; I had a blast all weekend.)

Coming up in the next two installments: CP-presented work on gender in television programming, and work on gender in television production.

When season premieres presage season finales

It’s been a mighty long time, but I’m back. Blogging time should (he says tentatively) open up a bit more in the coming weeks, with the end of the semester. Welcome in particular to those of you who stumbled upon my name in the Film Comment piece on David Bordwell’s blog; sorry for the lack of fresh product. I’m going to do bit more remodeling on the interface in the coming weeks as well, so stay tuned.

What concerns me these days are new seasons of three of my current favorite series (note: no hedging over the word “favorite”). Lost’s fourth season started back in February (and they’re currently on strike-affected hiatus till April 24); both Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who began their respective fourth seasons this past weekend. I had intended to blog about anticipation as a mode of media engagement, but instead (since the seasons have started) I’d like to talk about serial narrative.

I’ve blogged before about the problems of long television seasons, i.e., what Jason Mittell has beautifully dubbed the “infinity model.” Each of these shows has been able to delimit “infinity” in a variety of ways. Last spring, the executive producers of Lost negotiated an end to their series: spring 2010. This means that (counting the 2008 episodes already aired) there are forty more Lost episodes to come over the next two and a half seasons. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica will wrap up this season; the first ten episodes will run this spring, but the strike likely delayed the release of the last ten episodes till the fall (this has yet to be confirmed). As for Doctor Who, only three bumper-length “specials” will run scattered throughout 2009, followed by a full season of thirteen episodes in 2010. While some fans have panicked at this news, it is intended to become the usual pattern of production from that point forward, in order to keep the demanding series and its personnel fresh.

I bring all this up because most fans are going into these new seasons knowing that “the end” (or, in DW’s case, an “end”) is nigh. That is, each series will end at a known point in the near future. Unlike virtually every other scripted television series in history (with some important exceptions, most occurring within the last decade or so), these series are embarking on an unknown narrative trajectory with a known terminus. Again, in DW’s case, it’s more complicated: the series isn’t ending, but the way it has been produced to date is. And it’s more complicated than that as well, but I’ll get into that in a moment.

Lost made this shift in last year’s season finale, when the familiar flashbacks were replaced with flash-forwards, i.e., glimpses at the lives of some of the characters after their departure from the island. This move neatly cleaved the entire series run in half, and signalled movement to a new narrative problematic. The question of “who were these people?” has become “what happened to them?” The foregrounding of the Oceanic Six (i.e., the only six characters who “survived” Oceanic 815 and returned to civilization and became celebrities), coupled with the addition of several new characters (brought on board the freighter that made contact with the regulars at the end of last season) has provided the fuel for this problematic. Interestingly, each episode thus far (there are still five to go this season) has prompted even more questions. For every answer that’s given (e.g., what happened to Michael) loads of questions are asked (e.g., what’s the deal with the polar bear skeleton in Tunisia?).

Thus, the knowledge that viewers must bring to bear on the material increases, but moves on at the same time. That is, answered questions or cut-off plotlines (e.g,. goodbye Danielle and Karl…probably) can be filed away, opening up conceptual space for the new questions. Lost has done this all throughout, of course. However, it’s new, denser narrative structure (16 straight episodes, rather than 25 scattered across 40 weeks), plus eight-month hiatuses, means that the experience of watching each season unfold will be even more “intense” than usual. That is, more narrative significance packed into fewer episodes, engaged with in a shorter amount of time.

(Side note: yes, DVD box set viewers have been able to do this for years. What’s interesting now is that this mode of focused intense engagement is occurring more and more in scheduled runs of series on their networks)

For Battlestar Galactica fans, the stakes are even higher: these episodes are it. Twenty and out. Moreover, there’s no flashforwards (at least straightforwardly). There’s no way to effectively predict where this story is going. The series has excelled at jaw-dropping season finales all the way through, episodes that both culminate their season arcs and explode into a completely different narrative direction. Arguably, the Season 3 finale was the most explosive of them all, revealing four of the “final five” cylons, acquitting Gaius Baltar, bringing back Kara Thrace from the dead, revealing that Earth does indeed exist, and working in Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.”

The first episode back (after almost a year) picked up exactly where events left off and didn’t disappoint, moving each of these plot points along (including the Dylan song) and raising the stakes accordingly. What’s most extraordinary is how this is working without resorting to genre cliche, and without drawing up an explicit puzzle (like in Lost). Instead, we’re left with bits and pieces of meaning to chew on, with very little stable ground. I like to think this is how both the surviving humans and the cylons are perceiving their worlds as well: that all attempts thus far to move on have either failed (e.g., New Caprica) or have gone unpredictably awry (Tigh’s a cylon!).

