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Off the Line: Independent Television and the Pitch to Reinvent Hollywood. 2012. 

The dissertation investigates the early years (2006-2011) of the market for independent television, or “web series,” arguing it represents a marginal but historically significant challenge to media industries (Hollywood) in a period of convergence. It asks why and how in this historical moment have web series creators opted to produce and distribute “television” independently through alternative markets.More broadly, it asks what the market for independent television contributes to scholarly debates over the possibility of a new media system, whether it supports or contradicts claims media industries are changing in the face of digital culture. The web series market reflects what I call “off the line” production in this historical moment. Creators of independent web series attempt to reinvent and reinterpret traditional forms of production, storytelling, marketing and distribution from outside its structures. The activity in this cottage industry represents a “pitch” to Hollywood, a supposedly new and potentially profitable way of producing and distributing video.

As a market operating on the margins of Hollywood, the web series world is different from the industry, but in many ways the same. This project will tease out those differences, examining how creators and entrepreneurs distinguish their practices from the industry while borrowing what they believe works from mainstream production. Unlike popular notions of alternative production, such as noncommercial art cinema, participants in the web series market occupy an in-between space: deviating from industrial norms while ultimately seeking capital for their efforts.

When completed, the project should speak to scholars researching the production of television, new media and film; it may also be of interest to those interested in histories and theories of labor, representation and the political economy of distribution.

Special thanks to my dissertation committee — Katherine Sender, Joseph Turow and John Jackson, along with Henry Jenkins and John Caldwell — for their advice and guidance.

For a preview of the structure and purpose of the dissertation, please see this primer published on my blog.

The Web As Television Reimagined? Online Networks and the Pursuit of Legacy Media. 2012. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 36 (4).

This essay explores the history of online video networks from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, from American Cybercast to YouTube. Television’s weakness at the turn of the century opened a rhetorical and economic space for entrepreneurs eager to curate and distribute web programs. These companies introduced various forms of experimentation they associated with the advantages of digital technologies, but they also maintained continuity with television’s business practices. This dialectic between old and new, continuity and change, insiders and outsiders, reflected the instability of television as a concept and the promise of the web as an alternative. Using articles in the trade press, this essay explores the history of episodic web programming—variously called web series, webisodes, bitcoms, web television and, in its earliest form, cybersoaps—as new media network executives hoped to replicate but also differentiate themselves from legacy media.

Beyond Big Video: The Instability of independent networks in a new media market. 2012. Continuum, 26 (1).

This essay explores the possibility of an online video market operating independent of conglomerations. At stake is whether new media can operate “democratically,” providing more equal distribution of control to producers and distributors within an unequal market. This is the story of a handful of these websites, all of which promise this possibility: Strike TV, My Damn Channel, KoldCast, Babelgum and Quarterlife. Their stories offer telling case studies of new media in their formative years. In the end, without industrial structures in place, independents must grapple with rapidly changing conditions, improvise business strategies and, ultimately, work with the mainstream, traditional structures to which they were, however superficially, in opposition. Independent distribution in early media emerges as a practice as much indebted to the old media as it pushes new forms of engagement, marketing and production.

Special thanks to Graeme Turner for his help with developing the article.

For a brief summary of the article, click here.

Fandom as Industrial Response: Producing Identity in an Independent Web Series. 2011.Transformative Works & Culture, 8.

This essay examines the development, production and distribution of a web series, The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, which it frames as a fan-driven response to an industrial product, Sex and the City. As intermittent participants within the Hollywood industry, the series producers, a diverse group of lesbian and straight women of various ethnicities, positioned their series as a market-oriented product intended to reform the industry from its margins and participate in a growing new media economy. The essay calls for expanded notions of fan production, industry and fresh frameworks for analyzing the effects of digital distribution, especially for communities of color, women and sexual minorities.

For a brief summary of the article, click here.

Producing Television 2.0: Reinventing the Industry in MTV’s Valemont. 2011. National Communication Association 2011 Conference. New Orleans, LA. 17-20, November.

