The Extratextuals

Today, I want to talk about a slightly different form of extratextual, namely a recent event that Joshua Green and I planned at MIT called Unboxing Television. We assembled 30 television scholars (well…it ended up being 26, due to various ailments and emergencies) to discuss where television is right now. This immediately followed the Convergence Culture Consortium’s Futures of Entertainment 2, but our interests lay less in the future of television per se, as in where it’s at now, and hence where Television Studies as field/discipline is at now.

Ivan and Derek were there too, so they may want to chime in, or post separately, and Derek Kompare and Louisa Stein have both blogged about the event already. But my own debriefing is below the fold, sectioned up so you can skip if you want.

A Brief History and Context

I realize, though, that since I co-planned it and since this blog is in public space, some people reading this (a) may not’ve been at Unboxing, and (b) moreso, may be wondering why they weren’t at Unboxing. So let me explain the concept. Unboxing was born at the Media in Transition conference at MIT this last Spring. The last panel I attended included three interesting papers, and then a lot of discussion. Almost two hours worth, to be precise. We gradually put our chairs in a circle, and just kept talking. Then some of us went for coffee and kept it going. Josh, Ivan, Derek, and I discussed how cool it would be to have more of these moments. Academic conferences are usually paper-focused, with the inevitable pleas of “I just need 3 more minutes” coming when presenters are already over time; by the end, discussion can be strictly limited … until people go out into the halls and the bars, that is. But Flow’s wonderful conference at UT Austin in October 2006 really showed how discussion-based panels could produce not only better interaction of ideas, but considerable interaction of individuals. It also highlighted how television and television studies are in a transitional era, with much changing, or at least threatening or promising to change. So the idea was to get some kind of conference or workshop that would deal with these changes, in a “Flow-ish” way, and that would hopefully produce the kinds of interaction that happened following that final MiT panel.

Josh and I decided to run this thing at MIT (burdening people with New York’s hotel prices didn’t seem right, and MIT [read: Henry Jenkins] was a supportive environment). Then we discussed numbers, and decided we liked the idea of starting small – since we were proposing something new, and since we had no real budget to work with, a classroom full seemed the way to go. And we liked the idea of an intimate gathering, with no competing panels. Everyone would attend every panel.

Then came the hardest task of working out which 30 people would be in the room. We began by limiting it to academics in television studies (Ivan an exception because he helped devise the initial idea, and because he’s a “highly successful executive”). In North America, since you have to know you’re good before you can ask a Brit to blow his or her travel budget for the year, for instance! We then devised 6 panels (Extensions of TV; Contextualizing Current Changes; Unfolding and Understanding Communities; Complicating Authorship and Cultural Labor; Citizens, Politics, and Television; and Evolving Television Studies), each of which would have 5 people, and we tried to fill by panel, in order to ensure a variety of interests and positions, not just 30 people echoing each other in Michael Keaton Multiplicity style. Invitations proved the hardest and also the most exciting part of the preparation and planning, largely because we underestimated how many people would want to come. We sent out almost 30 invitations, believing that 50% would likely say no, and we’d then move on to more people. Josh and I honestly felt we’d get through about 60 invitations before the thing was full. Instead, people kept saying yes. Which was great on one hand, but meant I’m still haunted by a list of others who could’ve been there. It also produced a snafu in the invitation process – the idea was that after the first 15 said yes, we’d turn it over to them for ideas for the remaining 15, so that Josh and I weren’t doing all the deciding. We still used this format, but had very few spots to fill once the first wave of invitations went out.

Why do I mention this? I’m still hounded by the exclusivity of the event. Growing up, I always had the foreign accent, and hence was never in the cool kids invitation list, and I’m uncomfortable that I had to make the list here. But Josh and I were motivated by the idea that if this worked, it could grow in due time. And we liked the idea of a small gathering, for ease of discussion, and for bonding purposes. And we had no money other than the coffee budget that CCC generously provided us. We hope to get more Unboxers, though, in due time.

(If you’re interested in who was there, and what their initial provocations were, go here)

The Immediate Context: Futures of Entertainment 2

My experience of Unboxing was partly colored by the fact that it followed hot on the heels of Futures of Entertainment 2. FoE2 did a great job of bringing together industry folk and academics, and Josh, Henry, Sam Ford, and others deserve commendation both for the idea and the follow-through. It’s so easy to create cartoon cutout versions of the industry, and their secrecy can at times leave one with nothing but cartoons and traces, so I found it rewarding to be in a rare space where industry and academe could talk to each other.

Inevitably, though, we often speak different languages, and as much as I made some great connections “across the divide,” at other times I found myself bothered by the market imperative of discussions. What I call “texts” or “stories” were often instead “content” or “product,” and audiences were things to be measured, cajoled, soothed, corralled, and mined for information and “passion points,” not people to be amused and inspired for amusement’s or inspiration’s sake. Meanwhile, entertainment itself seemed a means to an end for many speakers, not the end goal itself.

