SCMS, C3, and the Futures of Television Scholarship
This past weekend marked the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia. This SCMS also marked the beginning of my time as a consulting researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium, based out of MIT. I’ve been chatting with the C3’ers for a while now, and was truly honored to be invited on board (incidentally, Ivan already has his C3 Brownie Badge, and Derek’s a consulting researcher now too, so The Extratextuals are now Completely C3-Compatible, or “C5â€). I’m still not exactly sure what is entailed, but it meant I got a free breakfast at SCMS, so it’s already looking good. Sam Ford, one of C3’s several superhuman forces and one of the nicer folks in the business, asked me to write up some comments on SCMS, in the aim of perhaps sharing these with other C3’ers. Well, he paid for my eggs benedict, so I will deliver.
The panels Sam was particularly interested in responses to were (1) the workshop on The Future of Television Studies, with MIT’s William Uricchio serving as chair, and Anne Everett, Roberta Pearson, Maire Messenger Davies, Michele Hilmes, and William Boddy serving as panelists; (2) the workshop on Scholarly Writing in the Digital Age, starring Jason Mittell, Avi Santo, Alexandra Juhasz, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Christian Keathley; and (3) Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, Avi Santo, and Kyle Edwards’ panel on Corporate Authorship.
The Future of Television Studies workshop was packed. It also generated lots of discussion, both during the workshop and afterwards in the halls and pubs. The panel risked becoming more about The Past of Television Studies for its first half, as discussions of how to access past television held the floor. The basic points were well taken: that we need access to television’s past if the discipline is going to embark on writing about the present and the future, and that the exploration of the future should not be at the expense of a continued examination of the past. But I started to get antsy, thinking that we might get to the end of the panel without addressing the future. Finally, Josh Green posed that we get a working committee on the archive issue and move on. The rather eclectic progression of the panel from there was also unsatisfying for me, though, as we spent, for instance, a good ten minutes or so following Maire and Roberta’s insistence that we should learn SPSS (a really sucky stats program, by the way: Stata kicks its ass), and start counting more things. Without meaning any criticism of the panelists (especially of Uricchio, who moderated with remarkable skill), as a whole the session lacked much vision. To put it in admittedly crude and reductive terms, if keeping good archives and buying SPSS are the best ideas that a room full of about 60-80 people can come up with for the future of television studies, eesh.
This got me thinking, though, about the Unboxing Television workshop that Josh and I put together last November. The final panel there, on the same topic, involved if anything too many ideas, and though many of us seemed and/or were eager to address some of them afterwards, perhaps the weight of too many ideas (along with other time commitments, of course) held us in traction, unable to attack any one of them. Comparing these two sessions, then, I’m forced to ask how we can or should both talk about the future of television studies, and how we can enact change. Television studies is a balkanized field, often with only a person or two in any given department. So the department as unit of change is often pretty impotent. The individual can, of course, take up the gauntlet on one’s own, but that’s both asking too much of one person and rather proto-fascist in its hope that one Great Individual will lead us forward. Even conferences often prove problematic grounds, since there are so many other things going on, with so little time devoted to bigger level discussions of what we’re trying to do as a field, that they’re open to occurrences such as at the panel described above, whereby, for a variety of reasons, the pattern of discussion never quite gets on track. Unboxing attempted to provide more time out for such talk, but even then, we had a rushed final session, poorly moderated by myself, and besides, who had elected those of us at Unboxing to dictate the future? Josh and I handled the invitations, but we’re hardly The King and Queen of Television Studies. So where do we look?
This leads me to the other panel about the future, though, the one on academic publishing. I found this session considerably more satisfying, since the presenters offered some ways forward. Alex Juhasz talked about teaching on YouTube, Kathleen Fitzpatrick presented on CommentPress, a program that allows group editing, and Jason Mittell presented on Sophie, a program that he hopes might let him author a “book†online, offering various versions for various audiences, and incorporating comments and multimedia. Keathley talked about using video as a mode of scholarship. And Avi Santo was on hand, too, ever the pro when it comes to thinking ahead and actually doing stuff. So all of the panelists offered ways to imagine what scholarship might look like in the future, and all tried to move us towards ways of thinking of scholarship as more open, communal, participatory, and dialogic. Not only, then, did they actually give some meaty answers to the ideas of what the future might/could/should hold, but the programs and ideas that they shared also offered possibilities of alternate sites at which new forms of collaborative discussions about the future might take place. Juhasz offered a sobering reminder that not all such venues allow the types of discussion that we’re most used to, or that conform to the requirements of academic discourse that we’ve set for ourselves. But at numerous points in the workshop, I found myself thinking that such-and-such is what academia could and should be doing, that such-and-such would address common problems in the field, and so forth.
