Laugh Track

I have a post up at antenna called Notes on the Laugh Track, which is a blog version of some thoughts I presented last month in Madison at a conference on TV comedy. Some of the ideas in it may be familiar to long-time readers; for more, see these old posts:

-Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object

-Upgrading the Situation Comedy

-Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre (this one is from In Media Res)

PowerPoint

The International Journal of Communication has just published a new section of essays on academic labor edited by Jonathan Sterne, and I'm really excited to have my work included in it. The essay is one I co-wrote with a friend I made at a Zionist summer camp in Canada in 1987, Ira Wagman. It's called "PowerPoint and Labor in the Mediated Classroom" (pdf). It draws on various sources, including my experience teaching a large lecture course (Intro to Media Studies) for many semesters and feeling like the PowerPoint component was taking up too much of my time and energy, even as I was always unsure I was using the slideware well enough. We tried to write our essay as both an assessment of PowerPoint, its functions and its value, and a set of practical suggestions not so much for how to use the software, but how to think about using it.

Gchat Status, an Appreciation

It is possible to do something special with a Gchat status, though the number of authors doing it thus far might be in the low double digits. The Gchat status, like much of what we do online these days, is a form of verbal communication, and the status is an art of language like poetry or rhetoric. Tweets and blog posts and Amazon reviews and comments on a Facebook photo can likewise be places for good writing, but I have chosen the Gchat status for this appreciation because it strikes me as a functionally unique instance in this particular moment, and because I happen to have been noticing Gchat statuses that I really like lately.

Gchat, the IM service of Gmail, lives in the sidebar of your inbox, though you might not have noticed it. It’s the only IM experience I’ve ever had. While I’m probably on the young enough end of Gen X to have been introduced to AOL and ICQ and other formative experiences of my Millennial friends and family, I was strictly an email person before my Gchatting began. At first I only ever Gchatted with one or two people -- my younger sister whose IM chops were developed in her teen years and an old friend living in another country where phone calls would be more expensive than IMs. Over time I have kept up with eight or ten friends and students (and students who became friends) with regular Gchats, and in my immediate family (mother, sister, wife) we use it as much or more than the phone. There are also contacts in my chat window with whom I have never or very seldom chatted, but whose statuses I regularly see and enjoy.

Gmail’s chat sidebar offers a narrow space for a status, which like a tweet or Facebook posting can take a variety of forms: a word, a phrase, a question, a quotation (with or without quotes), the title of what you’re reading (or writing), a report, an observation, an exclamation, a curse or blessing, a call to action, a cryptic reference, a fragmentary image, or a link to your new blog post or to a video you think is cute of pets or babies. On Wisconsin! Office job. This is what I do. Now 20% smarter! When is 112:30? Just chillin’. Snowdrift. feministmusicgeek.com. And you are? It is definitely too soon to be writing Interim Reports. Home. Asleep (how did I type that while I was asleep??!?).
I’m going to eat my feelings for dinner. Most of my contacts either have no status or have one that they update very infrequently -- effectively never. Some write a new one every few days or even more often.

The characters in a Gchat status are limited to around 500, but anything longer than around 20 characters (it depends on how wide your letters are -- you’ll run out of room for big A’s faster than little l’s) is truncated at that point and finished off with ellipses. When you mouseover the name in your chat list, a window appears with the contact’s picture, the full status, their gmail address, and a few buttons offering options to chat, email, and change settings. Thus approximately 20 is not exactly a character limit, but it is functionally important: most of the time people will only see that much. I’m more likely to mouseover a new status, or a status that hooks me in the first 20. I’m less likely to mouseover a link without description, because the likelihood of my following a link is always lower than of just reading a status. If you think 140 characters makes tweets into the most exemplary form of contemporary web brevity, Gchat statuses offer us even less room for expressing ourselves. But as in any form, constraints can be opportunities.



There are a number of things I find especially pleasurable about Gchat statuses. Unlike most of the things you can write nowadays on the internet, the Gchat status offers no direct feedback mechanism. You can’t like or favorite a status, you can’t share or retweet it, you can’t start a comments thread under it, you can’t give it thumbs up or down, digg it or bury it, or give it between one and five stars. You can’t mark it as spam or as inappropriate content, and you can’t recommend it to your friends with one click. Just try to share it on Facebook -- try it! I love how self-contained the Gchat status is, content to be its own thing and not a come-on inviting your participation.

On the other hand, there is one way of finding out more about a status or expressing your admiration for it: starting a Gchat. The absence of likes and retweets is actually an incentive to use Gchat for the central purpose of IM: person-to-person communication. Sometimes I have had others begin chats with me by asking more about my status, which works especially well with quotations of my one year-old son. (E.g., NO, Dada! got quick chat responses from his grandmother and aunt). One time a friend liked a link to a video and told me as much in a chat message. I have no real issue with the depersonalized nature of likes and faves and thumbsups, but I have noticed that sometimes they seem to offer a substitute for more interactive and substantive communication.

Another constraint of the Gchat is its total ephemerality. Unlike so much of our web lives, the status does not become part of an archive or timeline or profile. It doesn’t turn up in web searches, and doesn’t ever appear in roundups of tweets or comments. There is no way to link to a status, no way to easily save them for posterity. Aside from myself, I don’t know of anyone who collects them. I don’t believe the Library of Congress is on the case, and I don’t imagine we will ever see publication of the Gchat statuses of tomorrow’s great novelists or presidents, though you never know.

The beauty of a nice Gchat status is in part a function of it having appeared in a place you weren't expecting something so good. It is also a function of being an artifact of so little practical value, addressing an audience of perhaps a few dozen people, probably fewer, who are unlikely to respond in any way, and whose reception is untraceable. Unlike a blog, you can't keep track of user data. Unlike twitter there is no count of chat status followers. The status doesn't occupy a point in the web reputation ecology. It barely matters, isn't meant to last, and can hardly ever hope to make more than a gentle ripple in a great sea. It is approaching the purest mode of creativity, a gift. Sometimes I wonder if the chat statuses that I like are meant to please only the writer, and the public performance of this private expression is almost accidental. But of course these are appearances only. Communication ordinarily serves more than one function. A status is always, among other things, an expression of status. It just does a nice job of not always seeming so.

*

LIKE MAH STATUS.:



images by me and dorywithserifs (used under a Creative Commons license)

Legitimating Television: Blogversation

This is cross-posted at Dr. Television.

In this post, Elana Levine and I aim to offer a look into the origins and purpose of our new book, Legitimating Televison: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. We include an abstract of our argument (which is also our back cover copy), and then engage in a “blogversation” about the project and its aims.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the twenty-first century. Once looked down upon as a “plug-in drug” offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, particularly as critics hail the rise of “cinematic,” Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a family-centered household appliance, offering a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue that television’s newfound, growing prestige emerges in concert with the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media--and more highly valued audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating “ordinary” television associated with the past, and thereby denies the continuities between past and present. It also distances the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the “old” TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with viewers of elevated economic and cultural status. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass. In so doing it reinforces cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class.

Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the taste question of whether television is simply “good” or “bad,” and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Why we wrote this book

EL: While we have been excited by much of the scholarship emerging that deals with the many changes television has been facing, and continues to face (economic, technological, experiential), we also noted some gaps in that scholarship. We kept noticing these discourses of distinction in popular, trade, and scholarly talk about TV, but no one seemed to be talking about it or acknowledging their implications. And once we started noticing it, it was everywhere! I, for one, worry about all of the “future-casting” that seems to be going into contemporary talk about TV (scholarly and popular) and wanted, in part, to do the historian’s work of noting both the continuities with and the disruptions to the past in contemporary developments. So we wanted to historicize a lot of the conversation about convergence-era TV, and specifically to do so around questions of cultural hierarchy and value. In addition, we wanted to inject more of a cultural studies-influenced sense of struggle over television’s status in the cultural hierarchy, something we don’t see a lot of attention being paid to these days.

MZN: We have now seen a fair number of attempts to grapple with how television has been changing during the digital age. Some say television has changed so much that it’s not even television any more (e.g., one book has the title Television after TV), which seems like such a radical break. We wanted to make an argument about the cultural implications of convergence as it works in relation to TV, and in particular how issues of social power underlie many of the shifts we observe in TV’s identity under convergence. We see the old concept of TV as crucial to the newly legitimated medium. A lot of people seem to be aware of some of the same things we observe, but I think our concept of the legitimation of television explains recent developments in a way that has not been done, and puts their meaning into focus. The gender and class implications of television’s legitimation have not been very well recognized.