For this reason, by the way, I was most impressed and encouraged by the final panel on Cult Media, with Heroes writer-producer Jesse Alexander, Starlight Runner’s transmedia guru Jeff Gomez, transmedia producer Danny Bilson, and Walden Media’s Gordon Tichell. Alexander, Bilson, and Gomez loved to create, and spoke enthusiastically about opening up storyworlds, Gomex using the analogy from his Dungeons and Dragons days of a good dungeon master who sets up the world and guides you through parts of it, but who ultimately lets you control large portions of the event. I still have some questions about exactly how that control works, but it was nice to see people who cared about stories.

By the end of FoE, though, to a degree I was eager to return to “my people.” I’d had a great time, but somewhat like an emissary from a foreign nation who yearns to go home to a place where the language, good coffee shops, culture, and behaviors are all known and familiar, I was eager to talk shop with some television folk.

Unboxing Television

And what a fantastic experience it was. As wonderful scholar after wonderful scholar walked into the room on Sunday morning, I got more and more excited. In the opening remarks I joked with the group that looking out at this classroom of 25, I had never been so sure of the likelihood of grade inflation: a lot of A+’s in this room! So we explained the purpose and background of the event, and then came the moment of truth, the actual unwrapping and unboxing.

Amanda Lotz, Miranda Banks, Ivan, and Louisa Stein kicked things off admirably, and then, since Amanda had wanted to talk about what television is and what counts as television, I posed this as the first question to the panel and the room. If you’re a television studies scholar, I dare you: try asking that question to your class. Blank stares, I bet. And yet discussion picked up. Bit by bit, everyone in the room was getting involved, and I found myself variously scratching down notes or promising myself I’d write it later because I was so engaged. I haven’t had such an experience since sitting through David Morley’s lectures and seminars at Goldsmiths College, where I did my graduate work. Dave’s a remarkable lecturer, and the density of ideas always left me aflutter over whether to notate or to listen. As time passed at Unboxing, I opted to eschew the notes, and just take part in the thing “organically” (the word on my brain, since it was dropped about 50 times per session at FoE).

And here in my write-up of the event, I find myself at something of an impasse, since I want to elaborate more upon the great ideas I heard, and the neat discussion, but it’s hard to do, since so much of it flowed in and out of other great ideas and discussion. If Raymond Williams found himself entranced by the “flow” of television in a Miami hotel circa 1970, here I found myself (albeit a poor replacement for Williams) entranced by the flow of television studies in a subterranean Cambridge classroom. Everyone brought a lot to the table. And as Jeff Jones remarked to me afterwards, the room had the feel of a group of newly-minted associate professors, in that even though many weren’t associate profs (Amanda counted 7 up for tenure, and I think I count 12 tenure-track or not even), there was no posturing, jockeying for position, or so forth. As I think of some of the best ideas I’m left with, I can’t attribute many of them to specific people, and so, like Derek Kompare, I regard it thematically more than panel-by-panel (see his comments here). In the last panel, someone wondered why we weren’t liveblogging this event, but I’m actually kind of happy we didn’t, since by consequence many more of the ideas (at least in my memory, though maybe it’s more addled than others’?) aren’t attributable to anyone but the room.

I do remember, though, that it was Tim Havens who eloquently noted in the final panel that such events as this are energizing, since we can all be pretty lonely in our own departments, yet when we get together like this, we can be reminded of why we study what we study, and the gas tank can be filled for many more miles of study, latenight writing sessions, and so forth. Amen to that.

What Next?

Of course, though, liveblogging may’ve allowed those not in the room to “participate” in some way. And herein lies the challenge: how to now open up some of the ideas, particularly the ones floated in the last panel, to a broader public? One of our last minute losses, Jason Mittell, spoke with me about attending other such events where the energy swells, people decide that “things should be done,” and then they all return to their grading, department meetings, personal research, and of course personal lives, children, … and television watching. Especially with final exams coming up, term papers to be graded (as I type this, I am mocked by a stack of 35 eight page papers on the other side of the room), and job candidates to be vetted, it would be easy for television to slip back in the box, so to speak.

With this in mind, Josh and I tried to collate some notes and scratchings from the final panel about television studies, and we’re sending them around via the Unboxing mailing list first. In the meantime, we need to sort out where to continue the discussion, especially in a way that (a) is open to others, (b) that no longer places Josh and I at the center, and (c) makes it more likely that people will participate. Any and all suggestions will be well appreciated, and I promise to get this discussion out there.

To close for now, let me pose that question, then, of how to ensure this discussion continues and continues in a way that isn’t just open to others, but that actively invites them too. Maybe all we needed was a chance to get together, but how can we do this more often, especially when ICA, SCMS, and other big cattle-call conferences don’t offer the same room for meaningful connection? And let me once more thank everyone who attended.

Unboxing Television Unboxing Television