Vicki Mayer | Tulane University (original) (raw)
Publications by Vicki Mayer
Television and New Media, 2024
Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ... more Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ways that production is a process nested within social worlds. In 2020, global Hollywood promoted a “COVID-friendly ideal” in order to return to work during widespread lockdowns and work stoppages. Yet by focusing comparatively on the stories that film and television workers told about production during COVID, we argue that crisis stories reveal much about the specificity of places in studying production cultures. To illustrate, we compare workers’ pandemic stories as evidence of emplacement in national hierarchies and emplotment in local power dynamics. Drawing on a corpus of seventy interviews conducted in Tel Aviv, Israel and New Orleans, USA in 2020 and 2021, we show that production cultures provide ample critique of normative tales that media industries promote about themselves and their workforces.
Media Industries in Crisis: What COVID Unmasked
This edited volume offers a global overview of the immediate impacts the COVID pandemic had on lo... more This edited volume offers a global overview of the immediate impacts the COVID pandemic had on local and national film, television, streaming, and social media industries—examining in compelling detail how these industries managed the crisis.
With accounts from the frontlines, Media Industries in Crisis provides readers with a stakeholder framework, management lessons, and urgent commentaries to unpack the nature of crisis management and communications. The authors show how these industries have not only survived, but often thrive amidst a backdrop of critical national and regional emergencies, wars, financial meltdowns, and climate disasters. This international collection—featuring case studies from 16 countries—examines how media industries managed all of these crises, successfully rebranding themselves as “essential” while making power plays in politics, economics, and culture. The chapters reveal key lessons for the meltdowns, tectonic shifts, and struggles ahead.
This collection will be of interest to media and communication students, particularly those focused on media industries, crisis communications, and management, as well as to practitioners working in media industries.
LAS FILMCOMMISSIONS EN EUROPAYAMÉRICA, 2024
(Tampico). Entre otros estudios su labor investigadora se centra en los operativos institucionale... more (Tampico). Entre otros estudios su labor investigadora se centra en los operativos institucionales fílmicos (USC, UAT) o las culturas de la pantalla
New Media and Society, 2023
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local ... more Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
The Information Society, 2023
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? Thi... more Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
Popular Communication, 2022
A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered ... more A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered 'essential workers' during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time.
Television & New Media, 2020
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How ... more What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, compe... more This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions.
Culture Machine, 2019
https://culturemachine.net/vol-18-the-nature-of-data-centers/the-second-coming/
A genealogy of feminist studies of media policy and governance.
Interventions: ICA Theme Book 2017
Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (I... more Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) as our cue, we delve into the gendered patterns of authorship and citation in review articles written about the discipline. These review articles have proliferated via a publishing industry bent on selling handbooks. Using the standard methods used in other forms of gender network analysis, we focus on the citations in the first 100 articles of The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, the ICA’s resource guide to the study of communication. Our data show strong disparities with regards to the number of women authors and articles about women’s scholarship as well as the citation of scholarly sources written by women in articles written by men. Based on the empirical evidence, we believe it is time for an intervention in communication scholarship. We suggest standards to enforce both personal and structural accountability. We want to make sure that violators of a feminist commitment to diversify our discipline be called on to make change happen, or else.
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, red... more Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despi... more Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions ... more Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions 16.1 (2016).
To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC ... more To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC Press, 2016.
This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communicati... more This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communication scholar Cicilia MK Peruzzo. Published in CSMC 2015.
Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Inv... more Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby, Lexington Books, 2015.
May 2015 Louisiana Cultural Vistas Magazine
Television and New Media, 2024
Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ... more Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ways that production is a process nested within social worlds. In 2020, global Hollywood promoted a “COVID-friendly ideal” in order to return to work during widespread lockdowns and work stoppages. Yet by focusing comparatively on the stories that film and television workers told about production during COVID, we argue that crisis stories reveal much about the specificity of places in studying production cultures. To illustrate, we compare workers’ pandemic stories as evidence of emplacement in national hierarchies and emplotment in local power dynamics. Drawing on a corpus of seventy interviews conducted in Tel Aviv, Israel and New Orleans, USA in 2020 and 2021, we show that production cultures provide ample critique of normative tales that media industries promote about themselves and their workforces.
