Television Fans Research Articles

Distribution Is Queen: LGBTQ Media on Demand

Distribution Is Queen: LGBTQ Media on Demand Candace Moore (bio) The research analyst who assured the Economist in 2009 that “people would sooner unplug their refrigerators than their cable boxes” may be eating his words.1 Perhaps he’d now muse that folks would rather sacrifice toilet paper than broadband. In “My Life as a Television Throwback,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner describes her cobbled-together viewing habits after her husband was laid off. Her family canceled cable and watched TV online through the usual streaming suspects, but also via digital antennae, forcing an encounter with “slow” TV—programs as scheduled during the week, interstitials and all.2 While my personal battle with AT&T to maintain cable service after a windstorm rages on after visits from six technicians, none of whom could climb a telephone pole, most of my friends have pulled the plug on cable and satellite. My dirtiest professional secret? I’m finding myself increasingly jealous of their lower monthly bills. And I write and teach about TV! But I am also anxious about what new online consumption patterns mean for the production and distribution of feminist and LGBTQ media. Now that video streaming represents a quarter of total Internet usage, mainstream television and film distributors are struggling to create pay-per-view, commercial-sponsored, and subscription online formats enticing enough that viewers stop downloading pirated media for free. Unfortunately, distributors for independent, alternative, and niche media are also suffering a siphoning off of their profits—and these companies often barely break even on festival favorites that don’t otherwise garner consumer interest. A clear consequence of rapidly shifting consumption practices for the vitality of alternative media is that to ensure profit, work that reproduces popular Hollywood narratives and aesthetics tends to get picked up over more experimental fare, even by companies that have previously taken chances with riskier material. In what follows, I examine the digital strategies and harnessing of consensual fan labor that queer distributors, in particular, employ to stave off their own economic collapse. I turn to two of [End Page 137] the largest LGBTQ film and television distributors, Wolfe Video and the Logo network, respectively, as case studies. As I detail, Wolfe’s e-commerce business model incorporates “hiring” consumers as online subcontractors, partnering with digital video distributors, and maximizing content-sharing sites like Pinterest to socially distribute its films. The basic cable channel Logo uses mobile social media applications, such as Foursquare, and mines user data across access devices to create individualized media experiences for television fans. These practices reflect some of the seismic shifts in the structure of for-profit media distribution over the past decade—moves toward providing media content for the consumer on demand and across multiple platforms. Given consumers’ new strategies for avoiding costly subscriptions, cable providers are retrenching, offering bundled deals, expanding video-on-demand (VOD) services for the customers they’ve kept, and developing online and mobile VOD sites that resemble HBO GO’s successful format. Apparently concerned that maybe “content is king” after all, multisystem operator Comcast even purchased the media conglomerate NBC Universal, first buying a controlling stake in 2011, followed by the whole company in 2013.3 Since the downturn of the economy, the film industry has experienced its own share of initial bed-wetting, given lower box-office and home entertainment sales.4 There’s also no money in local video-rental chains, unless you’re talking about those little red boxes outside of drugstores. Rental giant Hollywood Video closed its doors and Blockbuster declared bankruptcy.5 Initial estimates that viewers would buy nearly a billion more movies through legal online sources than on Blu-ray or DVD in 2012 ended up being inflated;6 but while 2012 didn’t quite mark the first year that Internet media viewing profits exceeded hard-copy revenue, online sales will inevitably beat out traditional delivery and home entertainment formats. While both large and small media distributors experiment with pay-to-watch online delivery systems, consumers’ insecurity in the new economy, married with changes in streaming technology and file sharing, invites forms of consumption off the corporate grid. In 2011, Maria Pallante, the US register of copyrights, shouted...

Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix

Reading the Remix: Methods for Researching and Analysing the Interactive Textuality of Remix

Locating Anti-Fandom in Extratextual Mash-Ups

Locating Anti-Fandom in Extratextual Mash-Ups

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Remixing Period Drama: The Fan Video and the Classic Novel Adaptation

This article examines the various types of fan videos inspired by the nineteenth-century classic novel adaptation trend that can be found on online platforms and sharing sites. These works, including fan music videos, fake fan trailers, and actor appreciation videos, provide valuable insight into the reception of the genre in contemporary online participatory culture. Such period drama fan responses, the article argues, challenge settled cultural, ideological, and aesthetic definitions of the genre. The fan productions are furthermore considered not only as ethnographic evidence of audience behaviour and response but also as forms of adaptation themselves. Taking this approach allows comparisons to be drawn between the practices of fan creators and those of professional adapters. The aim is to revise the common view of the effective adaptation as an incisive critical reading by emphasising the more subjective and affective qualities the genre shares with fandom.