Influences

MZN: Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV and William Boddy’s New Media and Popular Imagination are most foundational in my thinking about our work, as both are ultimately concerned with how people think about television as a medium, and what place television has in our everyday lives as a result. We are also building on essays by Derek Kompare and Matt Hills about TV on DVD, and by Dana Polan and Christopher Anderson on the cultural status of Quality TV, particularly around HBO and its series. More in terms of background knowledge and approach, I am always inspired by Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which is a book I think everyone across the humanities should read. Bourdieu, of course.

EL: I come to the project with the same influences, although I would also add two other streams of work: British Cultural Studies approaches to television, especially John Fiske’s Bourdieuian takes on cultural hierarchies and appreciation of the tastes of “the people.” For me, the study of television has always been about seeking an understanding of and empathy with a culturally denigrated medium and the subordinated social positions of those who find in that medium their culture. The legitimation of the medium, as much as it is still struggling to achieve dominance, seems to me to dismiss all of that. And that feels like a betrayal of what both television and the cultural studies-influenced field of television studies mean to me. I’d additionally add feminist scholarship on TV melodrama/soaps, especially work by such scholars as Tania Modleski, Jane Feuer, and Lynne Joyrich. These scholars understand deeply the gendered nature of cultural hierarchies and attend to television’s feminized texts as a challenge to such easy dismissals.

Challenges of writing about the present

MZN: When you write about the present, you aim at a moving target. You can think you have figured out what to say about something, and just as you are saying it, the subject changes or new developments complicate your points. You lack historical distance and risk seeing change as more important than it is. We tend to think of our present moment as a break from the past, and to see ourselves as somehow special. Actually I think part of our book’s contribution is in questioning this very tendency toward misapprehending the present, and failing to recognize historical continuities. We call it a history of the present and a polemic, and I wonder if a history of the present can avoid being a polemic in some sense, as our concerns are so immediate and so present in discourses we encounter day by day.

EL: Yeah, I worry about the “ranty” nature of the book at points, but I also feel so strongly about the ideas that I’m kind of proud of the rants, too. My worry is not so much that we come off sounding cranky, but that that crankiness will soon be seen as short-sighted, in that it misses a development that is about to come. Still, we’ve been studying these discourses for a number of years and, if anything, see them increasing rather than decreasing or changing.

What do we hope will come of Legitimating Television?

EL: I hope that readers of our book will think about contemporary TV and the discourses surrounding it in new ways, that they will start to notice the discourses of legitimation all around us and the ways in which these discourses operate in tension with those of denigration. I hope that scholarship that focuses on the economic and technological convergence of TV and other media will not reproduce the classed and gendered hierarchies of so much legitimating discourse--or will at least be more self-conscious about it. I hope that the critics and other journalists talking about contemporary TV will avoid the either/or dichotomy of trash or art that pervades discourses of legitimation and delegitimation and consider the ways their words shape the way we all think about TV. Mostly, I just want to see thoughtful, socially and politically engaged work on TV that has an historical sensibility and that tries not to reproduce damaging cultural hierarchies.

MZN: I’m eager to see more scholarly engagement with television texts in aesthetic terms, and some of this book indeed works in this area, e.g., the discussions of sitcom and drama forms. My previous work on TV storytelling is also an effort in this area. But I’d like to see aesthetic considerations of television proceed in full consciousness of the power of aesthetic discourses, and to the extent possible without the naive appreciation of “good TV” or denigration of “bad TV” that reinforces the cultural hierarchies central to legitimation and delegitimation. This is a challenge to be sure, but one that I think must be undertaken if TV studies is to maintain a critical perspective. Similarly, with new technologies and audience practices, we ought to be wary of endorsing the so-called control and activity of new ways of watching without recognizing drawbacks and their ideological implications.

What you should know before you read

MZN: I wonder if some people might see the book and infer that we’re rooting for TV to be legitimated. Sometimes when I tell people that the book is about the idea that TV has gotten better, they seem excited by the thought and eager to endorse it. (Others are more cranky and say things like, “I disagree!” or “I don’t watch television.”) Our purpose is to document and analyze legitimation as the emergent common sense, but also to argue that it’s not ultimately a force for good.

EL: You put that so democratically. We say legitimation is bad! But, at the same time, it’s important that readers know: 1) We love TV. 2) We know there are some benefits to the legitimation of television, but think the discourse as it now stands does too much damage to television writ large and to classed and gendered conceptions of cultural and social worth. 3) That is not our living room on the cover.

Legitimating Television, Process

This is the first of two planned posts about Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, the book I have written with Elana Levine (Amazon). In this entry I reflect on collaboration as a scholarly endeavor, and elaborate a bit more about the processes of academic work, picking up where I left off in my last post on the academic summertime. A subsequent post will discuss the book’s ideas.

Like most academic works, ours is the product of years of research. My computer files tell me that I began to take notes on the topic of legitimation of TV about four years ago, fall 2007. But our project began at least a year or two before that moment, which is just the time that legitimation became a concept bringing our thinking about television’s changing cultural status into sharper focus.

We began by collecting research on TV on DVD and what I was thinking of as the cinematization of television in terms of audiovisual style and storytelling, but also in terms of distribution (as on DVD). I’m not sure when this was exactly but it was likely around the time that so much popular press attention was being given to the significance of discs for television’s business model, story forms, and cultural circulation. For instance, between 2004 and 2007 we saw a steady stream of articles in newspapers and magazines singing the praises of DVD as a solution to some of television’s enduring problems, such as:

-James Poniewozik, “Show Business: It's Not TV. It's TV on DVD,” Time, April 19, 2004.

-Scott Collins, “Some Television Reruns Hit Their Prime on DVD,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2005.

-Toni Ruberto, “DVDs offer viewer freedom,” The Buffalo News, September 17, 2006.

-Claire Atkinson, “What to Watch? How About a ‘Simpsons’ Episode From 1999?” New York Times, September 24, 2007.

DVDs (as well as DVRs) were also central to the discussion of television in Steven Johnson’s 2005 book Everything Bad is Good For You, key to his brief in favor of contemporary popular culture as a kind of cognitive pencil sharpener. The repeatability of television made possible by the digital revolution was supposed to have improved television and pushed its place in the cultural hierarchy from disreputable trash to a more elevated level.

Television scholars were remarkably quick to assess the implications of this new development. Derek Kompare and Matt Hills wrote important articles on the topic -- both highly recommended to anyone interested in how TV has changed in the past decade -- just as the popular press was also grappling with the same developments:

-Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” Television & New Media 7:4 (November 2006), 335-360. (pdf)

-Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: 'TVIII' and the cultural/textual valorisations of DVD,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.1 (April 2007), 41-60.

But the moment I most vividly remember as having made an impression on me, an impression that would remain as we worked through our ideas and towards the book, was even before these popular press discussions became commonplace. One day in January, 2003, we were wandering around a Tower-records-type retailer (this was in Paris, which is why I remember the date but not the name of the store), and were quite overwhelmed by the television section of the DVDs. It had not been that long since shows were first appearing in season and series box sets, and to see the number of American Quality TV series packaged so lavishly and appealing to our sensibilities so strongly was really shocking, as was, in my recollection, the typical price tag. I remember the HBO titles like The Sopranos, and I’m sure there were cult shows like Buffy. I recall that store’s TV on DVD section was quite large at a time when TV on DVD was still pretty new and exciting.

Season box sets of highly regarded programs produce such a different identity for TV shows as objects of intense consumer desire and significant commodity value, especially compared with the earlier reputation of television as disposable and ephemeral mere entertainment. In this new figuration, television was clearly attaining a newly high value that was quite the contrast against its historical identity as mass culture, as a vast wasteland, as the idiot box or boob tube. Over the span of time between 2002 and 2007, then, Elana and I began to collect research materials and to talk about how we might write something that would engage with this shift (individually or together, I’m not sure when we decided this was something to do together). A lot of our thinking coalesced in a series of conference papers we gave, which developed our project and provided an initial base of evidence and concepts on which the book would build. At the same time, both of us were busy with other things and this work was rarely if ever on the front burner for long (for starters, I had another book to write), which is partly why is took a long time to come to fruition.

In general I believe it’s beter to avoid working up new material for a conference presentation, and to try to present material that’s more or less publication-ready. This way you don’t stress out for three weeks before the conference figuring out what you are going to say, you don’t end up deciding you don’t like your topic after all and trying to give a different paper under the published title, and you don’t give a really rough draft that makes you look sloppy and abuses the audience’s attention. Perhaps more importantly, if you are working up new material, you might end up writing something 12 pages long that never goes anywhere, which seems to me, despite what I’ve said earlier about reconsidering what it means to be productive, like a squandered opportunity.It’s unusual that 12 pages of work all by itself is publishable as is in a journal or book in today’s academic publishing world, though maybe that’s too bad.