This pushes the series out of the literal realm and into something more challenging, more disturbing, and more uncertain. The various strains of hybridity presented (all twelve cylon models, Baltar’s vision of Six, undead Kara, Hera (and maybe Aaron), the cylon/human hybrids, the animal consciousness of the centurions and raiders, the failing Colonial state, etc.) make any notion of a core or foundation untenable, and increasingly so. This material would be compelling in any medium, but on television-that seemingly reliable technology of modernity and civilization-its fissures and wounds are felt all the more. You can’t put it down. You can’t walk out of the theater. You can watch something afterwards, or turn off the screen. But you know it’ll be back. And yet it will still end as well, within the next eight months.

Finally, Doctor Who continues to offer kind of “annual saga” mode of narrative, in that each season has a central thematic, as well as a growing narrative problematic, that nibbles away at the corners of early episodes before building up to increasingly explosive finales. In practice, this means that while the entire series run is interconnected, individual seasons are meant to be experienced as one thirteen-episode saga (I’m leaving out the Christmas episodes in this calculus, glorious though they are, as they’ve functioned thus far as variously “interstitial” between the main action in the seasons).

Twenty-nine episodes into the David Tennant era, and we’re starting to see the emotional cracks in this particular Doctor blossom. He was put through the wringer last season well enough, but not as much as his companion Martha Jones. This season looks to compound these emotions and relationships several-fold, as not only Martha, but, incredibly, Rose Tyler (marooned in a parallel universe way back in Series Two’s finale “Doomsday”) are somehow returning this year, in addition to the now-regular companion Donna Noble (seen previously as one-off team-up in “The Runaway Bride” in 2006). Unlike Lost, which literally screams the questions and answers at us, and BSG, which plunges us into uncharted conceptual waters, DW’s real “big questions” are actually quite intimate. For despite all the copious (and extremely well-conveyed) action and epic scale, this is basically a series about a very, very lonely person, and the emotional (as well as physical) damage he leaves in his wake. And, based on the last few minutes of the Series Four opener, “Partners In Crime,” his life is about to get very, very complicated indeed.

The “end,” here, ominously foreshadowed in the already released title of this year’s final episode (”Journey’s End”), refers to the seeming end of this year’s particular theme, and I suspect, the buildup to the end of Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, probably in the last 2009 special, which then would usher in an Eleventh Doctor in a full series in 2010. But that’s all speculation. The primary advantage of Doctor Who’s narrative structure is that it allows a relatively wide range of storytelling styles (everything from comedy to horror to SF to domestic drama) which collectively, and subtly, build upon an overarching story. A story that then actually comes to a conclusion as episode thirteen ends, while still leaving plenty of bruises and mysteries to propel the next series.

Unboxing “Unboxing TV”

Just back from Cambridge, where I attended Unboxing TV, one of the most satisfying “conference experiences” I’ve ever had. So, right off the top, yay Jonathan Gray and Joshua Green for putting this together. Let’s do it again.

In the wake of MIT5, Jon and Josh cooked up the idea for a small, one-stream conference of TV Studies scholars where the focus would not be on the conference paper as the kind of finished idea polished for presentation, but on the much more engaging process of interactive thought and discussion. They were also inspired by the design of last year’s Flow conference in Austin, which similarly put the “discussions in the corridor” front-and-center. The difference was in scale. Flow was not large, but certainly not small. There were 30 invited participants to Unboxing TV, present at every panel, in the same space, for a day and a half. This produced the effect of an undistracted collective experience, an ongoing evolution of discussion throughout the weekend.

The larger conferences in our field (e.g., SCMS, at around 800 participants) can be exciting but exhausting in all their numerous, too-brief meet-ups and scurrying between panels. By contrast, as one person put it, Unboxing TV felt like the best grad seminar ever, where everyone has done the reading, and everyone has something interesting to say.

You can do the reading as well, here, where you’ll find PDFs of the “provocations” – the short thought pieces that each participant contributed. Collectively, they indicate how we’re working to understand and contextualize both the rapid changes happening in and around television (and media and culture more broadly) and the continuities of so much unfinished lines of inquiry. Rather than break down each panel, as I did for MIT5, and will ideally do for similar conferences, I thought I’d do a synthesis here instead, giving a general sense of what our collective intelligence generated.

Indeterminacy

All throughout the weekend, and embedded in the design of the event, were questions of definition. What is “television”? What is “television studies”? What is “public service”? What is “fandom”? What is “newness”? What is “creative labor”? What is “community”? What emerged from these discussions was not only the sense that none of these categories (and several others) can be pinned down precisely, but that none of them should be pinned down. Instead, in the best post-structuralist tradition, we collectively (if often not consciously, and not with some contention) argued for the value of indeterminacy. That is, the strategic mobility of concepts, terms, and discourses.

