Click for journal article at Continuum

As video networks become increasingly successful monetizing audiences — through either advertising or subscription — the question arises: what about everyone else? Most Americans are unaware of the rich ecosystem for video online, from smaller omnibus sites like Blip to minority networks like GLO.

Yet as dynamic as the space is there are still enormous challenges. For years, no company has been able to outpace the size of YouTube or content quality of Hulu. I have a recent article in the academic journal Continuum – “Beyond big video: the instability of independent networks in a new media market” – attempting to understand the innovations and challenges these networks bring to our understanding of our “new media” moment.

The question of how smaller networks will survive in this landscape is more pressing as Netflix and YouTube pump millions in programming. At the top of video market, the major players are already pretty consistent, a combination of YouTube (views) and Hulu (leader in ads), and then Facebook, MSN, Aol, Yahoo and Viacom sites battling it out for the rest.

If you lack that kind of market share, what are your options? Most sites have focused fine-tuning ad sales, through some combination of curating quality programs, refining ad-serving technologies and developing branded entertainment. The latter has proven particularly lucrative for some sites; My Damn Channel and Machinima.com are two great examples. As the video market matures, there’s hope many more networks will be able to survive along with the bigger guys, the kind of long-tail expansion we’ve seen a bit of on television (admittedly aided by conglomeration).

The Continuum article is limited by its time frame — I had to analyze a specific moment, roughly 2007-2010 — and by its case-study methodology. Nevertheless I hope it is useful to media scholars looking for a grounded analysis of how digital media markets are sometimes limited by the old media realities, which rewards companies sophisticated enough to cater to the largescale advertisers and marketers capable of investing in a new medium.

I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to announce a new blog about the future of video and television! Within the last month, YouTube’s re-launch has changed the video landscape, Hulu and Netflix announced more original content, and the web series community has been experimenting with award shows.

Hacktivision is the brainchild of Josh Braun, a Quinnipiac University professor — and recent doctoral graduate at Cornell — who’s been researching new media and television. The site is being supported by Quinnipiac. Braun is the managing editor, and I’m an editor.

There’s been big revival in television criticism and scholarship over the past ten years in response to the medium’s rapid transformation by cable and digital distribution. A number of sites like Antenna, Flow and In Media Res publish essays in this area.

Meanwhile writers focused on digital media have been turning to TV scholarship as video consumption rises and web-grown companies grow in scale and financial clout. I can’t think of a better way for journalists, academics and practitioners to talk about the incredible changes underway in our media system, and TV studies seems uniquely positioned to examine contemporary visual culture holistically. (See Noel Kirkpatrick’s review of Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz’s new book on television studies for an example of what I mean).

We hope the the site will be a hub for writing not only on video and TV, but also its relationship to social media, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, policy, tech and film. No medium is an island these days!

Visit the site, follow it on Twitter and like it on Facebook (heck, even circle it on Google+).

Finally, please take a look at our stellar list of contributors, who I’m sure will produce provocative and fun posts and essays over the coming months!

Some of you may remember the web series The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, a satirical show about Rasha, a Lebanese lesbian forced to date men to finance her book project. The series got a lot of coverage last year, from NPR to Jezebel, and a host of lesbian-focused blogs and websites. Super-syndicated across various networks — Strike TV, KoldCast, AfterEllen, RowdyOrbit, among others — it was a successful experiment in indie production.

I was fascinated the producers’ efforts to posit an alternative to Sex and the City and its many copycats by integrating chick-lit/rom-com storytelling with a sensitivity to race, gender and sexuality.

So, in the spirit of honoring the amazing things filmmakers can do, I wrote up a case study of the show now published in the current issue of Transformative Works & Cultures!

The article is for a special issue on race and fandom, an outgrowth of a 2009 symposium on race, ethnicity and (new) media. Because of the journal’s focus on fan studies, I emphasized the series’ use of Sex and the City to market their show in the broader media landscape. Judging from the coverage they received, it seems to have worked.

The thrust of the essay underscores the importance of the market and industry for producers of fan works. Fans have historically tried to influence the industry — typically Hollywood — in a lot of interesting ways, including direct forms of activism. Now, for many years, digital marketplaces have allowed fans to create their own commodities, a way to get the industry’s attention through capitalism. Creating a web series has become in recent years an important part of that process, from Machinima to original dramas and sitcoms.

Most independent web series creators have a mainstream media property to which they are responding. Most media producers do as well. Television shows and movies get sold by resting on the shoulders of success. Ringer = Lost + Alias (right?). You know the drill.

A lot of web shows made from 2007-2009 used Sex and the City as a referent (the other popular referent was The Office). The Real Girl’s Guide is among the most direct, since the creators were both fans of the series and anti-fans of the films (as were most of us!). The producers of the show were saavy marketers and used their particular perspective on woman’s media — an effort to integrate issues of race and sexuality — to get press and attention.

Check out the article if you can — I tried to minimize jargon — and let me know what you think in the comments or shoot me an email at aj (at) ajchristian (dot) org.

PS – For those fans of RGGTEE the producers tell me a plan for season two is in the works. Stay tuned!

Academic publishing is slow. Everybody knows that. So it should come as no surprise that only now is my article on mumblecore, titled “Joe Swanberg, Intimacy and the Digital Aesthetic,” coming out in the latest issue of Cinema Journal.

2011 a strange time for an article on mumblecore, since it is now “over.” I wrote the article, which focuses on Joe Swanberg’s LOL (2006), in 2008, several months after The New York Times, encouraged by IFC, started fawning over it.

By now, many of mumblecore’s bigger names have moved on or more matured, though a full account is complicated by the fact that there’s no clear answer on who was or was not under its umbrella. Sill, the likes of Mark Duplass, Greta Gerwig, Lynn Shelton and Kelly Reichardt now have promising careers and are associated with increasingly buzzy projects. And micro-budget filmmaking has taken interesting turns, from Lena Dunham’s dark, satirical Tiny Furniture to Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister Jones’ Breaking Upwards.