MTV’s web series Valemont marked a significant shift in traditional network practices: a piece of “branded entertainment” – sponsored by Verizon – and a web series with an alternate reality game featuring mobile extensions and involving Twitter, a fake university website, and, to a lesser extent, Facebook and YouTube.This essay narrates how Valemont proposed an alternative to traditional network development, production and distribution practices. First, through interviews, it introduces its production team, an independent working both within and outside the industry to reform it. The rest of the essay focuses on the series itself: its distribution platforms, its engagement with fans and its alternate reality game. ‘Valemont’ emerges as a novelty in the television landscape, an ambitious if politically limited effort to make the industry more flexible and engaged, between fans and producers, producers and sponsors, and networks and new forms of releasing content.

Special thanks to Denise Mann for her help developing this article.

Not TV, Not the Web: Mobile Video Between Openness and Control. 2012. Mobile Media Reader. Noah Arceneaux, ed. Bruges, Belgium: College of Europe.

This chapter focuses on the efforts of three distributors of independent web video – Vimeo, My Damn Channel, and Q3030 Networks – alongside larger video sites – YouTube, Hulu and Crackle – to show how navigating the mobile market involves negotiating complex industrial and technological considerations. I outline what these companies wanted from mobile distribution and how they conceptualized their needs in the months leading up to and directly following the government’s first official statement on net neutrality and its exception for wireless services.From their perspective, the realities of the mobile video market illuminate how new media arise in fractured markets, not fully open or closed to new and established entrants. This chapter analyzes a sector of the mobile video market in a specific, narrow period of time. In the end, the mobile device itself holds no inherent meaning or politics outside its market and government players, all of whom are still working out how to deliver mobile content.

Joe Swanberg, Intimacy and the Digital Aesthetic. 2011. Cinema Journal, 50 (4).

Using the works of Joe Swanberg, primarily LOL, and weaving in films from other directors, this paper argues for mumblecore as a distinct form of realism based on a “digital aesthetic,” an aesthetic not merely in style and form, but also in the themes emanating from this form. This digital aesthetic, a result of theories from film and new media history, supports what I call “networked film,” both of which make mumblecore distinct from prior attempts at realism in film and distinguish it as an early 21st century phenomenon.

Thanks to Leo Charney for advising me on this project.

For a brief summary of the article, click here.

“Real Vlogs: The Rules and Meanings of Online Video.” 2009. First Monday, 14 (11).

This paper explores what the “rules” of vlogging (video blogging) are: the various visual and social practices viewers and creators understand and debate as either authentic or inauthentic on YouTube. It analyzes a small, random set of vlogs on YouTube and highlight several controversies around key celebrities on the site. This essay concludes by challenging whether conversations around authenticity will persist in dialogues about online video.

Special thanks to Paul Messaris for his help developing this article.

For a brief summary of the article, click here.

“Camp 2.0: A Queer Performance of the Personal.” 2010. Communication, Culture and Critique. 13 (3).

Camp has a rich and complicated history, its meanings and forms periodically shifting. Camp is variously known as a style of communication, a subcultural social glue, or a political position. In its newest incarnation online, camp has morphed in ways that contradict, or at least deviate from, its historical understandings.Spurred by the structure of YouTube and broader social trends, performers are infusing sincerity, emotion and deeper meanings of selfhood into camp, breaking with historical precedent, challenging the meanings of camp and, perhaps, the nature of performance. Performers of camp must negotiate their own gender and sexual identities, their audience, their artistic style, their desire for fame, and their “sense of self” when making videos and maintaining their web presence. These interests collide to result in a form of queer performance which partially unravels, though sometimes imitates, the forms in the past. The results of these negotiations show up in both the statements performers make but also in the videos themselves – both how they are made and what content they broadcast.

Special thanks to Katherine Sender for counsel and support. Click above for a poster demonstration.

For a brief summary of the article, click here.

Independent Cinema in Hong Kong: Negotiating Independence, Navigating Global Markets and Defining the Nation. 2010. Lecture. SummerCulture Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA.

Far from its heyday as the center of Asian film production, the market for Hong Kong cinema has changed drastically over the past ten years. Independent filmmaking — locally produced and shot — is experiencing a small revival, with the participation of the government and the local industry. Yet that market faces numerous challenges: a small and insufficient local box office, the global marketing power of China and, most significantly, a still nascent notion of Hong Kong identity, all of which prevent the forms from maturing achieving “independence.”