Film Tourism Event Longevity: Lost in Mayberry

The purpose of this study is to examine a US festival widely known for attracting television fan tourists, build a traveler profile or typology of festival goers, and reflect on how the behavioral segmentation of these tourists may affect the longevity of the film tourism event and the broader planning of the destination community. Specifically, this study examines the Mayberry Days Festival, an annual event held in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Mount Airy is the birthplace and boyhood home of actor, Andy Griffith, whose television series (The Andy Griffith Show) was set in the fictional hamlet of Mayberry. Online survey invitation cards were distributed during the 2010 Mayberry Days Festival to gather data on the sociodemographic characteristics, motivations, perceptions, and economic impact of the attendee to comprehend how sustainable the Mayberry Days Festival will be for Mount Airy. Results suggest that visitors are drawn to Mount Airy for a variety of reasons and that The Andy Griffith Show is not necessarily the main motivator. It is important for the town's tourism promoters not to get “lost in Mayberry” as they plan for alternative marketing and attraction development in the future.

Film Tourism Event Longevity: Lost in Mayberry

The purpose of this study is to examine a US festival widely known for attracting television fan tourists, build a traveler profile or typology of festival goers, and reflect on how the behavioral segmentation of these tourists may affect the longevity of the film tourism event and the broader planning of the destination community. Specifically, this study examines the Mayberry Days Festival, an annual event held in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Mount Airy is the birthplace and boyhood home of actor, Andy Griffith, whose television series (The Andy Griffith Show) was set in the fictional hamlet of Mayberry. Online survey invitation cards were distributed during the 2010 Mayberry Days Festival to gather data on the sociodemographic characteristics, motivations, perceptions, and economic impact of the attendee to comprehend how sustainable the Mayberry Days Festival will be for Mount Airy. Results suggest that visitors are drawn to Mount Airy for a variety of reasons and that The Andy Griffith Show is not necessarily the main motivator. It is important for the town's tourism promoters not to get �lost in Mayberry� as they plan for alternative marketing and attraction development in the future.

"Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses

For decades, the phrase fan activism has referred almost exclusively to television fans' efforts to save their favorite series. These campaigns—dating at least as far back as the original Star Trek (1966–69) to the more recent Farscape (1999–2003), Firefly (2002–3), Jericho (2006–8), and Veronica Mars (2004–7), among others—appear effective at catalyzing fan involvement, yet are largely ineffective at saving series. In other words, while it may achieve some secondary, albeit significant, victories such as tighter-knit relationships among fans, fan crusading rarely seems to end with the supposed primary goal of activist labors: more installments of the texts devotees admire and love. Recently, however, the phenomenon of fan activism has taken on a new dimension, and scholars are beginning to take note by asking several important questions. As Henry Jenkins asks, how does a fan move from "participatory culture to public participation"? And what does this move mean? As one might expect, there are many reasons for and implications that emerge from this reallocation of such devoted attention. To explore some of those reasons and implications, the author considers some of the devotees of television auteur Joss Whedon, their activist efforts, and the distinct ways Whedon inspires a politically participatory fan following. Ultimately, the author contends that through their activism, many enthusiasts of the Whedonverses extend the worlds of Whedon's stories by consciously constructing a sociopolitical, feminist identity.

Breeding Unity: Battlestar Galactica's Biracial Reproductive Futurity

While Galactica reinvigorated the science fiction genre by representing contemporary political problems in a complex, often radical fashion, the series also makes visible a new articulation of eugenic thinking. Postmodern eugenics repurposes turn-of-the 20th century ideas of racial progress and recombines them with different narratives and ideologies so that audiences may receive them as new and cut off from history. By centering its finale on the survival of one genetically idealized child, constructs a new narrative context for an old story that rationalizes the sacrifice of the non-heterosexual, non-reproductive, and non-conformist to build a better race. The idealization of biraciality in puts eugenic means to modern ends: the biological construction a future wherein difference can be dealt with in reproductive rather than political terms. Two pieces of fan video art, Unnatural Selection and Battlestar Redactica, clarify Battlestar’s complicity in eugenic violence and history, while offering alternative solutions to the series’ moral and narrative impasses. By refusing the genetic stasis proposes, these fan video projects invite audiences to continue exploring multiple definitions of survival, hybridity, and cultural transformation, reanimating characters sacrificed in the series on its way to genetic utopia (or dystopia) and thereby resuscitating the multiple, queer, contradictory futures they embodied.