What was mumblecore? Many of its formal characteristics were side effects of the rise of digital filmmaking — because of cost — and rarely true artistic statements about the state of cinema. I argue in my article that mumblecore has to be placed in a broader media context, one which includes blogs, live webcams and early YouTube videos — back when YouTube was a collection of low-res vlogs. Other contexts, from reality television and Dogme 95, could also be relevant.

If you take away that context — the period from 2004-2007 when web video was on the rise and when cell phones were just starting to become cameras — you lose a lot of what was significant about the collection of films.

As the beginnings of lonelygirl15 showed us, people were genuinely questioning what digital culture meant, what was “real.” I was working at the Washington Post in 2005 and it was a big deal when, during the London bombing, the Post published a cell phone image on its front page. Now every disaster comes with calls from newspapers for readers to send in photos.

My point is mumblecore died because it was only “new” because everything was new. Now web video is a real industry, and its production values rival that of many mainstream projects. Digital cameras are cheap and even more sophisticated, and with little effort a quality image is easy to produce (though sound remains an issue for indies, so there’s that). Cell phones shoot in HD. All that grainy pseudo-realism and feigned malaise about the ever-worsening postcollegiate job market seems woefully quaint in retrospect.

This is not to say mumblecore wasn’t meaningful. Far from it. LOL remains a subtle investigation of digital culture, among the best to date, and I chose it as a case study because it explicitly grappled with questions of realism. It might look postmodern, with all its strange interludes and affectless acting, but it was actually a searing critique of loneliness a digital world. Swanberg was preoccupied with how human connections form, dissolve or fail to materialize, and he was pretty insightful about it.

Swanberg has stayed admirably committed to independent production, despite the fact that it’s never made him much money. While Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers get more press, Swanberg has remained relevant for his continued work creating content across platforms and sticking true to realism. Young American Bodies, distributed on IFC.com, is now a classic web series, and Swanberg is still making features.

There’s still a lot to be written about mumblecore, and some of it is happening. I know scholar Geoff King has a book in the works that explores aspects of the movement, and he pays particularly close attention to Four-Eyed Monsters (2005), a seminal film creatively distributed across platforms I wish I’d spent more time analyzing.

But as video production and distribution technologies have improved, mumblecore has lost its novelty. Micro-budget realism will live on, and occasionally become popular. But the mumblecore style will no longer be new; it can’t compete.

Now the media marketplace demands more ambitious storytelling at lower costs, and the buzziest projects look more like Plot Device (2011), Panic Attack (2009), and Alive in Joburg (2005). Mumblecore was a quieter movement from a simpler time when competition was low and digitally produced realism a sight to behold.

Hollywood isn’t the only industry with slashers. Some readers of this blog see me as a journalist chronicling web video/series, others as a TV film/critic and a few more as an academic. I’m really all those things, but research pays the bills.

In the next year I’ll be cranking out the product of my five-year graduate career, a journey I’ve occasionally chronicled on this blog. That product is my dissertation, expected spring 2012. This also means I’m officially on the job market! (Self-promotion alert: see my CV here).

I thought I’d preview the main ideas of the dissertation and solicit input from scholars, producers, writers and marketers. I’ve done this once before, but the project has become slightly more refined.

OFF THE LINE: INDEPENDENT TELEVISION AND THE PITCH TO REINVENT HOLLYWOOD (tentative)

The Abstract

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.

“Independent Television”

There’s a reason why very few scholars research “web series:” it’s hard to define what it is! From the very beginning, when I started this work in 2009, I’ve been aware that by the time my book comes out, there may not be a thing called a “web series.” The very term is constantly up for debate. Why shouldn’t it be? The “web” is inherently a hybrid form, and as convergence steams ahead, it will only get more confusing.

I’ve chosen “independent television” because it more precisely describes what I hear and see from producers. Most people who seriously make web series are either working in TV, have worked in TV, want to work with TV or cite TV as the main inspiration for their work. They see themselves as doing a new kind of TV. ”Independent television,” which has been used many times before to describe the market, also suggests links with “independent film.” The market for web series resembles the indie film market at certain points in its history. Hopefully this dissertation participates in a bigger conversation about the challenges and possibilities of making content outside of traditional industrial structures.

“Off the Line”

Which brings me to the first part of the title. What is “off the line”? Everyone reading this blog knows of the “above/below the line” distinction in traditional TV/film production. Recent academic scholarship, from likes of John Caldwell and Vicki Mayer, has shed light on this institutional distinction, arguing for greater attention to below the line workers as key supporters, culturally as well as economically, of the industry.

For me, as digital production and distribution has lowered costs, a new segment of workers has emerged: off the line workers. These individuals, groups and small companies occasionally work in traditional media (above/below) but also create their own works outside the system, blurring classic distinctions. They take on more work and have to be more inventive and improvisational, but they get greater creative and economic control over their labor.

To many scholars, this is a classic example of “precarious labor,” the kind of increasingly common work required of workers in a postindustrial economy. With less regulation and state support, workers must be entrepreneurial and/or worker harder and longer for less pay. The idea isn’t unheard of among web series creators. I’ve written about it before.

So while web labor is certainly precarious, “off the line” work can also be incredibly rewarding and bring new cultural forms to the market — think of The Guild or Awkward Black Girl. Or basically half the posts on this blog. There’s a lot of value being created here.

“Reinventing Hollywood”

What “challenge”? Talk to anyone who makes web content and you’re likely to hear some hint of resignation. To this day, if it’s not on television, it matters less. (It used to be if it wasn’t on 2,000 screens, and instead on television, it mattered less. It still kind of does). Individual TV networks — and, for that matter, individual film studios — might be having hard times, but in general, Hollywood is making plenty of cash without the web. The overall market for web video is still much smaller. Moreover, most of the important and noteworthy projects made for the web are made either by traditional institutions — major networks and studios — or by people with strong connections to them. Much of this dissertation will focus on smaller projects.