In working on Legitimating Television, though, we did a lot of our initial writing for conferences, and these presentations were a great value to our process. Elana and I both gave conference papers that became book material at Console-ing Passions 2008 in Santa Barbara, and 2010 in Eugene. We both gave papers at the one-day Unthinking Television conference in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2009, that found their way into the book. Of the book’s eight chapters, four were to a great extent built around those six conference papers, cutting and pasting parts here and there and integrating different papers together. My 2008 CP paper ended up partly in chapter 4 and partly in chapter 7 (see the book’s table of contents below). Elana’s 2008 CP paper gave chapter 6 its main ideas and some of its examples. Her 2010 CP paper was the basis for chapter 5, while mine was mostly integrated into chapter 4. The book also includes work here and there that first appeared on Zigzigger (this post on widescreen TV lives on in chapter 7), though with much modification. We also included a few bits and pieces from an unsubmitted column I wrote for Flow when I was a columnist (2008-2009). I decided not to submit it because it seemed too much like the introduction to a book and not enough like a column for a web publication. Chapters 2, 3, and 8 are just about all new, but the rest of the book is a patchwork integrating material previously shared in some way with an audience as work in progress.

Some people have asked us how we went about co-authoring a book. It’s not that unusual to see original research monographs have more than one author, but in the humanities it’s still something a bit out of the ordinary, and people seem to wonder how the process unfolds. Our training in graduate school, especially in the humanities, assumes single authorship and offers little guidance in producing collaborative research. Editing a book or writing a textbook might lend themselves more to collaboration than this kind of work, though I haven’t done either of those things so I can’t speak to their finer points.

We might think of collaboration as having greater or lesser degrees of intellectual integration. There may be some projects where work can be divided among collaborators in a way that doesn’t require them to share all of the same ideas and expectations, and to work out arguments and evidence together. Ours is the kind of book that does require that kind of collaboration. We conducted research separately and wrote separately, but we did not divide up the work into discrete sections and each keep to our side of a line. We wrote the chapters one at a time (you work on this one, I’ll work on that one) but they are all still products of our collaboration. Sometimes the ideas of a section come more from one person but the words are composed mostly by the other. I wrote most of chapter 6’s first draft, but the conceptual work was mostly Elana’s. There are parts where the research was done by one of us and the other wove it into an argument. In chapter 2, for instance, I wrote a section of a couple thousand words to be integrated into a longer discussion written mainly by Elana, but she revised my part to make it fit, and I revised hers after that. And in revision, there was never any sense of the words being proprietary. Some parts of the book were revised so many times by us both that they really were written by two people. Having said all of this, there are passages of the book only I could have written, and passages only Elana could have. I would rather preserve the veneer of total collaboration than reveal which parts these are, but people who know us will be able to figure them out. There are also phrases I’m especially happy with that I wrote, and quotes that express a thought especially nicely that I found, and I feel pleased about these. There are similar passages that Elana wrote or quoted, and I admire these no less, but in the way you admire someone else’s good job.

Sometimes I infer that the subtext of the co-authorship question is that for a married couple it might be a special challenge to write a book together. This would depend on the couple, but for us it was undoubtedly easier to co-author a book with each other than it would have been with anyone else. We talk about TV all the time anyway, and our “work” and “life” are continuous. The ideas benefited from the continual hashing out during car rides and over lunches at home, and we could discuss progress bit by bit as each of us worked on separate parts. I think it helps to live with your co-author, though I can see that in other situations it might be preferable to be separated by some physical distance. I like collaboration for many reasons: it solves the problem of scholarly loneliness and isolation, it makes possible synergistic productivity, and it might lead to a multi-dimensionality that one person’s work can never have. I also believe it provides some of the same rewards as solitary scholarship at a reduced rate of labor (though certainly not reduced by half). I like collaborative writing and I want to collaborate more in the future, though a collaboration I might have with people other than Elana will have obviously different dynamics. (I have co-authored one other publication, a journal article soon to appear that I look forward to linking to when it’s out. That experience, writing with someone other than my wife, has also made me eager to collaborate more.)

Most of the book’s research had been accumulated by the time we signed a contract with Routledge in fall 2009, and the writing was done in a sustained effort between the spring of 2010 and the early winter of 2011. It’s definitely easier to write a book quickly with two authors, though having an infant child (born in late 2009) whose care both authors are responsible for providing can add more than a bit of difficulty. It also, however, provided us time away from teaching, which was technically family leave but (now I speak mainly for myself) actually freed up some extra writing time. We wrote the book mostly
one chapter at a time and passed them back and forth through cycles of editing and revision. In the final weeks, once all eight chapters had been drafted, we often worked across a coffee shop table to facilitate discussion of revisions. When the page proofs arrived a few months ago we returned there to pass them back and forth marked up in different colors of ink. We still go to that coffee shop sometimes and sit across the table from each other. Of course we’re pleased that the book is done, but we also miss those days.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status
Contents
1. Legitimating Television
2. Another Golden Age?
3. The Showrunner as Auteur
4. Upgrading the Situation Comedy
5. Not a Soap Opera
6. The Television Image and the Image of the Television
7. Technologies of Agency
8. Television Scholarship and/as Legitimation

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Fall is practically here. The public schools are back in business and a fresh crop of freshmen have appeared at UWM, wandering the campus in packs and wearing those lanyards they must give out with room keys and ID badges, but which no one seems to need once classes start. We don’t begin the semester until after Labor Day but my course syllabus has been ready to go for a few weeks. I’m starting now to think more clearly about what the course will actually be like. It’s an advanced new media course which I am adapting from a graduate seminar I taught last fall. I have just begun a year-long fellowship at the Center for 21st Century Studies, which is the reason I’m teaching only one course each semester in 2011-12, and on Monday I claimed the keys to a new office with a view of the city and the lake.




I love (ok, enjoy and get various rewards from) teaching, but I also love the annual summer break from teaching. From May to September I have been granted 122 happily classroom-free days. Academics get irritated when civilians think we have the summer off, but this kind of conversation is so familiar and in my experience well-meaning. Actually, I say when feeling like talking about myself, I’m kind of busier during the summer. Graduate students are hurrying to finish MA theses, sending me work to read chapter by chapter and thesis by thesis. Service is supposed to pause but it doesn’t. I worked this summer on an assessment for the large lecture course I taught for many semesters. If teaching a new course or even a modification of an old one in fall, books and articles need to be collected and ordered and requested from the reserves at the library, but only after a process of deciding which to assign. Peer-reviewing manuscripts is an all-season task, though I am still not asked to do very much of it. Research has the biggest claim on my time, and I have spent much of this summer reading, taking notes, writing and rewriting, editing, revising, looking up dates and names on Wikipedia and IMDb and Google Books, corresponding with coauthors and editors, planning future research, and more generally managing a number of ongoing projects. Since May I have been juggling work on a couple of journal articles, a couple of book chapters, a co-authored book soon to be published, and two large projects in the early stages of research. I’ve been making conference plans for fall and spring. I also spent some of my time researching a project that I decided to abandon despite having spent a lot of time thinking about it and shlepping to the library to claim ILL books (maybe it will linger in the deep archive of my mind, some day to be integrated into another project or brought back to life on its own).

Summer is also a time of leisure, though, and I always feel a tension between the need to “be productive” as an untenured prof, and the desire to enjoy the season, the welcome visits from friends and family, the outings and trips and times of recreation and fun. This makes the summer not only busy but unfortunately stressful. I know this is a “white whine” and I don’t really work for a living like the vast majority of people who toil at jobs that really feel like work all day, all week, all year. But time is finite and an afternoon at the beach sometimes, perversely, looks like a missed opportunity to “be productive.” An afternoon of “being productive” can also seem like a missed opportunity to have fun, which is after all why God gave us summer. Even supposedly multi-functional fun+productive time, like a weekday afternoon at the movies (privilege of the film scholar!), can seem like a decadent indulgence. One day in early August I was going to spend an afternoon writing an essay while my sister and brother-in-law, visiting from out of town, took our 7 year-old son to a water park. After waffling briefly I opted for the water park and was pretty glad. But at the change of seasons I always feel frustrated by the incompleteness of the summer’s work, by the inevitability of goals unmet (even if I knew they were unrealistic all along).