Finally, I also want to discuss the Authorship panel in terms of the future and past of television and television studies too. Derek Kompare kicked it off with a smart (as ever) discussion of authorship, why it hasn’t been studied enough in television studies, and what it might offer us. I then had stomach cramps and had to miss Kyle Edwards’ paper, returning in time for Derek J’s smart (as ever) paper on Activision and Raven’s creation of the Marvel computer games. Avi Santo then finished up with a fascinating voyage back in time to the branding and transmedia existence of Little Orphan Annie and her many products. I really feel that discussions of authorial creation, and of the construction of authorship as a meaningful category in the first place, could and should be a major piece of the puzzle as television studies moves forward. I’m so tired of the text/audience/industry divide that has dominated media studies, and while I get where it came from and why, I’m most excited by work that tries to situate itself in between these three, and that tries to create modes of discourse that make sense for scholars studying all three (not necessarily to replace, but to superimpose on top of). Authorship seems to speak in these terms, definitively about the industry (since that’s where the authors of), the audience (since they’re only meaningful when audiences get interested), and the text (since they’re seen as the text’s point of origin, and they often are a key part of the text). Also, if I can get immodest for a second, I think paratexts/extratexts brace these three areas too, meaning I was happy to hear many people using the words this SCMS. (Derek J and Avi, of course, mixed authors and paratexts, so double kudos to them). Avi (along with one of the panel’s attendees, Michael Kackman) also fruitfully discussed how we can use new methodologies (“the future of television studiesâ€) to examine its past in new and interesting ways.
To conclude, though, I end up back with C3, since in my search for places where we can have real discussions about the future of television studies, and where we can hopefully enact changes in scholarship and praxis based on what we’re trying to do differently, C3 seems one of the few liminal spaces, itself between text, audience, academia, and industry. It’s gonna cost money to keep going to Boston, it may be awkward to work out how to make C3 do some of the things its growing number of consulting researchers and business partners want it to do, but I look forward to the challenge. Too often, once the conference is over, and we get home and sit down on a sofa, it’s easy to breathe out a sigh of relief, relish the thought of getting a full night’s sleep, and pack up the energized thinking about the future till the next go ‘round … but I’m hoping we can hold onto that raw energy and excitement that exists in the conference space, when it works, and that may therefore allow us not just to speak about futures of television studies in lone panels, but to actively engage in changing the field into being a more cutting edge, responsive, open, innovative, thought-provoking one that is the public utility it should and could be.
SPSS is not a sucky programme at all — much advanced from when I first started using it with punch cards and a mainframe. But Maire and i weren’t really extolling the virtues of one programme over another. Rather we were making the point that qualitative tv types should think about putting quantitative methods into their took kits. Quantitative methods, which have been used to ideological evil ends in the past, are actually neutral and can be used just as easily for good as for bad. And as I stressed during the workshop, if you want to communicate with policy makers you have to so in a language that they understand and they understand numbers.
Roberta, thanks for posting. To be clear, my comment re: SPSS was only an aside (hence the parentheses), since Stata really is a much better, much easier-to-use, and often much cheaper program (or so I’m told by my demographer wife). I also hope it’s clear to you and to other readers that my criticism of the slight “lack of vision” was one of the session (admittedly, expectations were extra high since the room contained so many luminaries of television studies), not of specific suggestions — I wanted more on the table to choose from (and given the nature of the workshop, this wasn’t a responsibility on you 6 alone but on us all), but in and of itself had no particular problem with what was on the table.
Regarding the specific issue of whether we should use stats, some of us definitely should (and some definitely do: SCMS just isn’t the place to find them. ICA is), and I agree with you there. But even if policy makers like stats, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we must convert to this language; it also means that we need to try and find ways to make them care about information and arguments in other languages too. Part of the problem with the tv industry’s method of analyzing audiences, for instance, centers around their dogged insistence on the holy and near-complete value of the Nielsens (or BARB for England), and to advance thinking in the industry, it’s not enough just to speak Nielsens (or BARB), or even to give competing yet different numbers, since we also need to convince them of the value of the qualitative. Yes, way easier said than done. And so, yes, in the meantime, some discussion needs to, and should occur in statistical rubric. I don’t think we disagree there at all, though at the same time I’m struggling to think about how the questions I’m most interested in asking of media could be helpfully and meaningfully informed by stats. I don’t doubt that others’ questions could, and perhaps this speaks more to a failure in the scope of my questioning, but many of the deep interpretive things that are being done in media studies don’t have a quantitative level.