By “challenge” I don’t mean the market for independent television will take over Hollywood — I don’t think that will ever happen, though at times some web creators have hoped as much. Instead I mean that “television,” and the processes by which the industry creates and markets content, is temporarily up for grabs. Indie web creators are proposing alternative ways of producing, new kinds of stories and slightly different distribution methods. These activities, while extremely small, are a bold proposition, a way of doing business that expands the field of production and enhances the industry’s creativity. It’s a gesture in a new direction.

The Chapters

How will I go out about proving this? The dissertation will follow three ways “off the line” entrepreneurs have attempted to reinvent television for the 21st century: production, representation and distribution. (Note: I have specific case studies mapped out but will leave it off here for brevity’s sake).

The production chapter will focus on three companies/individuals whose production practices demonstrate how having fewer resources lead to slightly new ways of making and exhibiting television, particularly along the above/below the line distinction (blurring roles, complex forms of investment).

The representation chapter probes three series, integrating numerous others, whose narratives showcase the promise and pitfalls of crafting stories about marginalized groups, particularly shows marketed to black, Latino, gay/lesbian and women audiences.

The distribution chapter examines independent web video networks, award shows and festivals as examples of ways marketers and entrepreneurs are trying to streamline independent television into a real market.

I will also have a chapter narrating the history of the web series market, linking it thematically to key moments in the histories of radio, television and film, almost in the way Tim Wu has tried to do.

The Production

A key component of the dissertation will be my own web series, a comedy I co-produced with Under the Spell Productions. The series, She’s Out Of Order,  is set for an early 2012 release. Having a role in the show from story, photography, post-production and marketing, I will be integrating that experience throughout the entire manuscript. I will be writing much more about it in the coming months.

Comments?

All dissertations are exercises in refining, narrowing, clarifying, etc. Even so, this has been a challenging project to nail down, perhaps because the market itself is so inchoate, though increasingly less so.

I’d appreciate any thoughts you have! You can respond in the comments or, if you feel more comfortable, email me directly here.

I’m currently writing the proposal for my dissertation, (very) tentatively titled: “Selling Independent New Media: Web Series and the Industry in a Time of Change.” (For those not in the academy, don’t ask what a proposal is: it’s a boring answer). As a graduate student, one of your constant anxieties is missing something: not knowing some key source, fact or theory.

As I noted in my previous post with a reading list, I found it really hard to find good bibliographies when trying to figure out what was important to read. The best sources were obviously the notes sections of books and current articles, and it required a lot of compilation! I see no reason not to share the fruits of my labor; there’s no value to a list of books.

Below is my working bibliography for the dissertation. This is just the foundational stuff: almost all of them books, with a few articles thrown in that I’ve needed to cite in my proposal. If I missed anything, put it in the comments or email me!

And, as before, citations are inelegantly formatted in terms of style; there will be many errors. This is just an entry point, not a bible!

***

Abercrombie, N. & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London, UK: SAGE Publications.

Acham, C. (2004). Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Althusser, L. (1998). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In J. Storey (Ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a reader (pp. 153-164). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Anderson, C. (1994). HollywoodTV: the studio system in the fifties. Austin, TX: University of Texas.

Anderson, C. (2008). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Andrejevic, M. (2004). Reality TV: the work of being watched. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Andrejevic, M. (2008). Watching Television Without Pity: The productivity of online fans. Television and New Media, 9, 24-46.

Andrejevic, M. (2009). Critical Media Studies 2.0: an interactive upgrade. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, 1, 35-51.

Alvey, M. (1997). The Independents: Rethinking the Television Studio System. In L. Spigel & M. Curtin (Eds.), The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (pp. 139-158), New York, NY: Routledge.

Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. New York, NY: Routledge.

Ang, I. (1991). Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York, NY: Routledge.

Askwith, I.D. (2007). Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium. (Master’s Thesis). Retrieved from FastArc.

Atton, C. (2002). Alternative Media. London, UK: Sage.

Auletta, K. (2010). Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. London, UK: Virgin Books.

Babe, R.E. (2009). Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield.

Bacon-Smith, C. (1992). Enterprising women: television fandom and the creation of popular myth. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Banet-Weiser, S., Chris, C., & Freitas, A., eds. (2007). Cable visions: television beyond broadcasting. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Banks, J. & Deuze, M. (2009). Co-creative labour. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12, 419-431.

Banks, J. & Humphreys, S. (2008). The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets?. Convergence, 14, 401-418.

Barker, D. (1985). Television Production Techniques in Communication. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2, 234-246.

Barnouw, E. (1978). The sponsor: Notes on a modern potentate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Barnouw, E. (1990). Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (2nd Ed). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Benjamin, W. (2009). The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. In D. Preziosi (Ed.), The art of art history: a critical anthology (pp. 435-443). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Benkler, Y. (2007). The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bennet, J. & Strange, N. (2011). Television as Digital Media. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berenstein, R.J. (2002). TV Performance, Intimacy and Immediacy (1945-1955). In J. Friedman (Ed.), Reality squared: televisual discourses on the real (pp. 25-49). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Boddy, W. (1990). Alternative television in the United States. Screen, 31, 91-101.

Boddy, W. (1992). Fifties television: the industry and its critics. Chicago: University of Illinois.

Boddy. W. (2004). New media and popular imagination: launching radio, television, and digital media in the United States. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bogle, D. (2001). Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bordwell, D. (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Bowser, P. & Spence, L. (2000). Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, And His Audiences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

boyd, d., & Ellison, N.B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

boyd, d. (2008). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 119-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2001). The Forms of Capital. In Granovetter, M.S. & Swedberg, R. (Eds.), The sociology of economic life (2^nd Ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Brown, L. (1971). Television: the business behind the box. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Bruns, A. (2008a). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Bruns, A. (2008b). Reconfiguring Television for a Networked, Produsage Context. Media International Australia, 126, 82-94.

Buonanno, M. & Radice, J. (2008). The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.

Burgess, J. (2006). Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling. Continuum, 20, 201-214.