Despite the prevailing cultural mandate of summer exuberance, my favorite time of year lately is actually the first few weeks of January. Our campus wedges a three-week winterim session in between fall and spring, and if you don’t teach winterim (I haven’t and will avoid it until we feel like we need the money) you have a nice month-long break from the classroom. The Christmas-New Year’s week is a wash as school and daycare are closed, but the first three weeks of the year are almost perfect. The kids are occupied all day, the weather is shitty, there is no sense that January ought to include leisure, and the weekdays are free for reading and writing, which is how I prefer to spend them most of the time. But the afternoon at the movies or the long lunch can be that much more pleasurable in winterim, when the rest of the world is really at work, the grind of teaching isn’t making every week into a struggle just to get to Friday, and there is so little expectation of fun. When I say that I wish the summer would be more like the winter it’s not just that I like indoors better than outdoors and sweaters better than shorts.

The problem with the academic summertime is a problem of how to think about academic work. Academic time (at least in my experience) has to be seen as fluid and multidimensional. The interest lately in promoting “work/life” or “work/family balance” is misguided, for a number of reasons, one of which is that work and life, business and pleasure, aren't separate. (Another reason is that it depends on a gendered conception of both life/family and of work, requiring women to shoulder an unfair share of the burden of an inequitable system of academic labor, childcare, and domestic responsibility). The idea that time is spent either on business or on pleasure, and that time spent on one is stolen from the other, is deeply ideological, rooted in an ethos of productive labor and industry that ultimately serves the interests of capitalism and class stratification. It is the right-wing politicians and neoliberal culture that sees the individual academic's productivity in terms of quantifiable return on investment, and questions the value of teaching and study as an end in itself. This is the same culture that makes academics eager to demonstrate their long working hours and quantify their productivity to answer the call that higher education pay, that it be economically accountable rather than an institution worthy of pubic investment. But even putting the deep ideological problem aside, it's also wrong to think of productivity in terms of the typical quantifiable metrics of an academic worker in hours of labor or courses taught or scholarly output.



The idea that producing articles, chapters, talks, books, blog posts — and more generally work to be lines on a vita or entries in an annual report — is "being productive" is a consequence of a flawed system for qualifying academics and establishing reputation and value. We can't easily change the system, but we can change how we think about our work. It's true that publishing is a sine qua non of academic success today, and that it is unfortunately more likely than teaching to lead to many people's professional fulfillment. But quantity isn't quality, and sometimes it's more productive to spend your time taking a walk or watching TV than forcing words out of your miserably typing fingers. One really good paper should be a more impressive accomplishment than half a dozen mediocre ones. My summer’s aborted research project, which was going to be a series of brief essays on Billy Joel songs (maybe blogged, maybe to become a short book), led me to a number of really good articles and videos, and inspired me to listen to the entire catalog of a recording artist I have felt strongly (positively) about (well, until An Innocent Man, after that I can’t really take that much of him) for almost thirty years. It helped me clarify in my own mind what I find so interesting about Billy Joel (this must wait for another time), which was satisfying in itself. Another of my big new projects, a book about taste in popular culture, might accommodate some of my ideas on this topic, so this research could prove "productive" down the road. But if it isn't, I don't really care. I liked reading and listening and thinking about Billy Joel these past few months, and I refuse to see it as a waste. I refuse to force myself to write an article or chapter on this when I don't know what shape it would take, who would read it, what scholarly conversation it enters into, and whether I have enough expertise to analyze the material as I might want to and interest to see it through to completion.

Sometimes I find the most useful and rewarding scholarly experiences are these kinds of meanderings, readings in topics that I decide are wrong turns, obsessions that come and go. Some inform my work in some way, eventually, and some turn out to be diversions, hard to know. Sometimes as a media scholar you can get into something seriously for months or years, and figure out what to do with it later. This seems to be my habit. I've watched cooking shows fairly avidly for ten years, sometimes more avidly than others. This summer I wrote an essay about a Food Network show, Everyday Italian with Giada de Laurentiis, for an edited book. I didn't realize six or seven years ago when I started watching Giada that this time was ultimately to be "productive," except maybe in practical culinary ways.



My other big new project, the one I proposed in my application for a Center fellowship, is research on the early history of video games in the home and the connection between games and television especially in the 1970s and early 1980s. I have been reading up on this for almost a year, trying to discover scholarly literature on this topic (it's scant) and assessing what primary sources could prove useful in a social and cultural history of games. To the extent that my childhood experience playing Atari and Intellivision in friends' basement rec rooms informs this work, that time was also "productive." But I see this project as something I intend to spend years doing. I don't know if I will write anything this year, as I collect, read, and make notes on popular and industry press and try to get my hands on the games themselves. That’s why I also have the taste project, which is more writing-ready. Scholarship can be like slow food. I'm not just cooking a dish all day, I'm growing the vegetables, raising the hog, waiting for the wine to get to be a better age. The payoff will come much later. But even thinking of the reading and note-taking as productive is too limiting. Time I spend thinking about it while driving kids to lessons and practices and half-watching youth soccer games, while walking across campus or riding my bike to a coffee shop, or while telling friends about my work are also part of the process. And sometimes it’s more productive to take a nap or watch a baseball game or bake a cake and come back to work later.

Some of the most tedious labor of the summer was the work Elana and I did on proofs of our book Legitimating Television, which is supposed to be coming out in a couple of weeks. Some of our standard academic practices, like conforming to Chicago style, insisting on knowing the place of publication of books we cite (who needs to know?), determining the dates of film releases (you weren’t sure which North by Northwest I was talking about?), are actually counterproductive. They suck our time and energy and divert our attention from more worthwhile activities. But when you do them you’re “being productive.” The proofs required long and careful attention to small details, and this took effort and put other pursuits on hold. But we’re happy the book is coming out and eager for people to read it. It’s the product of years of “being productive” in the usual various ways, and our process in writing it will — I hope — be the toping of another blog post soon to come.



Other things I did on my summer vacation:

-Watched 2 seasons of The Good Wife, and a fair bit of thirtysomething and Parks and Rec.
-Read A Visit from the Goon Squad and House of Holes.
-Listened to Gillian Welch, The Harrow & The Harvest.
-Went to see Tree of Life at 2pm on a Thursday, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on DVD one sunny morning.
-Read Walter Everett, "The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel," Contemporary Music Review 18.4 (2000): 105-129.

photos from recent summer vacations are by .michael.newman. published under CC attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works license

The Television Image and the Image of the Television

Next weekend I will be at the Media in Transition 7 conference at MIT, where I am giving a paper called "The Television Image and the Image of the Television" (pdf) about flat-panel HDTV sets. This work is part of the book I have been writing with Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, which we are told will be published in September (though the copyright will be 2012). The full paper has been posted as a pdf at the conference website. If you come hear me present at the conference, you will get to see lots of pretty pictures of HD television sets, like the one above from the March 2011 issue of Dwell. My paper identifies the switch from 4:3 CRT sets to 16:9 flat-panels as one facet of the wider cultural legitimation of television during the era of media convergence. It addresses the upscale and masculinized sophistication of the new sets, and their significance for TV's convergence with cinema and gaming.

Mad Men Class

In the past few weeks I have begun to teach an independent study with Lynn Reed, a student in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Skidmore College. The topic is Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s (link is to the class blog). This program allows students to do courses with faculty they approach who have some expertise and interest in topics they want to study, and I'm really grateful to Lynn for getting in touch with me because I have been finding the experience rewarding and (if I can speak for her) I think she has too.

I wanted to mention this here not just to share the syllabus, which I think will be of interest to serious Mad Men viewers, but also to link to Lynn's writings on the show and related readings, and to publicize her good work. Thus far she has written about character motivation in serialized narrative, character goals in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy", the dislocation that comes with cultural change, Reisman's ideas about conformity as applied to Don Draper, and "cool" in the 1960s, among other topics.

The course description to follow is Lynn's. The readings and viewings were put together collaboratively.

Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s

The acclaimed cable television drama Mad Men depicts the process of cultural change in early 1960s America through narratives of the personal and professional lives of men and women in a New York City advertising agency.

The series two most central protagonists, creative director Don Draper and secretary-turned-writer Peggy Olson, are attempting to:
-re-make themselves and re-tell their own stories,
-while working in an advertising industry that defines desires and creates narratives to sell products,
-at a time in which the country is re-making itself, re-telling the story of what it means to be an American and who can participate in the telling of that story

In this independent study, we will examine both the social history of the early 1960’s, and the ways in which this serialized television narrative tells the story of cultural change in this period (1960 – 1965).

