The first three parts of this series are available here, here, and here. I have been running this series over at my blog as well. This series, which concludes with this piece, is co-authored by myself and Dr. Joshua Green, the Consortium's Research Manager.
Prohibitionists and The Moral Economy
"The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important." - Tim O'Reilly (2005)
"Our entire cultural economy is in dire straights....We will live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising." -- Andrew Keen (2007)
See the first two parts of this series here and here. I have been running this over on my blog. This series is co-authored between myself and Dr. Joshua Green, C3's Research Manager.
The Value of Engagement and Participation
"Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of their creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help to create value or they will refuse it... Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it." --Grant McCracken (1997)
At the most basic level, the distribution and publicity mechanisms of networked computing renders visible the often "invisible" labor fans perform in supporting their favorite properties.
As a variety of people who read our blog know, the Consortium has been engaged since its launch in researching the ways in which the audience is constructed. While the media industries, and business parlance in general, often discuss what is known as "the consumer," discussion of those who access digital tools often refer to people as "users." We often discuss "audiences" and use the term "fans" in particular to describe the more engaged of those audience members as a way to insert agency back into the discussion of relationships between media producers and brands and those who support their products, rather than a construction in which the power is presumed to lie primarily in the hands of those who make the products, be they cultural products or goods and services.
This motivation and concern, along with our increased interest in studying online video, were the motivations behind C3 Research Manager Joshua Green's presentation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference earlier this month. Joshua joined alongside other scholars studying YouTube, in light of our own work inside the Consortium at present on the video sharing site, not to present the particulars of what we've found in our early analysis of Youtube content but rather to talk about how to approach these new venues, and how to understand those who use these tools to consume and create content.
Joshua's presentation was entitled "The People Formerly Known As: What Happens to the Audience When We're All 'Users'?"
See the first part of this series here. I have been running this over on my blog. This series is co-authored between myself and Dr. Joshua Green, C3's Research Manager.
Convergence Culture
"The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet." -- Clay Shirkey (2000)
Push-button publishing, citizen journalism, and pro-amateur creative activities dominated early conceptions of the ways digitization would change media production. Newer, so-called "Web 2.0" companies integrate participatory components into their business plans. These activities run from feedback forums and beta-tests to inviting audiences to produce, tag, or remix content. Online services regularly collected under the banner of 'Web 2.0' such as photo sharing site flickr, social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, and video uploading sites such as YouTube and Veoh, have built entire business plans on the back of user-generated content. Software companies engage users as beta-testers and co-creators of content (Banks 2002). Marketing departments build puzzles, scavenger hunts, and interactive components into websites and mixed-media campaigns to generate buzz around branded entertainment properties. Technological, cultural, and marketplace changes make such tactics a necessity.
I wrote the following essay on the cultural politics around web 2.0 with Joshua Green, a post-doc in the CMS program, who is speerheading the Convergence Culture Consortium and who is my partner in crime in organizing the Futures of Entertainment conferences. Green came to us from the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology. This paper blends work out of Queensland on creative industries with work out of MIT on convergence culture. Green is currently completing a book manuscript about YouTube with Jean Burgess, who was interviewed over at my blog earlier this year. I am running this series on my blog but also wanted to cross-post it here, considering its relationship to the work we do here in the Consortium.
As part of ongoing work about YouTube and the nature of online video sharing we've been pursuing, I've been looking lately at the some of the reasons for the ascension of the service to almost generic status as a shorthand for online video-sharing. The reasons for YouTube's rise to Xerox status in the US are many and murky, some having to do with diverse matters like site design, early mover status, canny marketing, the width of the stripes on their sweaters and champions they picked up along the way. Undoubtedly, however, I think that one of the reasons for YouTube's particular success is the downmarket quality of the video on the site. This is due to change, with the service currently testing technology that's been in development for a while now to increase the video and audio quality of the site, so it is perhaps prudent to point to some of the reasons I think grainy quality equalled success in YouTube's case.
The varied uses of YouTube by candidates, citizens and the news media has lent a participatory air to the 2008 US Presidential election. While there is an emphasis in much of this discussion on the possibilities for candidates and citizens to connect more directly with each other (however unevenly this might be realized in practice), effective participation in democratic systems equally relies on access to information. In this regard, both Yahoo's Election '08 Political Dashboard and the ECOresearch Network's US Election 2008 Web Monitor projects , both of which offer reasonably sophisticated tools for tracking campaign coverage and candidate performance, are especially interesting because of the access to information and analysis they provide.
With the WGA strike looking like it will push through into January, I wanted to draw your attention to a few bits of content available online that might serve as a stop-gap through the holiday season if reality programming and christmas specials aren't to your taste.
First, this seems a good juncture to point you once again to the podcasts from this year's Futures of Entertainment conference are starting to go up on the FoE2 site. Audio and video of the panels are being uploaded progressively, and we'll make another announcement when the entire set is available.
The second thing worth drawing your attention to is that footage from the recent Portland convergence conference is available on YouTube. Below is the first part of my presentation that opened the conference, titled "More than Bringing Bits Together: Convergence Culture and New Media Logics". This presentation provides a working through of some of the concepts discussed in Convergence Culture, touching on some of the work we've been doing here at the Consortium and presenting some of the arguments Henry and I make in our forthcoming chapter in Alisa Perren and Jennifer Holt's Media Industries: History, Theory and Methods book. Parts two and three are below the jump as is an interview with Mark Deuze about agency culture and media work.
The opening remarks at this year's FUTURES OF ENTERTAINMENT conference are being made by Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies, and Joshua Green, research manager for C3.