Burgess, J. & Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Caldwell, J.T. (1995). Televisuality: style, crisis, and authority in American television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Caldwell, J.T. (2002). New Media/Old Augmentations: Television, the Internet, and Interactivity. In A. Jerslev (Ed.), Realism and `Reality’ in Film and Media. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Caldwell, J.T. (2004). Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration. In L. Spigel & J. Olsson (Eds.), Television after TV: Essays on a medium in transition (pp. 45-56). Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press.

Caldwell, J.T. (2006). Critical Industrial Practice: Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts. Television New Media, 7, 99-134.

Caldwell, J.T. (2008). Production Culture: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press.

Campbell, J.E. (2004). Getting it on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. New York, NY: Harrington Park Press.

Campbell, J.E. (2005). Outing PlanetOut: surveillance, gay marketing and internet affinity portals. New Media & Society. 7, 663-683.

Carter, B. (2007). Desperate Networks. New York, NY: Random House.

Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Cerwonka, A. & Malkki, L.H. (2007). Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.

Christian, A.J. (2011). The Problem of YouTube. Flow. 13(8), Retrieved from http://flowtv.org/2011/02/the-problem-of-youtube.

Collins, P.H. (2000). Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge.

Coleman, R.M. (2000). African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: situating racial humor. New York, NY: Garland Publications.

Coleman, R.M. (2002). Say it loud!: African-American audiences, media, and identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Couldry, N. & Curran, J. (2003). Contesting media power: alternative media in a networked world. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

Couldry, N. (2004). Transvaluing Media Studies Or, Beyond the Myth of the Mediated Centre. In J. Curran & D. Morley (Eds.), Media and Cultural Theory: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 177-194). New York, NY: Routledge.

Creeber, G. (2004). Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London, UK: British Film Institute.

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Curtin, M. (2009). Matrix Media. In G. Turner & J. Tay (Eds.), Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era. New York, NY: Routledge.

Dates, J.L. & Barlow, W. (1990). Split image: African Americans in the mass media. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Dávila. A. (2001). Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Davis, G. & Needham, G. (Eds.) (2009). Queer Television: Theories, Histories, Politics. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Dawson, M. (2011). Convergence Television and the Digital Short, In J. Bennett, N. Strange, & L. Spigel (Eds.), Television as Digital Media. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Dayan, D. & Katz, E. (1994). Media Events: the live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Deuze, M. (2010). Managing Media Work. New York, NY: Sage.

De Vany, A.S. (2003). Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. New York, NY: Routledge.

Donaton, S. (2004). Madison & Vine: Why Entertainment and Advertising Industries Must Converge to Survive. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Dornfeld, B. (1998). Producing Public Television. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Douglas, S.J. (1987). Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Douglas, S.J. (2004). Listening in: radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press.

Downing, J. (2001). Radical media: rebellious communication and social movements. London, UK: Sage.

Einstein, M. (2004). Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership and the FCC. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Evans, A. (2009). How Homo Can Hollywood Be?: Remaking Queer Authenticity from To Wong Foo to Brokeback Mountain. Journal of Film and Video, 61(4): 41-54.

Evans, D.S. (2008). Economics of the Online Advertising Industry. Review of Network Economics. 7(3): 359-391

Evans, D.S. (2009). Online Advertising Industry: Economics, Evolution, and Privacy.  The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 23(3): 37-60.

Ewen, S. (2001). Captains of consciousness: advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Fabian, J. (2008). Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Feuer, J. (1983). The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology. In E.A. Kaplan (Ed.), Regarding Television: critical approaches, an anthology (pp. 12-21). Los Angeles: American Film Institute.

Fiske, J. (1989). Reading the Popular. New York, NY: Routledge.

Fiske, J. (1987). Television Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.

Fiske, J. (1992). The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In L.A. Lewis (Ed.), The Adoring Audience (pp. 30-49). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Freedman, D. (2008). The Politics of Media Policy. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

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As you may know, I’m doing some heavy reading over the next few weeks, and they more I read, the more I realize there’s a lot of academic books on media history and theory that could benefit practitioners in the digital economy; books a lot people might pass over on Amazon for not directly addressing digital culture.

I’ve decided to try to make a list of a few of these books, a reference for anyone looking for some fall and winter reading. I’ll try to update it over the next few months.

These books, most of them highly-cited classics, are taken off my previous reading list, but I wanted to set them off and explain why someone working in or thinking about contemporary media might take their eyes off their Twitter lists — I’m bound to mine! — and take a look. For some scholars, these might be obvious choices, but it’s not entirely obvious why these books are still relevant, except inasmuch as history is always relevant.

I tried to keep this short. I know most people lack the time to sit and read a dozen books on media history. I hope I can eventually blog relevant reviews of these and other books.

In general all these works offer interesting and digestible insights into how other “new media” have matured and gained structure. Among the big questions with our current new media are: where will it go and how will it scale? Given my interest in online video, still an unstable marketplace, these questions are especially pressing. The books below provide some models, some of them promising and instructive, others pessimistic and cautionary.

Radio

William Boddy, New media and popular imagination: launching radio, television, and digital media in the United States.

Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922.

There are a lot of histories of radio now, Susan Douglas and William Boddy’s books are just two addressing on the medium’s early history (pre-1920). Why read about radio? The beginning of radio, starting from the late 19th century, is actually a very relevant case study in new media, how control of distribution (then: the airwaves, now: uploading to the web) provides opportunities for independents and amateurs. The story of how radio came to be controlled by a handful of powerful interests, rather than the woolly cacophony of the web is a both a cautionary tale and lesson in how to do things differently — if, of course, we want a different result. Douglas’ industrial and historical account is complete and readable; Boddy’s is more concise, more about cultural, not industrial, implications, but is also more explicitly connected to contemporary debates.

Television

Todd Gitlin, Inside prime time.

Erik Barnouw, The sponsor: notes on modern potentates.

Chris Anderson, HollywoodTV: the studio system in the fifties.

William Boddy, Fifties television: the industry and its critics.