From that examination, we will also look at larger questions. Contemporary politics and popular culture debate the meaning of “the sixties” through broad symbols and shorthand references. Does this study of Mad Men and the social history of the early 1960s tell us something about the current cultural fault lines that are seen as resulting from “the sixties”? Can it tell us something about which cultural changes have been accepted and absorbed by American culture and which are still up for debate?

Reading and Viewing Assignments:

The book Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, a collection of scholarly essays on Mad Men edited by Gary R. Edgerton, will be published April 26, 2011. The essays will be assigned reading and integrated with the syllabus as appropriate. (MN note: this is the language as we drafted it in the syllabus; this book has now been published and I just got my copy this week.)

Week 1-2 -- Overview of Television Storytelling & Serialized Narrative

“From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative”, Michael Z. Newman
Storytelling in Film and Television, Kristin Thompson
Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, Glen Creeber

Mad Men episodes:
1.6 “Babylon”
2.7 “The Gold Violin”
2.12 “The Mountain King”
3.6 “Guy Walks in to an Advertising Agency”
3.11 “The Gypsy and the Hobo”
4.4 “The Rejected”

Week 3-4 -- The “Crisis of Conformity” in the late ‘50s

The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank, chapters 1-3
The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman
“The White Negro”, Norman Mailer
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich

Mad Men episodes:
1.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
1.8 “The Hobo Code”
2.11 “The Jet Set”
3.7 “Seven Twenty Three”
4.7 “The Suitcase”

Week 5-6 – Changes in Advertising and American Culture

Conquest of Cool, chapters 4 – 8
The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard
A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, chapters 1-2

Mad Men episodes:
3.2 “Love Among the Ruins”
3.13 “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”
4.5 “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”
4.7 “The Suitcase”
4.11 “Chinese Wall”

Week 7-9 – Feminine Mystique and the early Women’s Movement

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz
Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon
Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks, Alice Echols, chapters 1-4

Mad Men Episodes:
1.3 “Ladies’ Room”
1.13 “The Wheel”
2.6 “Maidenform”
3.8 “Souvenir”
4.9 “The Beautiful Girls”


Week 10-12 – Political Change and Social Change / Re-telling the American Story in the Early 1960s

Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin, chapters 1-7
Port Huron Statement
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch

Mad Men Episodes:
1.12 “Nixon vs. Kennedy”
2.13 “Meditations in an Emergency”
3.3 “My Old Kentucky Home”
3.12 “The Grown-Ups”
4.13 “Tomorrowland”

Indie Promotion

The Columbia University Press website has published some of my work online, and I just wanted to alert those of you not following my every thought and link on twitter to these two items:

1. Indie's introduction has been posted for all to see. It begins:

Like so many cultural categories, indie cinema is slippery. The same term refers not only to a diverse body of films spanning more than two decades, from Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008) and beyond, but also a cultural network that sustains them. This book is about American indie cinema as a film culture that comprises not only movies but also institutions—distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media—within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings.

To read the rest, click on over.

2. The CUP blog has posted an interview with me. It starts off like this:

Question: Why “indie” rather than “independent”?

Michael Newman: At some point, maybe in the 1990s, indie became a kind of catch-all for describing edgy, youthful, subcultural, or alternative culture...

The rest is on the CUP blog.

Indie: An American Film Culture

My book has been published! Woo hoo! It was on the table of the book room at the recent Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans, where at least eight people got to take a copy home. I'm told the date retailers can sell the thing is April 12, though they are taking orders. If you want to buy it directly from CUP, follow the link above and use the promo code INDNE for a 30% discount.

Columbia UP's publicist emailed me to see if I can help promote the book by posting to listservs, alerting my social networks, etc. Yes I can do that!

This post is going to take you BEHIND THE SCENES of the thrilling production process of an ACADEMIC MONOGRAPH!!! I have been saving some of these tidbits for years, carefully guarding them until this day.

-The idea for the book was suggested to me circa 2002 by my graduate school advisor, David Bordwell at a restaurant in Madison called The Saz that no longer exists. I wanted to write a dissertation about narrative theory and in particular about character, and he thought independent cinema would offer a good body of work within which to explore my ideas. These things take time. The dissertation was completed in 2005, and in the meantime I had a child and found my interests expanding into television and new media and taste and cultural studies. I have found that parenthood is a great motivator. I waste much less time when someone else is looking after my kid while I'm supposed to be working. People think having a baby around must kill your productivity, and maybe it's my male privilege speaking, but I have found it to be the opposite.

-The title changed a few times. When I proposed the book to CUP it was to be called Indiewood: Storytelling in American Independent Cinema. I changed it when I saw storytelling becoming only one aspect of the work rather than a singular central focus. I also didn't want the book to have the same title as Geoff King's Indiewood, USA, and I saw "Indiewood" as too specific a term, leaving out what some see as the "true" indies. My wife, Elana, suggested the title Indie. I'm pretty sure the An American Film Culture part was mine. At one point I wanted to rename the book Home is Where the Art Is, which is the title of a chapter about film festivals and art house theaters and a headline from a NYT article about independent cinema from 1989. My editor at the press thought it was a bad idea, and I think she was right.

-As in any long-simmering project, this book is the product of an abiding personal interest and a connection with many events in my life. In some ways this is the ultimate expression of my youthful cinephilia, which in most ways I have outgrown. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was eager to be initiated into the world of serious film passion. The first film I ever saw at a film festival was Jarmusch's Mystery Train, at the 1989 Toronto festival with the director and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in attendance. I worked managing the candy counter of the Carleton Cinema around that time, where Do the Right Thing and sex, lies, and videotape were playing (along with Jesus of Montreal, 36 Filette, The Little Thief, as well as some more popular titles like When Harry Met Sally...). After moving to New York in 1994 I became a pretty passionate follower of independent film, regularly spending weekend afternoons at the Angelika. In some ways the book is an effort to make sense of one kind of cinema that was part of what made me want to become a film -- later media -- scholar. I have never thought of myself as a fan of independent films per se, and I have probably been a bigger fan of studio-era Hollywood and some foreign cinema (at times, Godard, Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu, Kiarostami, 1980s Hong Kong action films). But having seen so many of the canonical indie films, the ones like sex, lies and Pulp Fiction, at an impressionable age, the centrality of this form of cinema to my conception of artistic film practice was pretty important. Later I would see this in a context of a film culture producing distinction for its elite audience, but having a critical perspective on indie's social functions hardly diminishes my feeling for some of these films.

-Maybe some processes are quicker and easier, but my revision process was slow and painful. Between proposal and proofs stages, there were at least four readers who wrote reports. The shape of the project shifted as my interests developed toward more of a concern with social issues and less with narrative. I like how it turned out, but it took a long time to get there. One thing I'm especially pleased with is how Indie balances two senses of culture: as works to be analyzed, and as social ways of knowing and experiencing. A film culture functions in both of these senses, and I try to combine an analysis of indie's value as a cultural category, and its coherence as a body of films calling on a coherent set of expectations about form and meaning. When I say film culture, I always mean both of these things.

-I am pretty pleased by the cover. I suggested images from Lost in Translation and Juno, and for various reasons the press preferred Juno. One reason I like seeing her on the cover is that Juno is both a film I liked a lot, and a great example of the contentiousness of indie as a cultural category. As I discuss in the final chapter, Juno is an example of a movie that some members of the indie community sought to de-authenticate, to remove from consideration as indie because of its heavy marketing by Fox Searchlight, its mainstream appeal, its lack of indie bona fides. One of my central claims about indie cinema is that it's a slippery, contested category, and that it can only be understood as it is used within indie film culture. I would not exclude it because it is so widely thought to belong, but the efforts of some critics and bloggers to distance themselves from Juno (and of many people I have talked to personally) reveals much about the values sustaining independent cinema. I suggested handwritten for the type but the designer did it better than that, and gave it more of a DIY scissors cut-out look.



This is the Lost in Translation image I had suggested. Pretty but not really fun. Related: I use the term bokeh in the chapter where I discuss Lost in Translation to describe the effect of out-of-focus abstract shapes of lights like we see in this image. That's one of my favorite words in the book, just cuz.

-Some people have asked how it feels to have a book published. It's kind of like asking how it feels to be 39 years old. I knew it was coming for a long time, and it's not that different from before. But publish means to make public, so now I have this sense that what I have done is out there and outside of my control, and I like that. It means my work is done. It belongs to you now.