Participate in the backchannel in real-time at backchan.nl.
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part Two): Melissa Click and Joshua Green
MC: How do we proceed in fan studies--what do we agree belongs in this category, and what should be left out? There seems to be an agreement (if only a reluctant one) among folks in this discussion on the idea that the category "fan" should be broadened. Concern has been expressed, however, that if we make it too broad, it will lose its meaning. Could we begin to try to nail it down by suggesting the ways "audience" and "fans" might be different?
JG: I'm really interested in this question as I think complicating the term "fan", and its use, can help us to start to understand how ideas about the audience itself is being transformed by the participatory moment that has arisen. This discussion has offered up a good range of ways to account for fandom that run the gamut from structures of feeling to productive consumption via a spectrum of viewing intensity (and the comments even offered up "fanatic" at one point). Theoretically pragmatic personally, I drew a lot from Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson's deconstruction of fans as an object of study that can be generalized about, challenging the notion of the fan as necessarily determined by community, socialization, productivity, consumption, engagement, or outsider status. Their ultimate conclusion seemed to be that the fan as an object of study needs to be understood as a multiplicitous social construction and contextualized within historical and cultural specificity. That said, they also draw upon the notion of the fan as a sort of cultural logic used to describe particular categories of consumption for the purposes of patrolling 'normal' behavior. This is a classic position for the fan, historically positioned as atypical or anomalous in ways that permit the delimitation of acceptable media consumption and engagement habits.
In the current moment, however, where non-fan audiences (apologies for the clunky language) are bring increasingly described if not constructed through discourses of production, the fan seems to have been drawn back in somewhat from the edge. As the television industry, especially, attempts to make sense of the impact of inviting viewers to participate, losing control over the contexts of consumption, and realigns itself in an environment that seems likely to privilege multiple separate opportunities to view content, certain elements of the fandom look very tantalizing as models of audience practice worth encouraging. Of course, this is not unproblematic, and the industry seems mostly interested in promoting the depth of engagement and what I would characterize as the structures of feeling of fan engagement and hopefully not having to deal with the politics of ownership and production that emerge from fandom. But the fan as a model of a passionate consumer, a loyal consumer, a willing participant, a word-of-mouth marketer (or what Sam Ford regularly refers to as a proselytizer), an active participant in expansive storyworlds, and even a producer of additional textual elements (whatever sanctioned or tolerated form they might take), seems to be having an impact on the model of 'regular' audienceship, particularly as the behaviors once considered anomalous (such as archiving content, to pick up on Derek's own example) are wrapped into revenue models or normalized through cultural practice.
MC: I should confess (in case it's not yet obvious) that I'm in agreement with the folks who keep saying that they think there's something useful in studying audience members who do not behave as fans have typically been defined--as communal producers of materials that "rewrite" media texts. I support this perspective because it speaks to my experiences as a fan--and I find it useful in terms of understanding the activity I have seen in my study of Martha Stewart fans.
Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part One): Melissa Click and Joshua Green
This is part of the Gender and Fan Studies series that is running over on Henry Jenkins' blog.
MC: Hi, I'm Melissa Click and I'm completing my dissertation on Martha Stewart fans (at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst), teaching at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and am just catching up on my sleep after the wonderfully overwhelming experience of having my first child. Having one foot in the East Coast and the other foot in the Mid-West, being in the midst of completing my Ph.D. while developing my professional identity as a scholar, and trying to figure out how to balance my work life and newly changed homelife, means that I'm still catching up on my TV viewing (I heart Tivo), I don't usually blog, and I'm a bit more behind on academic reading than I'd prefer.
As a scholar writing about Martha Stewart fans, I have argued that the women and men I interviewed were not simply audience members, they are fans (and anti-fans, for that matter). However, the types of fandom they demonstrated were different than many of the types of fandom discussed here: they didn't write Martha fan-fic, create Martha fan-vids, etc. My interest in their fandom overlapped with my own interest in/repulsion by Stewart's texts, and my allegiance with their behaviors as fans--my expressions of fandom mirror the behaviors gendered "masculine" in this discussion.
JG: Hello all, my name is Joshua Green. I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where I also run the Convergence Culture Consortium. At the Consortium we do a lot of work about the changing patterns of relationships between media producers - big and small, professional and amateur - media content and various audience formulations. We work with some "big media" companies (though not exclusively) to come to understand the changing environment in which their content circulates and the changing logics of the media space when you factor in participatory culture and the changing constitution of the audience experience.
Before I transplanted from Australia to the States, I was working on the recent history Australian television, particularly looking at the way the Australian television system resolved the presence of international, and specifically American, programming with discourses of nationalism. My (I suppose still recently completed) dissertation looked at the way Dawson's Creek was nationalized by industrial promotional strategies and received by a range of Australian viewers. I'm currently really, very interested in the ways we can understand the constitution and composition of television audiences as they're imagined more and more as media producers, or at least, as the role of media production is increasingly prescribed for those we used to understand as audiences.
If anyone is going to be in Portland on the 6th and 7th of September, I'll be speaking at inVerge: The Interactive Convergence Conference at the Gerding Theater. The conference gathers an interesting group of people together, including Jeff Yapp of MTV Networks, Catherine Ogilvie, of Edelman, and long time friend of the Consortium, Mark Deuze. Portland looks like it will be jumping, as there are a three other events taking place over those days, and the conference itself looks like it will be a sustaining and thought provoking event. Click the link for an overview of my presentation, which explores many of the principles we're exploring this year, and drop me a line if you'll be in town.