This applied most radically to the questions of television and Television Studies itself. After more than thirty years of scratching at the doors of various fields (mostly the one marked “Film Studies”) for legitimacy, the field is arguably better off pursuing an open disciplinarity. By this I don’t mean “interdisciplinarity” (which many critiqued) or even post-disciplinarity, but rather a kind of not-disciplinarity, whereby the usual parameters of an academic field (theories, methods, objects of study, etc.) could never quite be fixed. Indeed, aside from a general lack of quantitative approaches (and even there, there were exceptions), the breadth of scholarship produced by the participants is staggering. A PowerPoint slide of all the participants’ book covers reminded us of that from the very beginning.

The benefits and risks of cohering into “a field” were openly discussed, and my wheels are still turning over the possibilities, which are especially intriguing given our steady ascendancy into SCMS over the past several years, and the impending job security of most of the people in the room.

Inquiry

In a similar manner, the weekend revealed plenty of gaps in methods, concepts, terms, “languages” (I’m guilty of that metaphor, I suppose), technologies, objects of study, texts, and (arguably most importantly) histories of every kind. If Television Studies is indeterminate, than “inquiry” is what keeps it afloat, always moving forward, always questioning established categories and practices.

Yes, the academic life is about inquiry at a very basic level. But this field never stops inquiring, never rests on assumptions, never takes much for granted. It might be a sign of a seminal moment in Television Studies, or maybe only a seminal moment in my academic life, that the energy and intensity of discussions in conference rooms and grad seminars of long ago (2005, 2003, 1999, 1994, 1991,…) was matched and superceded by our collective wisdom in Cambridge.

I now find myself wanting to listen in on Julie D’Acci’s feminism seminar in 1991, or John Fiske’s Media Theory seminar in 1993, or my dissertation writing group in 1996, or the birth of the SCMS TV Studies group in 1999, or the collective intellectual geek-out over reality TV at MIT3 in 2003. To see how the act of “inquiry” propelled discussions towards where we are now, and to see those past moments under the (often harsh) glare of the present.

Inquiry is what we do; it’s what we’ve always done and always will do.

Community

The last major category to emerge from Unboxing TV was community. I understand community, coming out of this, as operating in three distinct ways (again, indeterminacy, remember?).

First, there was a lot of talk about building communities across not only other academic disciplines, but other key publics (regulators, activists, fans, creative workers, “the industry,” etc.). Lines of inquiry often led in this direction, which in turn led “out” of a sense of a cohesive field, and toward a more diffuse array of interests and politics. Every panel tied back into the concept of community in this regard, whether of Asian Americans, program buyers, journalists, striking TV writers, or Mexican factory workers (to name a few).

Second, there was great support (especially from Jon and Josh, as event organizers) for maintaining and expanding online and offline communities within our “field” (as such). The ongoing “good fight” at places like Flow, MediaCommons, LiveJournal, Henry’s AcaFan Debate, and the blogosphere more broadly were discussed as examples of how we need to effectively utilize new interfaces and technologies to support the idea of “academic community.” Oddly, the TV Studies group at SCMS didn’t come up once, despite the fact that five past or present steering committee members were there, and that one invitee (Michele Hilmes, who unfortunately couldn’t make the trip) now serves on the SCMS Executive Committee.

And a final, important note about community. At the first panel, Jon made the observation that the participants were going to be colleagues and collaborators in our “field,” or whatever it is we do, for the next thirty-odd years. I thought at that moment not only of those in the room, but of the many others, some in “adjacent” fields like Film Studies, Popular Music Studies, and Communication Studies more broadly, in my generational cohort. We’re the “class of the millennium,” I suppose, all gaining PhDs in the last ten years and many now scampering over the hedge to tenure (Amanda Lotz counted seven colleagues in the field going up this year alone). So community also means this particular community. These people, gathered in this room.

In this regard, there’s not only a shared politics and purpose; there’s love. I’ve known many of the people at Unboxing TV for several years, and a few of them for many years, dating back to my early grad school days (I first met Henry Jenkins at the first Console-ing Passions, at Iowa City in 1992). Even those I’ve only met recently, I feel a close affinity with. We’ve shared knowledge, gossip, baby pictures, book chapters, hopes, fears, drink recipes, job tips, political rants, hugs, works-in-progress, fannish crushes, mentor stories, laughter, restaurant reviews, conference panels, YouTube videos, paper calls, tears, and complaints about department meetings for years. We all feel isolated at our home institutions. We all feel like “home” in distant hotel meeting rooms and bars, and blogs and e-mail discussions. We all do, otherwise we wouldn’t have come to Cambridge.