Free TV? Television File-Sharing, Media Convergence and Cultural Status

Update November 2, 2011: The longer and peer-reviewed version of this essay has been published online in Television & New Media, DOI 10.1177/1527476411421350. If you want to quote or cite this, I recommend the TV&NM publication.

I gave this paper on Saturday at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans. It's an elaboration of some ideas I wrote awhile back in Flow. I have been researching this topic for a couple of years and the 2011 conference gave me the opportunity to turn it into something more substantial; there's a longer version soon to be submitted to a journal. This is work in progress, and your comments are welcome.

Television has always been free, and the cultural status of television—despite shifts in recent years—endures as a product of the over-the-air model. Free TV is of course commercial, and we pay indirectly, but in the digital age a new kind of free TV has emerged which is removed from the commercial circuit. Television shared as files among peers using BitTorrent and other online means, making TV freer, in some ways, than it ever was. P2P TV is one of many developments in our era of convergence prompting a renewal of television’s place in the popular imagination. Thus my title is meant in two ways. P2P TV is free to the consumer, but it also promises to free television from its identity, from old modes of viewing rooted in earlier technologies. By considering its conflicted cultural implications, my aim today is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television’s value during the era of digital convergence.

Much has been written about file-sharing over the past decade. [For starters I recommend Lessig, Vaidhyanathan, Gillespie, Litman, Strangelove, and Green & Jenkins in Holt & Perren.] By and large, however, this work has focused especially on music and movies, the two forms of media that appear to be most threatened economically by the disruptions posed by file-sharing. Much of this writing is premised on media industries selling to the consumer. Record labels and movie studios can claim lost revenue if sales of CDs or DVDs are replaced by free P2P circulation. Television shows, unlike recordings and films, are not most often sold directly to the audience. Despite the widespread file-sharing of television content, then, and despite an evidently high degree of concern in the TV industry, the place of TV in analyses of piracy has been marginal.

I see three ways in which file-sharing challenges conceptions of television, rooted in the era of network broadcasting.

First, file-sharing is part of the legitimation of television. In its traditional identity rooted in the network era, television’s cultural status was as feminized mass culture, as a threat to intellectual culture, childhood development, and social cohesion. In some ways the introduction of television into P2P networks, alongside other technological developments, bespeaks the high value of some forms of TV to media consumers eager to locate and select episodes and to devote time and resources to their acquisition and experience. The availability of TV series alongside movies and music is a factor in the rising legitimacy of TV, now seen as equivalent to other media at least in the context of some forms of convergent distribution. The kinds of television shared in P2P networks tends to be the aestheticized, scripted prime time comedies and dramas. Users of P2P networks might come in all shapes and sizes, but the practice is typically linked to youth, masculinity, class, and technological sophistication. One seldom finds the less legitimate and more ephemeral forms of television, feminized and devalued genres such as daytime talk shows and local news, circulating in P2P networks.

File-sharing is further legitimating by transforming the audience for television from supposedly passive viewers into active users. The ability of users to program their own viewing rather than being “slaves to the schedule,” and the possibility of watching television shows purged of commercials, function to legitimate television. Sharing files of episodes is one means of the viewer becoming an advertising-avoiding television programmer. Thus the P2P distribution of television is one among a cluster of technologies of agency, making TV more culturally respectable by masculinizing it, articulating TV with activity and discernment rather than the more feminized and passive characteristics that earlier defined it.

[Aside: TV's legitimation during the era of convergence is the topic of the book I wrote with Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. It should be in print from Routledge by the end of the year.]

Second, file-sharing is located in a space of transition from television’s status as a public good to a private good. The culture of file-sharing associates television content with the broadcasting model of distribution, wherein the television text has no price. In some ways file-sharing confirms the value of television as ephemeral and disposable even as it arrests “flow” to make possible sharing TV shows as files. One contradiction of television circulating for free among P2P networks is that this form of distribution at once denies and affirms the value of the text. On one hand, like broadcasts, the shared text is a public good which no one buys or sells. On the other hand, the television industry sees this form of circulation as a potential crisis of lost revenue. The use of P2P networks for television file-sharing reveals an instability in the valuation of TV as it shifts from being a public good, freely available to anyone as it was during the network era, to a private good, available only to audiences who actively choose to enter into terms of commercial exchange.

A third way in which file-sharing complicates traditional conceptions of TV is by extracting the circulation of television content from local or national communities. Media corporations are still defined by national intellectual property and regulatory regimes. The availability of shows from one country in another was once a matter of licensing agreements between firms. Now viewers interested in seeing series from abroad have fast and easy access, and online fandoms congregate as global communities. This new availability has awakened and attuned audiences to the temporality of transnational media flows. Discourses of P2P TV communities reveal a sense of entitlement to television and a frustration with structures that slow or forbid transmission of American shows to viewers in other countries. The transition from local/national to global distribution of TV requires new conceptions of television’s value, thinking of it now as a cosmopolitan transnational culture.

I want to consider these tensions of value between low and high, public and private, and national and global by looking at practices of P2P TV consumption as represented in the online discourses of TV file-sharing communities such as message boards, which frequently make arguments in favor of file-sharing in self-consciously value-laden and often ethical terms. The practical ethical theories of P2P users offer evidence of ways of thinking about television and its cultural status as convergent technologies introduce problems and possibilities never before faced by television consumers.

P2P users might reason that it is ethical to download content not otherwise or legally available. Many believe downloading is justified when one has paid for the content in another format. Some rationales might justify TV, music, and movies alike. But users also establish specific norms for television. In a nightly.net forum, a commenter explains, “I personally don’t hold a lot of guilt for using BitTorrent to download shows. Everything I’ve downloaded…is something I’ve technically paid for in my satellite bill.” Sharers also insist that DVR recordings and downloads ethically equivalent. The difference between recording a show oneself using a VCR or DVR and skipping commercials and downloading a commercial-free file via BitTorrent is regarded as ethically insignificant. In the same comments thread, a user responds, “If you pay for cable and have DVR, then downloading a cable show is no different from recording and skipping through the commercials.” The nature of broadcast television’s business model makes sharing different from music or movies, especially when considering network programming. As one Digg user explains, “The networks BROADCAST their shows, sending them out FOR FREE into the air all over the country. How can they claim that I am stealing if they are giving it away for free?”

Avoiding the cost of cable or satellite subscription or even of owning a television might be paramount. There might also be value found in having a way to watch TV without some of the traditional cultural associations constructing television as degraded and feminized. A reddit discussion on the question “How many redditors don’t watch TV?” inspired a number of telling confessions from community members. The legitimation of the convergence era has opened up new opportunities for television appreciation while distancing a new conception of TV from its old cultural construction. Consider these statements:

-I don’t watch TV but I do download some TV shows.

-I watch a few TV shows but I mostly download them so you could say I watch Laptop.

-My TV is called Pirate’s Bay.

-I was going to ask if torrents of TV shows counted.
No waiting for the local station to pick up a program
No loud annoying commercials
You can download an entire season at a time.

The television reflected in these comments is clearly a residual conception rooted in the technologies of an earlier period. The superiority of new technologies is given as self-evident and as distinguishing a youthful, masculine, and technologically adept community from the mainstream. Many qualify that if they watch TV shows it is not really watching TV. By this logic, file-sharing ameliorates some of television’s basic problems. Within the community of file-sharers, overcoming these issues is good, indeed, doing so has the potential to recuperate television from its low status and make watching TV more legitimate.

Even with DVRs and other legally legitimate technologies, there are obstacles standing in the way of some consumers accessing TV content on their own terms. Shows are not released in all countries simultaneously, and in many countries some content is not available at all. Legal downloads are encrusted in DRM, inhibiting portability and archival value. Media companies release their content in “windows;” DVD content is offered at a later window than transmission on broadcast, cable, or satellite. Webisodes and streaming video are routinely geo-blocked: some sites will work only in some territories. Users abroad trying to access Hulu are greeted with a “not available in your region” message.

File-sharing is thus especially prevalent in countries where access to American shows is limited by windowing and geo-blocking, especially in English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia. Canadian television viewers have been motivated to start Facebook groups like “TV Fans Against Hulu’s Geo-Blocking Policy” and blogs like “I Hate Hulu.” A reddit thread inspired one Canadian commenter to exclaim, “Fuck Hulu! Bittorrent lives!”