Stranger than fiction: Fan identity in cosplay

Academic accounts of fan cultures usually focus on creative practices such as fan fiction, fan videos, and fan art. Through these practices, fans, as an active audience, closely interpret existing texts and rework them with texts of their own. A practice scarcely examined is cosplay ("costume play"), in which fans produce their own costumes inspired by fictional characters. Cosplay is a form of appropriation that transforms and actualizes an existing story in close connection to the fan community and the fan's own identity. I provide analytical insights into this fan practice, focusing on how it influences the subject. Cosplay is understood as a performative activity and analyzed through Judith Butler's concept of performativity. I specifically focus on boundaries between the body and dress, and on those between reality and fiction. I aim to show that cosplay emphasizes the personal enactment of a narrative, thereby offering new perspectives on fan identity.

The Contest of Faculties: On Discerning the Politics of Social Engagement in the Academy

The Contest of Faculties: On Discerning the Politics of Social Engagement in the Academy

The De/Stabilization of Identity in Online Fan Communities

This article explores the negotiation of fan identity within two internet-based fan communities (the television fan site City of Angel and videogame fan site Silent Hill Heaven) in responses to two destabilizing events (the ‘Save Angel’ campaign and the release of the Silent Hill film). The article explores three aspects of the posting activity relating to these events: the ways that members, at times, constitute what it is to be a fan through the reification of their own agency; the ways that posters conceptualize external threats to their own interests; and the ways that they respond to internal challenges to the stability of these settings. Developing a relational approach to the study of fan identity, the article examines how these moves are tied into ongoing struggles for legitimacy within these sites.

IS Doctor Who Australian?

As part of an ARC Discovery project to write a history of Australian television from the point of view of audiences, I looked for Australian television fan communities. It transpired that the most productive communities exist around imported programming like the BBC's Doctor Who. This program is an Australian television institution, and I was therefore interested in finding out whether it should be included in an audience-centred history of Australian television. Research in archives of fan materials showed that the program has been made distinctively Australian through censorship and scheduling practices. There are uniquely Australian social practices built around it. Also, its very Britishness has become part of its being — in a sense — Australian. Through all of this, there is a clear awareness that this Australian institution originates somewhere else — that for these fans Australia is always secondary, relying on other countries to produce its myths for it, no matter how much it might reshape them.

Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership

is delivered to you. Your television and your computer are going to become the same device within the foreseeable future.9 Official and unofficial authors were perhaps surprised to find themselves on the same side of the batde lines during the strike, allied as creative workers in the context of convergence. Participants in online fandom, who are uniquely equipped to realize the Web's status as a commercial platform, banded together to support television writers by picketing, educating, and fundraising. Mean while, fans too are wondering how they will be contracted and compensated in a me dia economy that increasingly attempts to harness and monetize their activities. It is the potential queerness of convergence itself?transgressing the accepted boundaries of media formations, which makes for strange bedfellows and hybrid offspring?that enables the increasing fertility of queer viewing, and these proclivities necessitate new negotiations and protocols on the part of the industry. Toaster Lover allegorically represents Video Maker's optimistic fantasy of a warm relationship between media producers and consumers: a romance between the monstrous automaton and the scrappy softy who find true love as war between their kind is waged around them. Vidders incarnate an alternative fantasy of kinship; collective, networked, and unsanc tioned, they reproduce without a patriarchal center. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives such as Video Maker, with their intrinsic compro mises and contradictions, can adequately channel fandom's procreative potential into one big happy capitalist family. *

User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence

by Julie Levin Russo Internet video has populated media ecology with remarkable speed and thoroughness. Although there has been video online since the late 1990s in forms such as QuickTime streaming, Flash animation, and downloadable files, YouTube's 2005 launch and the subsequent proliferation of similar sites represent a maturation of the broadband infrastructure and the embedded software required for social media. The resulting ease of posting, finding, watching, and sharing videos, along with the incorporation of Webcams and basic editing tools like Windows Movie Maker into standard computer bundles, have facili tated an eruption of user-generated media. At the same time, the digi tization of mass media, including the compulsory conversion to digital television in the United States, has made commercial texts more read ily available for appropriation and manipulation because these video files are now directly transferable between the devices formerly known as the TV and the computer. These conditions have contributed to the profusion and pervasiveness of various sorts of video mashups. This dynamism has in turn sparked increased interest by the media industry in harnessing some of this reservoir of creative labor for the purpose of making money (above and beyond the fact that YouTube and its ilk are ad-supported commercial enterprises), including exploiting it for promotional ventures. This encroachment provokes antagonism over the limits of participation; the legitimacy and perhaps even survival of forms of vernacular creativity may hinge on the degrees of poaching, hybridizing, and queering that processes of commodification are able to tolerate and incorporate. Video's viral propagation is not unlimited. Its vectors are constrained by the lattice of power materialized in available technologies?not only technologies of media, but also more broadly technologies of law, commerce, and desire. As long as the infrastructure for video host ing remains prohibitively expensive, not to mention legally delicate, grassroots producers who wish to participate in the culture of stream ing depend on commercial social media sites for distribution. You Tube and similar ventures face greater risks for hosting illegal content than for refusing to host content that is legal; they have every incen tive to reduce these risks by complying with the industry's demands. This results in a lack of recourse for users. For example, YouTube is