I don’t want to critique or theorize this community, but hold onto it. Aside from family and friends, these are the most important long-term relationships we’ll ever have. These people, and the many others they’ve led me to, are ultimately the fuel that keeps my inquiry moving, and my indeterminacy undaunted.

May we never stop unboxing television.

WGA Strike: Bring on the new new Hollywood

In case you haven’t heard (and honestly, if you’re not reading about it online, you probably haven’t heard much), the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), the guild that represents several thousand film and television writers, went on strike this week. The key issue prompting this strike has to with residuals, the royalties paid to writers, and other creative talent, for subsequent runs of their material. Their current residual system is flawed in two ways: DVDs only count at the same lousy rate they’ve had for VHS tapes for twenty years, and internet-distributed content isn’t eligible at all for residual payments.

This WGA video explains this all in just under four minutes:

The strike is a critical rupture (or at least could be; it’s too early to tell) in the ongoing story of TPTB (i.e., the corporations that run the networks and studios; you know, “Hollywood”) extracting more and more value out of the content they own while sharing less and less and none with the people who actually create it. In Rerun Nation, I described how the TV rerun moved from the margins of industrial logic to its very center over the space of a few years in the 1950s. At the time, as the video above points out, writers (and actors, for that matter) received no residuals on these reruns, which were often successfully, and extraordinarily profitably, syndicated for years and decades in the US and across the world. I closed that book with a chapter on the DVD box set, which has had a similar industrial impact in the 2000s — basically creating a new market for television reruns — with a similar outcome for writers (not nothing, but very minimal residuals).

Since 2005, we’ve had another revenue front open up: the internet. Yes, mucho material was available online long before this, but that year marked the beginning of the official distribution of full-length episodes online, via iTunes, or the networks’ own websites (a practice that has moved from “experimental” to “standard operating procedure” in less than two years). Apparently, though, if we’re to believe the networks and studios (via their representative organization in this conflict, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP)), this content is “promotional,” and thus aren’t really content. Sure, they still sell advertising on them, as they do when they run over the air, and yes, they make a lot of money on that advertising, but don’t call them “content,” because then they might have to pay the people who made the “content.” Which they don’t, at the moment.

So, basically, the strike is about one thing: who gets to profit from the creative work, short-term, long-term, and in-between.

In this regard, it’s been very interesting to see how the sides are waging their war over the past several days. The WGA has done a (mostly) masterful job with relentless pickets at key locations in LA and NY, peppered by celebrities and members of other, supportive unions (SAG, IATSE, and the Teamsters, among others, to various degrees), and culminated (thus far) with the massive demonstration today at Fox’s corporate HQ, which was the largest picket in the history of the guild. As public spectacle, it’s working, except that none of the major TV news organizations are covering it much (hmm, I wonder why not…?) The AMPTP, on the other hand, has no discernible PR strategy, but perhaps they reason that, like Springfield’s Mr. Burns, they don’t need one when they’ve got money and lawyers and the networks themselves. Thus far, they’ve both rattled their swords and tried to blow off the whole thing, which suggests to me that they really are pretty freaked out about where this could be headed (even beyond the virtually inevitable abortion of the 2007-08 TV season).

Along the way, there are some equally compelling side narratives. Let’s call them the “B stories” of the strike for now, but keep an eye on them as the season strike goes on.

The showrunners — the hybrid writer-producers who oversee the creative aspects of TV series and who (technically at least) straddle both sides of this fence — have thus far pledged nearly 100% support for the strike, though they split on how far to go to support it. Some have advocated a complete shutdown of their productions, while others argue that they should honor their contractual obligations for at least the episodes that have already been scripted or shot. Nikki Finke’s report and speculation about the showrunners’ dilemma is a must-read, as is her ongoing reportage on the strike in general. My current work is focused on the role of the television “author,” and the legal and cultural role of these particular “authors” at the moment is fascinating. Here’s several of them at their own picket, at Disney on Wednesday:

Meanwhile, tensions between the striking writers and below-the-line workers are simmering. As is often the case in management’s strategies of divide-and-conquer, many crew members and office staffers have been laid off already. Thus far, the other unions have been officially sympathetic, but there’s a lot of class conflict apparent in this divide, with electricians calling writers greedy millionaires on blog comments. Creative labor takes a lot of specialized labor, and if the WGA is to successfully wage this war, they’ll need the other guilds and unions, and the thousands of now-unemployed technical workers, on board as well.

Over here on the interweb, fans have burst into action, pledging their support, but not quite knowing how to support the writers (although fans in LA and NY have walked the pickets, and fed the picketers). The debate here is about strategy (should I not watch at all? should I only watch the episodes that are already out? who should I write?), but reveals an ongoing development of the fan/producer relationship, which I wrote about, with Cynthia Walker, here. How fans rally around particular writers (and the cult of Joss is thus far the one to really watch), and what impact that has, could be a key development of this whole ordeal.