Television, like radio, is similarly instructive. More expensive and borne out of the radio system, its story is less harrowing, but still very illustrative. There is a lot of scholarship on fifties television, perhaps its most pivotal decade, when the networks went from a single-sponsor model to a 30-second-spot model; from live to telefilm; from New York to Hollywood, etc. Anderson and Boddy’s accounts are pleasurable reads with a lot of relevant information on how industries mature. For new media producers trying to understand sponsorship, Barnouw’s short history is instructive. (In general, if you want to learn all about TV history, Barnouw has a classic series of books: a lengthy three-volume set, and a condensed book, Tube of Plenty.). Gitlin’s book is a great inside look of network TV right before cable started to pose a serious threat.

Film

Michele Hilmes, Hollywood & Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable

Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover.

Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era.

Film is a bit of a different animal from radio and television, given it’s not conventionally supported by ads and has a different relationship to media policy (licensing, antitrust, etc.). Nonetheless, it’s still relevant to debates about new media and video, especially concerning different ways of doing production. Hilmes offers a great early history of “convergence,” how Hollywood interacted with radio and television, and might be of interest to anyone looking at how competing media industries form symbiotic relationships. Mann’s history takes seriously the role of the industry’s early independents, primarily in cinema but also how they helped shape television, and what industrial and cultural factors allowed them to flourish. Schatz’s book is a classic study in how, despite cinema’s well-earned claims to artistry and creativity, the organized production model for Hollywood helped form and sustain the industry.

Policy

Mara Einstein, Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership and the FCC.

Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States.

I’ll be expanding this quite a bit, but I’ve only recently become interested in policy, for obvious reasons. There are countless histories of American media policy and the FCC, these are just the most recent two I happened to pick up. Streeter’s book has some good overviews of radio and TV and offers an interesting theoretical solution to the dilemma of commercial broadcasting. Einstein’s book has been controversial, and while I don’t completely agree with her overall argument, she has a great case study and history of TV ownership and syndication rules.

So I have an article out this month in Communication, Culture and Critique! As is typical of academic publishing, I wrote the bulk of the article years ago, so if it reads very YouTube-circa-2007, that’s why.

(I should also say I’ve more or less moved on from the theoretical concerns with identity and performance in the CCC article to those about industry and markets that you see more often in this blog.)

Nevertheless it’s an article and argument I’ll stand by. The basic thrust of the piece uses YouTube vloggers to argue that what academics have traditionally thought of as “camp” – and specifically “queer” – now is being reimagined online in ways that would probably upset most scholars of traditional queer scholarship.

“Camp” is a very historically specific term describing a kind of gay performance associated with theatricality, irony and humor, with an undertone of seriousness. Drag queens are the classic camp icons: theatrical, they embodied the ironies and peculiarities of gender, a seriously potent combination mollified through humor. If you read Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp,’ which isn’t a hard read, it gets much more complicated pretty quickly.

Nevertheless, the YouTubers interviewed – who I’d mostly label as doing some kind of “queer camp,” though not all would describe themselves that way – don’t express their performances in ways we traditionally understand.

What they add is what academics call a “neoliberal” spin, a focus on individual power and spirit, in resistance to or disregard of social, political or institutional confinements. You’d be surprised how, in the context of queer history and academic writing, such a perspective is de-emphasized among performers and scholars. In this framework, camp becomes much more about overcoming personal challenges and expressing one’s “true self,” than about posing challenges to the social order or staying removed from the potency of one’s performance.

It’s tough to articulate in a nutshell and is far from a clean and perfect argument. Certainly it leaves out a lot, not the least of which are considerations of race and class, which were just too much to contend with given my small sample. Nonetheless, I worked hard on it and hope it contributes to an ongoing discussion. You can access it here; you’ll need a subscription through a library (or some other means). I can’t paste it here! Ah, copyright.

If I blog only sporadically over the next month it’s because I’m locked in a library reading! I’ll be taking what my graduate program calls “comprehensive exams” in October and I have a ridiculously long list of books to get through. It’s an exciting process in the beginning: it’s great to get a solid historical, theoretical and topic-specific foundation on American media. Something so few people have! (How many people have a few months to just read?).

I’m publishing my reading list to help any other grad students or non-academic/professional aficionados out there who want to find resources. There aren’t many lists out there (Alisa Perren’s great list of recent books on media industries inspired this post). The list is by no means entirely “comprehensive.” A true comprehensive list would probably have well over 1,000 books, and that wouldn’t be very practical, would it?! Also, the list is suited to my personal research needs and interests (gaps in knowledge I need to close, specific topics I need to cover). Some books I’ve read over and over are not included, some are; it’s personally tailored. Finally, this is an almost-final draft, meaning a few of the citations are off/incorrect.

Hope this helps someone out there!

The list is divided into three foci: theory, method and topic.

Method

Qualitative methods. My work is interview-based. For this reading list, I’m focusing on a combination of “how to” and theory with actual ethnographies/studies of media/industries.

Methodological Theory and Practice/Guides:

Cerwonka, A. and Malkki, L.H. 2007. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Couldry, N. 2004. ‘Transvaluing Media Studies Or, Beyond the Myth of the Mediated Centre’ in J. Curran and D. Morley (eds.) Media and Cultural Theory: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Fabian, J. 2008. Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Fiske, J. 1989. Reading the Popular. New York: Routledge.

Geertz, C. 19973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. pp. 3-30.

Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. 2006. The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. New York: Gruyter.

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. 1995. Ethnography: Principles in Practice, 3^rd Ed. New York: Routledge.

Havens, T., Lotz, A.D., Tinic, S. 2009. “Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach.” Communication, Culture and Critique. 234-253.

Hine, C. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Miller, D. and Slater, D. 2001. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Berg, 2001.

Nader, L. 1982. Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In Cole, J.B. (Ed), Anthropology for the Eighties. New York: The Free Press.