The rationales for geo-blocking may not be evident to users who feel deserving of access to popular culture. A Hulu vice-president claims that “Canadians consider it their ‘birthright’ to have access to Hulu." Geo-blocking is one among many forms of Canadians’ deprivation of popular culture, and whether in the name of IP agreements or cultural protectionism, the experience of Canadians can be characterized by frustration and resentment over the inability to share a common culture with those beyond their borders.* File-sharing ameliorates this sense of being wronged by cultural institutions. Insofar as it finds ways around the legally legitimate obstacles to access, then, P2P file-sharing in Canada and elsewhere is constructed as ethically legitimate because of a sense of justified entitlement to popular culture, as well as a sense of the illegitimacy of this access’s denial. This returns us to a sometimes lost sense of popular culture as culture belonging to the people rather than the corporations who produce and disseminate it. Preserving the people’s access to their culture in the face of corporate and state interference might be a more ethical gesture than preserving intellectual property rights in the name of profits and national sovereignty. By framing TV as popular culture in this sense, rather than as disposable trash or commodified mass culture, the communities of TV fans downloading their shows express a valuation of television.

Because of Australia’s geographical distance from the Anglophone countries, pre-Internet, Australians waited many months or even longer for foreign shows to be seen there, and many series or seasons are still not available Thus one Australian commenter on a tv.com forum asserts, “If your local TV stations don't want to keep up with the latest episodes of whatever it is then shows deserve to be downloaded."

Thanks to file-sharing, Australian fans of shows like Battlestar Galactica are able to participate in fan communities as episodes air in the U.S. This has allowed Australians to overcome some of the distance previously felt from foreign cultures. But when official BSG webisodes are geo-blocked, viewers feel the same frustration as the Canadians. This is especially troubling to viewers avoiding spoilers. The global circulation of media makes simultaneity more imperative to passionate audiences, and this too drives P2P sharing as an ethical imperative. Because spoiler-avoidance functions as an ethic of fan communities, distribution infrastructures denying global simultaneity are effectively spoiling not only the plot, but also an ethical contract among media companies and fans. This helps explain why Australia has more P2P TV sharing per capita than any other nation. (For more on the Australian example, see Tama Leaver, "Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance".)

This consideration of TV file-sharing reveals a number of new positive valuations of television in the context of digital convergence: as more culturally legitimate than it had been, and as a form of global popular culture which finds a hospitable site of community cohesion on the Internet. At the same time, however, the residual reputation of TV as a form of low culture, and the efforts of media corporations to extract revenue from every experience of media, also inform the valuation of television evident in the case of file-sharing.

Because television, unlike movies and music, has long been an example of a public good, because—iTunes aside—the TV consumer is not in the habit of paying per show, the online sharing of television also is marked by distinctions of value which are less flattering to TV, and which in some ways are inconsistent or contradictory with those more positive formulations just considered. The best illustration of this is the sense among file-sharing participants that TV sharing is more ethical than movie or music sharing. In other words, the value of movies and music is constructed in distinction to the value of TV, but in this instance value is monetary rather than cultural or communal. Nevertheless, cultural hierarchy is evident in such judgments.

The gadget blog Gizmodo offers one clear formulation of this relative valuation as a “Pirate’s Code of Conduct” for file-sharing, prescribing formal ethical norms for its technologically sophisticated, masculinized readership. (As a “Pirate’s” code, it is crafted in a stylized lingo.)

"TV is to be downloaded, movies are to be attended when a man returns to shore. If ye aren't a Neilsen family, what you watch doesn't matter for ratings anyway. Since advertisers pay by rating, it's a theft-less crime. Movies, on the other hand, do see profits of gold and jewels. So support independent/foreign film in the theaters, and save the action flicks with high production values and many beautiful explosions for the big screen, too. Hollywood romantic comedies? They are for plundering (in secret)."

The gendered and classed conception of media makes for a set of downloading distinctions keyed not only to ideas about media economics, but also about the relative value of genres and formats depending on placement on the cultural hierarchy. It also strategically ignores the profits sought by TV studios and networks from DVD sales among other ancillary windows, as well as cable subscriptions.

A nightly.net commenter claims to feel no guilt from downloading TV shows, as he skips commercials while watching using his DVR. But movies are different: he will only download them “in the rare case it’s not playing in any theaters in my location.”

Similarly, a Don't Make Me Steal manifesto circulating lately sets clear values for television and movies. The point of this online petition is to encourage practices for media corporations to follow to make legitimate alternatives preferable to file-sharing. Among these is reasonable pricing of media products: making a television series cost 1/3 the price of a film, insisting that content be advertising-free. As we have seen, the conception of TV as free of charge has a strong effect on the ethical calculation involved in P2P sharing of television. Users find it hard to accept downloading of TV shows as free-riding or stealing, and often view advertising-avoidance in positive rather than negative moral terms.

I have argued today that television in this new context of media convergence is contradictory and unstable, caught between its traditional and emergent identities. The network era might have given way to convergence, but the medium is understood in the popular imagination according to terms drawing from both periods. Old ways of knowing cannot be cast aside as quickly as old technologies and industrial practices. The file-sharing of TV content is thus a practice and discourse wherein television’s cultural value can be contested and reassessed as the medium’s identity is renewed.

*My discussion of Canadians' experiences of geo-blocking draws from Ira Wagman and Peter Urquhart, “This Content is Not Available in Your Region: Geo-Blocking Culture in Canada,” in Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creative Canadian Culture Online, ed. Rosemary Coombe, Darren Wershler-Henry, and Martin Zelinger (Toronto: U of Toronto P, forthcoming).

Faves, 2010

My year has been defined more than anything by being a parent of a very young child, a baby boy born in late November 2009. I saw many of my favorite movies of 2009 on video in early 2010 (A Serious Man and Inglourious Basterds were among them but The Hurt Locker was a disappointment, and none of what I have seen of the '09 vintage impresses me more than Up), and very few of what I expect to be my favorite movies of 2010. I also played a lot of video games, but few of the year's releases. This is in such contrast to earlier times in my life, when I had no television or gaming console, and would see several films a week, and not infrequently more than one a day in the theater. Over the years I have become just as interested in television as an object of study as cinema, and have been spending more home time with TV than movies for several years. With two kids and busy semester business for much of the year, in addition to a number of active research projects, this has left barely an hour a day of audiovisual media consumption in the evenings, which is enough to keep up with a big handful of shows but not a very satisfying condition for consuming motion picture features. I'd like to seem a bit ashamed of how much I have given up watching movies, but I have a hard time seeing greater value in them than I find in television shows.

And more than any other form of media, it's the internet that got the largest share of my attention in 2010. If I had to say what was my favorite thing of all, it would probably be the web in all its various forms and in the many ways I have accessed it -- MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPad, computer terminals in public places. I was reluctant to become one of those new gadget enthusiasts, the bleeding-edge tech geeks so ridiculously enamored of mere devices. But I often feel excessively for the iPad, which I got late in the summer. It's my best toy since the Wii. It's a portable TV for showing YouTube videos to the baby, an easy way of checking in on email and Twitter from the couch of away from home, and a great format for reading many kinds of prose. I still use an iPod touch all the time too, for reading in bed and carrying in my pocket, and for music much more than the iPad. I would want to give either one of them up.

Of course much of my time this year was spent with culture of the past, and I'm keeping this list 2010 only. As in previous installments, what follows is in no particular order.

***

Definitely Twitter, certainly not Facebook. Amanda Klein recently wrote a very nice appreciation of why Twitter is so appealing and so useful. Someone said Facebook is for the people you used to know, Twitter is for the people you want to know. Twitter is amusing, informative, and sometimes outrageous. I sometimes go to it for advice and conversation, but more than that I find it offers a continual connection with a cluster of overlapping public communities of shared interest. I stay with Facebook because I care about many of the people I keep in touch with there, but I always wish there were a better way to keep us connected.

Terriers was my favorite new show of the season, and I wasn't surprised or even really devastated by its cancellation, which seemed inevitable. I admired its crackling dialog and subtle characterizations, and it eventually made me forget that Donal Logue was the title character in The Tao of Steve. The theme song by Robert Duncan made us dance on the couch once a week. We'll miss you.



Devour is a web video aggregator, a sort of curated best-of-YouTube site where there is always something worth watching. It has an appealing layout, with blurred thumbnails on which simple titles are superimposed. I follow it in an RSS reader, but increasingly RSS reader interfaces are losing their appeal as new forms of aggregation do what they do better. Devour is a good example, as the visual experience of a grid of selected videos beats the listed headlines or river of news you find in feedreaders.