Lastly, speaking of the internet, there’s the Big Question: can we bury the networks? This post, at the strike’s main info site, articulates well what many are feeling: Google and/or Apple could totally pwn the networks!!!11!1! What’s most striking to me about the post and its comments, and similar sentiments elsewhere, is how variable the knowledge and sentiment is about the ostensibly inevitable merging of the internet and TV. Like the money itself that’s “not” made from online TV distribution, the ability of internet giants to take over the industry is a matter of considerable mystery, fear, hope, and debate. That said, the networks and studios are clearly at least projecting desperation, doing all they can to sustain their economic and cultural relevance.

All in all, what’s possibly at stake, if this really blows up, is nothing less than the entire economic logic of Hollywood. Who gets paid for what and how and when they get paid. When audiences fragment, when distribution costs can be factored out, when content moves to multiple platforms, and when each and every metric for figuring out just what’s going on is under fire…something’s got to give.

We may not have new TV shows for a while, but this is better.

For more academic bloggery on the strike, see Jason and Chuck.

One day, I shall come back…

As you can probably tell from my sporadic posting, this blog is not my top priority. Indeed, it’s well down the list of priorities in my life. While this is certainly not by design, it’s the unfortunate reality of my life. Accordingly, I’m giving up the pretense of being a blogger, at least for the time being, and am putting DKMM on (more-or-less) hold.

It’s not going away for good, and I’ll certainly post when the spirit moves me (and clouds part enough for me to write here), but I won’t be attempting a regular schedule any time soon. So, don’t drop me from your feed reader just yet, but don’t get impatient waiting for new installments. In the meantime, you can tap into my del.icio.us links (my username there is dkompare), and see what I’m up to on the coming CSI casefile at MediaCommons. Enterprising folks will easily be able to track me down elsewhere online as well (including commenting on others’ blogs).

Before I go for now, I did have one last mini-rant. Amidst all the great discussion about media convergence and fandom these past several months (at Henry Jenkins’ blog and elsewhere), there’s been amazingly little acknowledgment of the elephant in the room: time.

I have a fairly typical junior professor workload, with teaching, research, writing, and committee work all commanding and dissecting my attention. I do have three course preps every fall (and two of these are new for me this go ’round; yay), so I’m a bit more crammed this time of year. However, I also have two pre-school-aged children. As any parent can tell you, kids, beautiful and amazing though they are, basically kick your ass, especially when they’re young. My spouse and I divide our work week up so that one of us is always with the kids. While this is far from ideal (and means that I must function exclusively as “Daddy” from about 3 till 8 on most weekdays, and 8 till 8 on weekends), it’s what we have to do.

So when people talk about the latest Web 2.0 gizmos, or playing the Wii, or this week’s hot topic for LiveJournal fans, I can generally only participate in “meta” mode, speculating about what’s going on, but doing very, very little of the actual stuff itself. From time to time, I’m able to nibble a few of these things here and there. But that’s it. I can scarcely keep up with the material I’m actively working on, let alone with anything else going on in the media universe.

There seems to be an unexamined assumption (especially in fan studies) that one has the time to do all (or even some) of these things, when in actuality, it’s amazingly difficult to make the time. Fandom, if defined as a continual active engagement in creative and critical practices, is thus by necessity the province of the temporally privileged, i.e., those with time on their hands. I haven’t had time on my hands since 2003, and look forward to having some again circa 2023. Like I said above, I can stick my toes in (to use another metaphor) from time to time, but can’t get in the water on a regular basis.

On that note, and as work beckons impatiently, I’ll take my leave for now. Till next time, happy musing elsewhere…

“Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”

Brief check-in

Just a brief check-in. In July I was bashing out a book proposal (about which more later [fingers crossed]), then out of town for about nine days, and am now deep in course prep for the fall and myriad plate-spinning other research and writing projects. I’m going to figure out a regular blogging schedule at some point before the semester, as this irregular blogging is even bugging me.

I also wanted to point to a couple of projects elsewhere I’m currently involved. First, it’s CSI week at MediaCommons’ In Media Res, and my piece on the series’ use of Las Vegas ran on July 31, but is still up for viewing and comment. Secondly, both parts of my discussion with Cynthia Walker about fans and producers are this week’s installments of the acafan summer debate series at Henry Jenkins’ blog. I’ll also mirror the discussion over on LiveJournal, if you’re inclined to participate over there.

Back for more soon. In the meantime, go check out Mad Men on AMC. This is my series of the year thus far, and it’s amazing.