Williams, R. 1998. The Analysis of Culture, in Cultural theory and popular culture: A reader, John Storey (Ed). Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Wolcott, H.F. 2008. Ethnography as a Way of Seeing, in Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. AltaMira, 1999. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Case Studies: Industry

Ang, I. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge.

Caldwell, J.T. 2008. Production Culture: industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and television. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Dornfeld, B. 1998. Producing Public Television. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gamson, J. 1998. Freaks talk back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gitlin, T. 1983. Inside prime time. New York: Pantheon Books.

Grindstaff, L. 2002. The Money Shot: Trash, class, and the making of TV talk shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tuchman, G. 1978. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press.

Case Studies: Subcultures

Beemyn, B, eds. 1997. Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. New York, Routledge.

Bowser, P. and Spence, Louise. Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, And His Audiences. Newark: Rutgers University Press.

Campbell, J.E. 2004. Getting it on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. New York: Harrington Park Press. Chapter 2: Getting Online, pp. 21-52.

Chauncey, G. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books.

Collins, P.H. 2000. Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Dávila. A. 2001. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California. (particularly: “Doing Fieldwork on a Fieldless Site”).

Gray, H. 1995. Watching race: television and the struggle for blackness. (Chapter 6). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hall, S. 1997. Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage. (Chapters 1, 4).

Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.

Jackson, J. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jhally, S. and Lewis, J. 1992. Enlightened racism: the Cosby show, audiences, and the myth of the American dream. Boulder: Westview Press.

Johnson, E.P. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Lewin, E. and Leap, W.L., eds. 1996. Out in The Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

McRobbie, A. 1980. Settling accounts with subcultures. Screen Education.

Newton, E. (1972). Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rubin, G. 2002. Studying Sexual Subcultures: Excavating the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America, in Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Sender, K. 2004. Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. New York: Columbia University Press.

Case Studies: New Media

Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. New York: NYU Press.

Turkle, S. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

boyd, d. (2008). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 119-142). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Burgress, J and Green, J. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lange, P. G. (2007). Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13.1, 18, Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/lange.html.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Media Industries

This section is intended to focus on media industries and their histories, helping me contextualize online video in the lineage of television, radio and advertising, alongside Internet history.

Anderson, C. 2008. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.

Anderson, C. 1994. HollywoodTV: the studio system in the fifties. Austin: University of Texas.

Andrejvic, M. 2004. Reality TV: the work of being watched. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Auletta, K. 2010. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. London: Virgin Books.

Babe, R.E. Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield.

Barnouw, E. 1990. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2^nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barnouw, E. 2004. The sponsor: notes on modern potentates. Transaction Publishers.

Benkler, Y. 2007. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage

Burgress, J and Green, J. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Boddy, W. 1992. Fifties television: the industry and its critics. Chicago: University of Illinois.

Boddy. W. 2004. New media and popular imagination: launching radio, television, and digital media in the United States. London: Oxford University.

Buonanno, M. and Radice, J. 2008. The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories. Intellect Books.

Caldwell, J.T. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film & TV. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Caldwell, J.T. 1995. Televisuality: Style, crisis, and authority in American television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Carter, B. 2007. Desperate Networks. New York: Random House.

Couldry, N. and Curran, J. 2003. Contesting media power: alternative media in a networked world. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield.

Curtin, M. 1995. Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Dayan, D. and Katz, E. 1994. Media Events: the live broadcasting of history. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dávila. A. 2001. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California. (particularly: “Doing Fieldwork on a Fieldless Site”).

Deuze, M. 2007. Media Work. Polity Press.

Douglas, S. 1987. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Douglas, S.J. 2004. Listening in: radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.

Downing, J. 2001. Radical media: rebellious communication and social movements. London: SAGE.

Einstein, M. 2004. Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership and the FCC. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates

Ewen, S. 2001. Captains of consciousness: advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture. New York: Basic Books.

Freedman, D. 2008. The Politics of Media Policy. Polity Press.

Fox, S.R. 1997. The mirror makers: a history of American advertising and its creators. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Gitlin, T. 1983. Inside prime time. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gray, H. 2004. Watching Race: television and the struggle for blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hartley, J., ed. 2005. Creative Industries. Wiley-Blackwell.

Hartley, J. and Fiske, J. 2003. Reading television. Psychology Press.

Hilmes, M. 1999.  Hollywood & Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Hilmes, M. 1997. Radio voices: American broadcasting, 1922-1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Hindman, M.S. 2009. The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holt, J. and Perren, Alisa. 2009. Media industries: history, theory, and method. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

Kellner, D. 1990. Television and the Crisis of Democracy. Boulder: Westview Press.

Kunz, W. 2007. Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and TV Industries. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lotz, A.D. 2007. The television will be revolutionized. New York: NYU Press.

Lotz, A.D. 2009. Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era. New York: Routledge.

Mann, D. 2008. Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McDonald, P.D. 2007. Video and DVD Industries. London: BFI Press.

Newcomb, H. “Reflections on TV: The Most Popular Art,” in Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader.

Schatz, T. 1998. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York, Pantheon Books.

Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin.

Smith-Shomade, B. 2008. Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television. University of California Press.

Spigel, L. 1992. Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Spigel, L. and Olsson, J, eds. 2004. Television after TV: Essays on a medium in transition. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Streeter, T. 1996. Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Turow, J. 2006. Niche Envy: advertisers and the new media world. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Turow, J. 1997. Breaking Up America advertisers and the new media world. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Turner, G. and Tay, Jinna. 2009. Television Studies after TV: Understanding post-broadcast television. New York: Routledge.

Wu, T. 2010. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Random House.

Williams, R. 2003. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Psychology Press.

Wood, J.P. 1958. Story of Advertising. Ronald Press Co.

Cultural Studies/Theory

This day I’d like to focus on how my work could potentially fit into work in cultural studies on cultural and subcultural production, power, hegemony and resistance, and identity. The dissertation will likely have a heavy focus on amateur/independent work, and I’ll need to examine how culture (identity, society) intersects with markets, networks, representation.

Althusser, L. 1977. Reading Capital. London: NLB.