“If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place”: Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology

“If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place”: Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology

Never Coming to a Theatre near You: Recut Film Trailers

In the lead-up to the release of some feature films, fake and fan trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself, but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences. Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces, media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

The Musicalisation of Visual Arts

This article was first published in Images Numeriques: L'aventure du regard, 1997, O. Blin et J. Sauvageot (eds.), University Press of Rennes/Distique, pp. 147-151. Reproduced courtesy of the publishers.The work of French sociologist Antoine Hennion, along with that of other authors such as Tia DeNora (2003), represents the latest attempt to conceptualise the relation between society and works of art, or rather the work of art in society, without resorting to the kind of purely internalist readings favoured by aestheticians nor, in reverse, burying their material specificities under the weight of social determinants. In this dense but beautifully composed article (two fitting qualifiers for the topic of image processing), the reader will find two key terms in Hennion's analytical toolkit, namely mediation and amateurs, mobilised in a reflection on the changes brought about by the digital reordering of artistic practices (for a comprehensive summary of Hennion's sociological approach, see Looseley 2006). Needless to say, the media ecology of which the author speaks has gone through substantial changes since the article's first publication in French more than ten years ago. Using Hennion's example of the now residual technology of the CD-ROM, we could sum up this socio-technical evolution as having moved from a 'read-only' model to what has come to be known as a 'remix' culture, characterised by a 'relayed creativity' (Born 2005) in which the respective roles of producers and audiences are redistributed and the material status of the resulting work is more fluid than ever. Although Hennion's idea of 'musicalisation' shares many features with the equally musical trope of the remix - now prevalent in so many cultural spheres, from open-source software to footwear - his historical cross-analysis of music and the visual arts should remind us that the regimes of art result from complex and contingent mediation effects, through which possibilities for greater openness and performativity coexist with the more established processes of authoriality and stabilisation. Facilitated by new media technologies (laptop, internet, editing software, etc.), the emergent cultural forms such as audio mash-ups, fan videos, live soundtracking, VJing and the like, largely confirm the role of 'amateur instrumentalists' in our audiovisual culture. By pointing in the direction of this creative force, and away from the isolated works presented to us in museums, galleries and other institutional art spaces, Hennion's contribution should be taken as an invitation to investigate further the objects, procedures and collectives that are simultaneously constructing and constructed through new regimes of digital creativity. Beyond the oscillation between naive enthusiasm and conservative scepticism that inevitably greets the introduction of new technologies, it is possible - and perhaps even necessary - to draw a few insights from their recent dramatic proliferation in the realm of image and sound.First, it must be noted that it is the fundamental characteristics of the visual arts, once easily taken for granted, that have been affected by digital media technologies. Indeed, if the virtual image conjures up a sense of loss, or absence, it is not that of the real 'body' of the represented subject - be it the flesh of the model or the reality of a chosen landscape - but of the very texture of the picture and the stability of its support. What we see is truly a change of medium, as expressed in the change of vocabulary from painting and visual arts to images and their processing - a painting cannot be 'processed' (at best, it can be restored). The model suggested by the uses of computer technologies constitutes a mirrorimage of the model historically constructed by the evolution of painting:* The painter produces a fixed image, attributed to a single author, created on a given medium (or, in the case of sculpture, equivalent to this medium), and whose distinct occurrence is guaranteed by the indivisible link between the 'matter' of the painting and the image it reflects. …

Failure Notice

Failure Notice

Cultural Outlaws

A web-based survey was used to collect qualitative data about online fans' use of the internet for keeping up with a favorite television program and for interacting with other fans. The textual responses from 757 participants were coded for patterns and themes related to theories of audience activity. The results reveal a continuum of activity from “lurkers” to a thriving, interpretive community of “outlaw” fans involved in the consumption and production of favored cultural texts. In contrast to historical images of rabid television fans, the researchers discovered a sophisticated audience, devoted to programs that make them think and that inspire meaningful exchanges in online discussions. Internet technologies have empowered these fans to more effectively organize en masse as resistors and shapers of commercial television narratives.