MIT 5: TV 2.0 - Remixing Battlestar Galactica

OK, now it was over two months ago; great googly moogly! I’ve finished my summer session class, and, while I’m neck deep in writing projects, they are, indeed, writing projects. Which means I’m writing. So here I am. Writing.

Two months on, and MIT 5 is still relevant in this post-iPhone age. Not only that, this panel, on Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and its fandoms, was the most intriguing panel of the weekend for me, and has given me a lot to chew on as I work through my own issues with authorship and fandom.

Before I get into it, though, I want to point to Julie Levin Russo’s podcasts of the panel. She organized, moderated, and presented on the panel, and recorded it all for posterity. I found these ‘casts to be immensely useful in revisiting these papers. All too often, conference papers recede from memory all too quickly once you’ve left the airport back home on Sunday night. They only function from that point out not as memory, but as a vaguely documented trace of scholarship (i.e., a line on the vita). True, they’ll hopefully also evolve into something more permanent, like an article or book chapter. However, the moment itself is gone, unless recorded. Maybe I’ve just got a thing for reruns, but I really appreciate being able to hear this panel again. Thank you, Julie!

Melanie Kohnen opened the panel with an overview of BSG’s much-discussed war-on-terror iconography and thematics. She argues that the series complicates default media constructions of terrorism and religious fervor by remixing its elements. For example, in BSG, it is the ostensible “bad guys” (the Cylons) who are evangelical monotheists, and the “good guys” (the humans) who (in S3’s “New Caprica” arc) mount an insurgency and plot suicide bombings. Such “remixing” occurs throughout the series, over axes of politics, gender, religion, ethnicity, and technology, questioning the strategies of power, and the tactics of resistance.

Next, Sarah Toton described the history of online BSG fandom from its “old school” roots in single-edited webistes of 1990s webrings (maintained by fans of the original 1978-80 series) to the more open-source, collaborative communities inspired by the new series (link to full paper). Along the way, and in addition to this generational split, fan expression has been gendered. The parameters of BattlestarWiki, for example, are only relatively open in that it seeks to assemble “factual” information about characters, places, events, and objects within the BSG universe (and as if it itself existed in that universe), and marginalizes more interpretive and speculative arguments and accounts of the series. Still, it, and other sites, are potential sites of collaborative canon (or at least “fanon”) generation, and for that reason, should continue to be explored and expanded.

Toton’s paper commanded most of the Q&A, but I can’t recall what transpired. Julie did record it as well, though, so maybe I’ll go back and hear it again!

The final two papers were most interesting to me in exploring the interface of the “sourcetext” (fanspeak for the actual TV episode, in this case) and fan desire.

Anne Kustritz examined the issue of relationships in long-running media texts, arguing that possibilities work best for fans when they remain possible, i.e, left open. BSG, over its first two seaasons, developed an intricate network of possible romantic entanglements, as most of its characters regularly interacted with each other. However, these possibilities, Kustritz argues, began to be shut down as the series went on, with definitive, and heteronormative, relationships becoming the norm into S3.

My observation for Anne (two months later!) is that sustaining openness, on a tightly serialized program like BSG, strains its realist conventions. In other words, while some fans may want the possibilities to linger, others, and the writers, may want to move the story on. There’s no narrative movement, no decisions, no regrets, if nothing tangible happens. That said, I agree that it’s sadly conventional in most of its choices in this regard (though there’s still going to be a lot to say/write about Kara Thrace and her passions when it’s all said and done next spring…).

On a similar path, Julie Levin Russo explored the queer possibilites the series has opened up thus far, revealing tensions between fans’ desires (their multiform love for the characters and its possibilities) and authorial actions that complicate that love. She donned her “girl slash goggles,” her chosen love technology, to show how queer modes of love could be found in the gaps and interstices of the text. (Note: you can see Russo, and the BSG GSGs, in the video clip of her paper). Most persuasively, she pointed out how the video clips made available on the official BSG site for fanvid production were generic and CGI-centric, favoring a particular kind of fanboy techno-love, in contrast to the fangirl-produced, character-centered fanvids at iMeem and elsewhere.

This paper was as compelling an account of queer online media fandom as I’ve ever read or heard. The primary point, about whose love is validated, and how, was particularly relevant to ongoing debates about the parameters of fandom. While at the time I thought she was a mite unfair to Ron Moore when she criticized his excuse for not having any gay characters on BSG, in retrospect (i.e., in “watching” the rerun of her paper), I can see her point. He is fighting the “good fight” on many fronts (as Kohnen argued), but obviously taking on heteornormativity isn’t one of them. It is telling that the one definitive space opened up for a “queerer” love on the show - the quaintly domestic and sorta Pottery Barn-ish threesome of D’Anna, Caprica, and Gaius - while vaguely utopian (as with much of the Cylon ethos, to the show’s credit), was also limited to these three “baddies,” and fell apart anyway pretty quickly (though it has to be said, that was all Gaius’ fault!).