Althusser, Louis. 1998. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a reader, ed. John Storey. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Barthes, R. 1972. The Structuralist Activity and The Death of the Author, in Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang.

Bataille, G. 1988. The Accursed Share, Vol. 1. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Baudrillard, J. 1983. “The ecstasy of communication.” In Hal Foster (ed.) The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Port Townsend WA: Bay Press, pp. 126-134.

Baudrillard, J. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press.

Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

Bhabha, H. 2004. Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. 2001. The Forms of Capital, in eds, Granovetter, M.S. & Swedberg, R. The sociology of economic life, 2^nd edition. Boulder: Westview Press.

Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. (also, Practice Theory)

Foucault, M. 1985. Discipline and Punish. New York: Knopf/Doubleday.

Foucault, M. 2003. “Society must be defended”: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. London: Macmillan.

Giddens, A. 1984. Constitution of Society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Giddens, A. 1999. Capitalism and modern social theory: an analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. London: Cambridge University Press.

Gramsci, A. 2006. “Hegemony, Intellectuals, and the state,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a reader. Ed. John Storey.

Grossberg, L. 1997. Bringing it all home: Essays on cultural studies. Raleigh: Duke University Press.

Habermas, J. 1981. Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hall, S. 1997. Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage.

Hall, S. 1982. ‘The rediscovery of ‘ideology:’ return of the repressed in media studies,” in Culture, society, and the media, ed. Michael Gurevitch.

Haraway, D. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

Horkheimer, M and Adorno, T. 1979. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,  in Dialectic of Enlightenment. New Left Books, 1979.

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Levi-Strauss, C. 1978. Myth and meaning. New York: Routledge.

Lukács, G. 1972. History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Macdonald, D. 1957. A theory of mass culture. In B. Rosenberg and D. Manning (eds.) Mass culture: The popular arts in America. New York: The Free Press, pp. 59-73.

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McLuhan, M and Powers, B.R. 1989. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. London: Oxford University Press.

McLuhan, M. 2001. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge.

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Peters, J.D. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber, M. 1965. Politics as Vocation. Fortress Press.

Williams, R. 2001. The Long revolution. Broadview Press. (Part One)

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Most people who read this blog know me professionally, which is to say, digitally. And, digitally speaking, I talk about my research, but not as rigorously as I do in person.

I’m developing my reading list for my exams now, which means I’m doing a lot of big and small preliminary thinking about “who I am” and “what I do” as a scholar. Rather than bore you with my most abstract problems, I thought I’d use a public platform to test out how I’d practically organize and frame my actual project. This is really an exercise for me — so thoughts/comments are very welcome — but also a chance to introduce myself. If you’re a practitioner, however, there may or may not be anything useful here; it’s academic, not practical. Continue at your own risk!

I’m making a few leaps here, because technically I’m supposed to spend the next few months after my exam organizing how I’d proceed with my dissertation. Still, I’ve already conducted over 50 interviews with probably over 70 individuals related to the topic of my research — generally, online video — so I should have some idea by now. Should. This post is me trying to be honest about where I am, where I need to go and what I’m looking for.

Right now, because I’ve yet to do a lot of reading, my work lacks a strong argument — it’s my biggest problem. At this point, I’m starting at the general point “web series matter,” because in the academy, as in most of America, they don’t right now. So I have to make a case. (I have a very expansive view of “web series,” see my introduction on the “web series” page above.) I then have a whole bunch of interesting topics, most of which don’t have a connecting through line yet.

Basically, the dissertation, so far, is looking like (a) an early history of online video as an “emerging new media” form, (b) connected theoretically with issues of markets, capital, production and representation, tried-and-true topics in communication research. I’m hoping (b) will give it relevance and heft while (a) will bring it to life.

Am I an Optimist or a Pessimist?

I feel compelled to offer a quick answer to this question first. Much of the scholarship on so-called “new media” has been concerned, to put it crudely, with whether you “hate it” or “love it.” Some say any account of new media that suggests all the problems with 20th century will go away (corporate power and big divide between producer-consumer, really) amounts to cockeyed optimism. Others say there’s a lot of new things going on that suggest change and maybe “progress.”

Part of my problem is I don’t see anything useful in the dichotomy or the debate. I’m an optimist by nature, but I see little fault in the more skeptical arguments about new media. The skeptics basically have the benefit of history and some solid theories behind them (i.e. most of media theory), while the optimists have the benefit of looking really closely at what’s happening now (often anecdotally) and pointing out interesting differences.

I’m hoping to sidestep the debate and re-frame it, somehow. I might re-frame it as looking how “new media” industries are shaped, how various parties (corporate producers, independents, amateurs, advertisers) work and compete to shape that industry; my dissertation would focus on the contributions of independents, but would include the others.

Why Web Series Matter

In the past few days/weeks there’s been a bunch of press on the importance of web series, both to the mainstream media, major advertisers and independent producers*. Still, I find myself having to sell “web series” as important. I’m fine with it, actually, because explaining why something is important is the fastest way to get to the heart of its value.

Superficially, there are the numbers and facts. The hundreds of millions of views web series garner every month (see Visible Measures), the major advertisers supporting them (IKEA, Sprint, CoverGirl, and on and on), the major TV networks producing them (MTV, ABC, NBC, SyFy, and on and on), the thousands of dollars independents shell out to finance them, the millions the aforementioned networks and advertisers spend, the fascinating new online networks coming out to distribute them (from Atom and CollegeHumor, MyDamnChannel to Babelgum, RowdyOrbit to OneMoreLesbian). A lot is going on. Web series are serious business.

Academically, web series are an ideal case study for what happens to media in periods in transition. In this case, web series come at a time when digital media starts to pose challenges to traditional business models and cultural distinctions, a perversely well-documented phenomenon. In terms of business, we have new practices in marketing (how to reel in consumers), financing/advertising (how media is made), distribution (how to get content to people). Culturally, we have collapsing distinctions in media form (TV vs. film vs. online video), categories (consumers vs. users, producers vs. users, professionals vs. amateurs), and value (what do consumers want? what gets them excited? what kinds of media are culturally important?).