I'm really fascinated by user-generated movie posters, which John August blogged about as "unsheets" (a play on "onesheets"). These are especially intriguing when they are especially minimalist and geometric, or just graphically simple and spare. They often call on your familiarity with a text, but they are also often highly suggestive and appetizing, making the viewer eager to know more. See also minimal movie posters and minimal TV series posters. I guess part of what makes these so arresting is that they're so different from the official posters issued by publicity departments. They might not effectively sell films and television shows to the most desirable audiences, but they allow us to imagine how visual culture might be different if it approached audiences differently.





Girl Talk, All Day. Girl Talk is all about the culture clashes inherent in popular music, making white music more dangerous and black music more palatable to white people. I find it totally audacious and inspiring, and I don't tire of listening even long after the most original and shocking moments have become familiar.

That Rube Goldberg OK Go video, "This Too Shall Pass" (see this interview for more).

30 Rock, which still makes me laugh every time. Honorable mention, among the sitcoms, to Modern Family. I have tried watching Community and Parks & Rec, and I know you probably think I'm lame for saying this but, they irritate me and I don't find them all that funny.


Mad Men, whose fourth season was as insanely watchable and engrossing as the first three. I'm eager to rewatch on DVD to pay more attention to Megan and Faye, and to appreciate the delicacy with which the story of Don's return to middle-class family life was unfolded. The scene of Don's return to Anna Draper's house, when he tells his kids that Dick refers to him, was especially memorable. Zosia Mamet as Joyce, Peggy's friend in the photo dept at Life magazine, was always fascinating, even more so given that the same actress also had quite different roles on United States of Tara and Parenthood.

Mallory’s Clothes, a compendium of screencaps from episodes of Family Ties. I'm fascinated by the use of screencaps in a kind of vernacular media criticism and appreciation, extending the apparatus of scholarly analysis to ordinary folks. The appreciation of the visuals of this 1980s sitcom strikes me as deeply loving and real.







Nicholson Baker on video games in the New Yorker.

The meta ending of The Hills, a gesture of real fakery in an increasingly unsuccessful representation of fake reality.

In Treatment's third season, especially the genius casting of Amy Ryan as Paul's new shrink Adele who's so hard to read, and Irrfan Khan as Sunil, a patient from Calcutta who wins Paul's admiration and affection but to his own selfish ends.

Parenthood is one of the few network dramas I ever look forward to these days, except I don’t like the whole show, just parts and things it could be -- I like Dax Shepard as a comical leading man type (Crosby) and Sarah Ramos in the Angela Chase role (Haddie) much more than Peter Krause and Lauren Graham, both of them too familiar from earlier roles (I wonder if Nate or Lorelai would have any patience for these two), love classic cute kid Jabbar of course, don’t buy Craig T. Nelson as a Berkeley type, hate the overuse of communal happy endings and little victories you know the network execs love and the writers find tiresome. I think what I really like is that it reminds me of the Zwick and Herskovitz dramas like thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once & Again that I wish were still on the air.

I liked the stoner roommate on Accidentally on Purpose and the curly-haired Jewish kid on Huge, two shows I enjoyed watching occasionally and without paying that much attention.

Pants on the Ground. Best thing about a fairly terrible season of Idol.

Survivor All-Stars was good entertainment, and was especially enjoyable through the filter of snarky Twitter fans like @fymaxwell. Twitter has put "appointment television" back on the agenda, though it seems many of the shows people like to watch all at once come in for some considerable mockery (I'm thinking of The Oscars as well as other awards shows and reality competitions). I generally avoid this stuff not just because I usually really like the shows I watch, but also because we aren't giving up time-shifting so quickly.

The Olympics, especially curling, held my attention last winter. I wish there were more curling on TV at other times. The World Cup was equally consuming. I seem to focus my attention on the aesthetics of sports as much as the play, and with the World Cup I get fascinated by the difference between sports style at home and abroad. For instance, check out the typography on the Italian kit. I was delighted by the vuvuzelas and all the bourgeois consternation they caused. It's always interesting to encounter differing gender norms, as when seeing men like Sergio Ramos in headbands, or the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o's form-fitting jersey.



Belle & Sebastian, Write about Love. The same catchy melodic lines and melancholy lyrics, the same vocal harmonies and inventive instrumentations familiar from earlier recordings, but now with indelible guest vocals by Norah Jones and Carey Mulligan. I like how the band has moved toward more female vocals but without changing much of what makes Stuart Murdoch's songs so original and catchy.

Movies in Frames, a tumblr blog to which people submit four frames stacked one on top of the other from a film. Sometimes these remind me of a movie I liked by recalling some of the most memorable or arresting images. But just as often they give the impression of having seen an interesting film I probably won't ever see. And they appreciate the qualities of movies as a pictorial art.


The Perfect Getaway


O Cheiro do Ralo (Drained)


Moonstruck



A Woman is a Woman

Molly Young on immersive retail in The Believer, about the aesthetics of stores like Hollister.

Lone Star, a great pilot, really wish it had the chance to become a great show. And thanks for the Mumford & Sons.

The Lady Gaga profile in New York by Vanessa Grigoriadis. I've been listening to Lady Gaga all year. My kids like her too. I still find her videos pretty fascinating and her Larry King interview was amusing, but I find that underneath the pastiche of Madonna and the performance of celebrity is a quality of classic songcraft and vocal performance missing from much of today's pop. When a Twitter friend asked who people thought we'd still be listening to in 25 from among today's artists, I didn't think long before naming Lady Gaga. I already feel like Bad Romance has been stuck in my head for 20 years.

Damages, Martin Short and Campbell Scott in particular as morally compromised men embroiled in scandal.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and its two predecesors, which I read on an iPod touch in a pretty brief period of time. Great character, impressive plotting, sometimes preposterous, unimpressive prose style. I like reading on the iPod because the screen is so small you can turn pages frequently and it feels like perpetual progress.

xkcd, the only comic strip I never miss.

Treme, which started slow and seemed populated by an unnecessary number of obnoxious male characters, but worked its way up to a pretty poignant ending celebrating the human spirit and the vitality of New Orleans culture. The most memorable sequence for me was the montage in the finale set to "My Indian Red."

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, visually exuberant, and very Torontonian.

The Imperfectionists, a network narrative about the news biz.

Arcade Fire's video "The Wilderness Downtown." I like the album but not as much as the hype made me want to, and as rock music meditations on suburbia go, I still like Billy Joel's Captain Jack.

I don't think I've seen her work in person, but I was glad to read anything about Marina Abramovic at MoMA, like the writeup by Arthur Danto in the NYT.

The Social Network didn't seem like it could have been the best film of the year, but it's images and narrative have stuck with me, and I saw so few films in the theater that I guess it's a fave. I mean, I liked it much more than Eat Pray Love or The Kids are Alright. I still wonder if it would have made any impression at all if it weren't about Facebook -- if the company in the movie were something no one has heard of. I think it would be really boring, but maybe Facebook represents something interesting enough that making a fairly pedestrian movie about it can tap into something vital.

I like the Facebook like button. I wish the whole world were covered in those thumbs you could click on to indicate your approval. Ever since the like button appeared, I find myself in situations in which it would be nice to have the option to just like, and engage no further. People often gripe that there ought to be a dislike button, but I appreciate any effort to keep the internet and the world for that matter civil. (I do not like the things the Facebook like button represents re Facebook's business model, its notion of community, its eagerness to sell my data to advertisers, etc.)

I have a bunch of favorite iPad apps and I'm not that eager to go on about them, but I'll mention a few: Flipboard, Note Taker HD, GoodReader, and Reeder. All are ways of reading certain kinds of things -- Flipboard and Reeder for news, blog, and social network content, NoteTaker and GoodReader for PDF documents. One of my most important uses of the iPad is to read (and annotate) PDFs.

Finally, some favorite blogs or blog-like sites, God bless you all, and here's to oodles of good pictures and words in 2011:
The Awl, News for TV Majors, Antenna, Flow, Ludic Despair, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style, This Recording, Kottke, Marginal Revolution, Torontoist, Waxy, Boing Boing, By Ken Levine, Seriocity, Observations on Film Art, Just TV, The Film Doctor, flickr blog, The Big Picture, Language Log, Uni Watch, Abstract City, James Fallows, Wordyard, Collision Detection, HRO, Film Studies for Free, Girish, Judgmental Observer, Cultural Learnings, The Gurgling Cod, Torrent Freak,The Extratextuals, Press Start to Drink, longreads, The Browser, and a few more fun tumblrs for good measure: this isn't happiness, Unhappy Hipsters, and Selleck Waterfall Sandwich. Clicking that last link is one recommended way to ring in a new year with a smile and a good feeling about what's possible when just about anyone can put just about anything in public.



See you next year!