So, a strong, thought-provoking panel overall, and one I was glad to revisit. This meta-issue about the boundaries of the “official” text and fan desires/creativity is particularly relevant to my work right now, as is the problematic gendered constructions of “fans” (”girls” and “boys”) and “The Powers That Be” (by the media, by fans, by academics, and by acafans). These papers gave me a lot to process.

Next up, the final MIT 5 retrospective!: Getting Lost (or “where the hell is Building 1?!?”)

More fan debate: what’s “traditional fan behavior” anyway?

Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova have a great discussion in this week’s Fan Debate offering, querying not only the limits of the category “fan,” but what does all these gendered distinctions offer to the discussion. I’m particularly in agreement with Ksenia’s points about how the construction of fandom in academia and in particular fan communities has itself structured what “counts” as “fandom.” To wit, here she wonders whether, in all the current focus on LiveJournal-centered fandom (in academic writing, at least), we’ve lost contact with other, more mundane, and more numerous, venues and practices:

That’s one of the striking things about sites like Livejournal for me – the way it places personal thoughts and conversation into a semi-public, semi-permanent arena – and the accessibility of blogs and discussion boards is obviously a gift for fan-scholars. But obviously, if we rely on those easily-accessible forms of fan discourse, we’re also overlooking all the more elusive discussion that goes on every day in the living room or the staff canteen, and perhaps we risk taking the part as representative of the whole. Again, let’s bear in mind that there are a lot of people, male and female, like myself – who enjoyed Serenity and Firefly but don’t create anything about it or engage in any communities about it. A lot of people who value a specific cultural text and for whom that text is an important part of their lives don’t engage in easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

It’s this notion of “traditional fan behaviour” that really nails it. What’s “traditional” in one venue may be an outlier in another. Part of the problem the whole endeavor of fan studies has is that the parameters of fandom are simultaneously crucial and indefinite. The identification and observation of myriad borders, boundaries, territories, and the like (e.g,. public vs. private message boards, friendslists, official vs. un-official sites, gen vs. slash, etc.) are what seemingly fuels much fan studies…and yet there is no map of the entire fan “universe” (nor could there ever be*). The debate about fandom being either a matter of degree or kind in the past few weeks’ discussion at fandebate and elsewhere points to this missing whole: is it totally distinct (from “regular” reading/viewing), or is it “regular” readingviewing, only amped up the scale?

Moreover, what is it exactly that separates these territories? Gender has been the default marker of this entire discussion, but I’ve always had the nagging feeling that what we’ve really been talking about was more particular practices (and within that, particular kinds of “progressive” creative output and/or reading strategies) than anything as unwieldy as “gender” per se. I’m more interested in understanding these practices first, and understanding how they’re deployed and managed, than in starting from a label of “male” or “female” or “fangirl” or “fanboy.” I hope Will and Ksenia have helped move this discussion forward this week.

* That said, the notion (spectre?) of quantitative analysis and demographics keeps surfacing in these discussions like a kind of epistemological whale in a sea of theorizing, with most acknowledging that it just hasn’t been done enough (but few volunteering to do it!).

MIT5: Towards a Culture of Collaboration

I attended this panel mostly due to my conference roommate (and one-time office-mate) Michael Newman (of zigzigger fame), who gave an overview of the Ze Frank phenomenon (here’s the full paper (PDF)). In case you’re not familiar, The Show with Ze Frank was an almost daily video webcast by the titular NY artist-cum-prankster which ran from March 2006 to March 2007, and attracted thousands of fans, who participated in many online (and real-world) interactive communities and projects inspired by The Show. Mike described the webcasts and the various identities it inspired in its fans (known as “sports racers,” or, if you were really cool, “fabulosos”), pointing out how it functioned as kind of an ongoing art project for Ze Frank and (more importantly) his fans. That’s “art” with a little “a,” by the way, which is how both Michael and Ze Frank would describe it; i.e., ways of creatively using digital tools and the internet to generate new forms and identities.

Working in a similar tack, Boston artist Ravi Jain gave an overview of his various online endeavors, which included an as-stereotypical-as-possible web sitcom (starring him and a few friends), an open-source cake (no, really!), and, most recently, Drive Time, a talk show (complete with co-host, his wife Sonia) done in his car, on his morning commute. Ravi’s interested in not only open source interactivity between artist and audience, but also in how affordable tools (e.g., small digital cameras, consumer-grade non-linear editing systems, blogs) can facilitate such exchanges.