Web series bring all these debates to the fore. For me, what makes them particularly valuable is, in these periods of transition, “new” (in the academy, new is always in quotes) forms of content, production and marketing are created, and this offers chances for independents to make a go at it. I want to focus on independents because they deal with the market in more complex ways, and because most of media research has been concerned with corporations and conglomerates — I’m talking from Adorno through much of 1980s scholarship. “Independence” has almost universally been seen as an antidote. For me, the big questions are: what are the possibilities of being an independent, especially in a more fluid, open, transitory market? What are the challenges? What is meaningful, in the culture and marketplace, about independent media and their new ideas about making and marketing? What is not so meaningful?

*I should say, for me, “producers” is a general world for “people who make things.” So I’m talking filmmakers, vloggers, corporations, production companies, screenwriters, amateurs, etc. It’s just easier than restricting myself to one category that might exclude someone

History of Independence in Emerging New Media

Right now, these ideas are the second least developed aspect of my work, and what I’ll be spending a lot of time reading in the coming months. Basically, the idea is to look at the histories of radio, TV and (maybe) film, particularly in their early years, and work through what kinds of issues came up in those markets: what opportunities independent producers had, what new ways of distributing content came up, what kinds of experimentation went on (form, marketing, advertising, financing) and, most importantly, what were the consequences of these early periods. Basically the history of 20th century media is one of cooptation and conglomeration. It’s true; still I’m hoping to make it more complicated than that.

Some of this will be original but there’s already been a lot of fantastic work on this, from the classic work of Erik Barnouw to scholars like Michele Hilmes, Susan Douglas, etc.

Making Video Valuable

This is the least developed aspect of my research. I’m basically nowhere on this. The point is to work out and theorize issues of markets, networks and capital in media as a way to understand the value of content and put the rest of the work in context. But I have a lot of reading to do and really nothing to say as of now. I’m looking toward more contemporary scholars from Henry Jenkins (who helping me out informally with my dissertation) and Manuel Castells, to mid-century philosophers like McLuhan and Bourdieu. We’ll see how meta I need/want to go.

When Individuals Meet the Market

I’m interested in looking at “personal production.” If there’s a “first wave” to web video, it’s the story of ordinary people putting themselves in front of the camera and revealing/marketing themselves to the public. This goes from your late-90s live streaming phenomenon, to lonelygirl, Chris Crocker and Fred. It’s a fascinating story that for me really brings to light the questions of what marketing means when the product is “just you,” and you have little to no money. When we look at this moment 20 years from now, what will we think of it? What will its lineage be? What does it say about identity, representation and cultural economy? I’ve already written and interviewed a couple dozen black and gay/queer vloggers, but I’m hoping to really open it up and see what connections I find.

Independents Speak to the Industry

Obviously the meatiest chunk of my research has been on web series production and distribution. I want to delve into what “independent producers” — here I’m primarily talking about makers of filmed, scripted** web series — have to say about innovation and instability within a media market.

The producers I talk to sell web series in numerous ways: as a way to “connect” with consumers/users when it’s increasingly difficult to do so, as a way to correct representations in the mainstream media, as a new way of telling stories, as a way to open up the industry to new entrants, etc. I’m hoping to examining how these things are accomplished, what they mean, whether it succeeds on the ground, and, more importantly, what all this says about theories and ideas about media generally (in communication research) and specifically (what does it say about TV, film, advertising and other industry business models and cultural justifications).

**[While the focus here is on scripted mainly to keep me sane, I'm wondering what people think about including vs. excluding "reality" web series: talk shows, reality shows, informational programming.]

Grappling with Representation

I really feed the need to talk about “identity” in its political and marketing categories, specifically women, minorities*** and gay men and women****. I’ll be trying to deal with “representation” — how media creates images of said categories — but hopefully in a different way. There are surprisingly few ethnographies of producing “minority media,” the bulk of the scholarship is about representation.

I’m hoping to talk about the tensions such web series bring up, how they cause us to (potentially!!!) reevaluate representation and “power.” The media market works differently today than it has 20, 40, 60 years ago, in ways that both open up new possibilities and pose new challenges.

***”Minorities” is outdated, but I’m talking about black as a marketing category, and hopefully will delve just as deeply into “Latino” as a category, along with “Asian-American” and potentially (but not likely) globally produced stuff, like this.

****I use “gay,” as I’ve said before, because I feel most of the web series I’ve tracked are explicitly marketing themselves as “gay” and “lesbian,” the accepted cateogories with the industry — “queer” is not a marketing category. I haven’t seen too many that are decidedly “queer,” in the way most academics accept. But this is a complicated issue I’ll be working on in the coming weeks (I’m giving a talk on it in the fall).

Corporations and Independents: Improvising When Markets Are Changing

The truth is, though, as much I will focus on independent media, the market for online video/web series has many corporate participants. By “corporate” I mean both the major networks and also major advertisers. In many ways the “corporate”***** side of the equation is more interesting, because it’s where we see important changes in dominant media histories and theories. This part would deal with how corporations and independents are forging interesting kinds of relationships and improvising different forms to make the market work for them, as has happened at other points in media history. What do these alliances mean?

I’m not sure how to frame this yet. Perhaps I’ll organize it around the changing conceptions of “mainstream” and “corporate” necessitated by a competitive, open and constantly shifting marketplace with – for now — low barriers to entry and shifting tastes and standards. What is a “corporation” in a new media marketplace? What does it want? I’m looking for suggestions on how to deal with this part.

*****Why is ‘corporate’ in quotes? Because you might have something distributed by, for example, USA, that’s written by a small start-up production co.; or something produced by a small subsidiary of a large corporation; or a major advertiser who decides to fund an amateur filmmaker. That it’s confusing is part of what makes it so interesting and important. Of course, part of the point is we’ve seen these dynamics throughout media history, but have forgotten it’s part of the biz.