This panel also had “Art” (with a big “A”) in the form of Wafaa Bilal and Shawn Lawson, known collectively as CrudeOils. Their works involve critiquing and reworking the idea of interactive art away from works based around common interfaces (i.e., a PC and a mouse) and towards modes of temporal and spatial interaction with and within artworks. Unlike the works of Ze Frank and Ravi Jain, Crudeoils’ works require extensive and sophisticated computer hardware and software, as well as access to resources such as gallery space. Still, it indicates how the idea of collaborative art takes in a wide array of practices and venues. Very fascinating stuff, all of which is described and presented on their website.

MIT5: Fans and Producers

Time flies, even in the summer. I’m pulled between several different projects at the moment (and teaching a summer session class) so the ol’ blog sometimes falls off the radar.

Anyway, continuing on with my review of MIT5…

The “Fans and Producers” panel was a highlight of the weekend for me, not only for presenting some work that had been gestating a while, but also for the ensuing discussion and subsequent eruption of academic/fannish (i.e., “acafan”) discussion. As noted earlier, Henry Jenkins has dedicated the summer to this topic on his blog. Kristina Busse has worked hard to keeping several discussions going, and has just added another LJ community to continue the debates started on Henry’s site.

At the panel, this debate was framed in a variety of ways. The first presenters, Joan Giglione and Robert Gustafson, took a more psychological approach to the issue, positing the fan-celebrity encounter as fraught with various anxieties. While I’m fascinated with the overall issue, the presentation itself meandered with little sense of organization (and, ruthless panel moderator that I am, I cut it off at about 22 minutes). I can’t really comment much on it because of this, but important differences with this approach emerged later in the comments.

Sam Ford next presented his work on the longstanding relationship between soap producers and fans (Here’s the full paper (PDF).). This was an important paper in a number of ways, pointing out the complex ways that fans and “TPTB” have viewed (and used) each other in this particular genre, tracing its history over a few decades of viewership, and raising the idea of the “old” (i.e., older than 49) viewer-historian as a key resource not only for soap fandom, but soap production.

Finally, I gave my initial version of my work on the authorship discourses produced around Doctor Who’s Russell T. Davies (the PDF of which will be up on the conference site shortly). While this is part of a larger project on contemporary television authorship, I am developing it into a stand-alone piece about this particular conjunction of “fan” and “producer” discourses–as shaped primarily by press and PR venues–as a model of “cult TV” production and promotion (I’m still working on how I’m dealing with its actual reception, and am in the process of getting up to speed on fan studies).

While the panel went off well, the real indication of its success came in the comments, when the room erupted in response to Joan Giglione’s (it has to be said) dismissive treatment of an audience question. She asked if the questioner (Bob Rehak, if I remember right) if he had “ever been on a Hollywood set.” When he answered no, she and Gustafson threw their hands up as if to say “well, there’s your problem.”

This elicited an intense exchange about the very epistemology of our object(s) of study. Giglione seemingly, and uncritically, located direct observation of “Hollywood sets” as the “truth” of media culture, while most of the room (including myself) viewed such access as but one particular discourse which, while important, does not necessarily trump other accounts. In my case, for the purposes of this paper, I’m more interested in how what goes on on the (Cardiff, not Hollywood) set of Doctor Who is packaged and presented to various publics, than in what the “actual” production is like.

The question itself - “Have you ever been on a Hollywood set?” - has stuck with me ever since that weekend, as I’ve pondered its explicit hierarchies of knowledge generation, and considered its several ironies (e.g., Hollywood sets are for the production of fantasy; scholarly access to a Hollywood set does not equate with the labor of Hollywood production, etc.). The knowledge gap it suggests cuts right to the core of what we do as media scholars, drawing in everything from Media Effects to Political Economy to Textual Analysis to Cultural Studies. More to come on this one, I’m certain.

This panel also partially fueled Kristina Busse’s response to the conference (which I’ve mentioned in earlier posts), which revealed another set of knowledge discourses that I (as scholar and panel moderator) had previously neglected: the fans themselves, and particularly the viewpoints of female fans and acafans to issues of knowledge, authorship, and textual authority.

I was (unknowingly) seen as one of the “fanboys” attending other “fanboy” panels, rather than the “fangirl” ones. In retrospect, judging by the company I kept that weekend, I can certainly see how that perception emerged. This realization has been important for me in opening up consideration of various codes of power (in that old Foucaultian sense) in my work and scholarly life: gendered, classed, academic, aged, textual, etc. Perhaps I’ve let these differences slide from my conscious thought too much (especially at conferences, where I’m still getting used to friendly grad students coming up to me about Rerun Nation). Regardless of where this comes from (gender, age, race, class, etc.) I’m working out how to maintain this awareness in future.

Next up in the MIT5 review: Towards a Culture of Collaboration (on interactive and online art)