Media Industries in Crisis: What COVID Unmasked
This edited volume offers a global overview of the immediate impacts the COVID pandemic had on lo... more This edited volume offers a global overview of the immediate impacts the COVID pandemic had on local and national film, television, streaming, and social media industries—examining in compelling detail how these industries managed the crisis.
With accounts from the frontlines, Media Industries in Crisis provides readers with a stakeholder framework, management lessons, and urgent commentaries to unpack the nature of crisis management and communications. The authors show how these industries have not only survived, but often thrive amidst a backdrop of critical national and regional emergencies, wars, financial meltdowns, and climate disasters. This international collection—featuring case studies from 16 countries—examines how media industries managed all of these crises, successfully rebranding themselves as “essential” while making power plays in politics, economics, and culture. The chapters reveal key lessons for the meltdowns, tectonic shifts, and struggles ahead.
This collection will be of interest to media and communication students, particularly those focused on media industries, crisis communications, and management, as well as to practitioners working in media industries.
LAS FILMCOMMISSIONS EN EUROPAYAMÉRICA, 2024
(Tampico). Entre otros estudios su labor investigadora se centra en los operativos institucionale... more (Tampico). Entre otros estudios su labor investigadora se centra en los operativos institucionales fílmicos (USC, UAT) o las culturas de la pantalla
New Media and Society, 2023
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local ... more Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
The Information Society, 2023
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? Thi... more Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
Popular Communication, 2022
A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered ... more A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered 'essential workers' during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time.
Television & New Media, 2020
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How ... more What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, compe... more This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions.
Culture Machine, 2019
https://culturemachine.net/vol-18-the-nature-of-data-centers/the-second-coming/
A genealogy of feminist studies of media policy and governance.
Interventions: ICA Theme Book 2017
Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (I... more Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) as our cue, we delve into the gendered patterns of authorship and citation in review articles written about the discipline. These review articles have proliferated via a publishing industry bent on selling handbooks. Using the standard methods used in other forms of gender network analysis, we focus on the citations in the first 100 articles of The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, the ICA’s resource guide to the study of communication. Our data show strong disparities with regards to the number of women authors and articles about women’s scholarship as well as the citation of scholarly sources written by women in articles written by men. Based on the empirical evidence, we believe it is time for an intervention in communication scholarship. We suggest standards to enforce both personal and structural accountability. We want to make sure that violators of a feminist commitment to diversify our discipline be called on to make change happen, or else.
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, red... more Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despi... more Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions ... more Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions 16.1 (2016).
To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC ... more To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC Press, 2016.
This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communicati... more This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communication scholar Cicilia MK Peruzzo. Published in CSMC 2015.
Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Inv... more Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby, Lexington Books, 2015.
May 2015 Louisiana Cultural Vistas Magazine
Course Description: This course combines theory and methods in the study of media archives, cultu... more Course Description: This course combines theory and methods in the study of media archives, cultural memory, and historiography. This course works with community partners to create digital stories and their archival repositories.
This course focuses generally on the structure and function of media as institutions and industri... more This course focuses generally on the structure and function of media as institutions and industries in contemporary society. It is a required course that joins theory and methods in the study of mass media technologies, contents, their producers, and their audiences. Specifically, this semester we will be using both classic and contemporary issues in mass communication in order to answer research question about news industries and production in New Orleans. We begin by examining the role of news media in particular as an institution of U.S. society and use a contemporary example to test how well this institution functions. From there, we look at the historical changes in politics, economics, and cultures that account for these changes. Finally, we apply these insights to understand global media institutions and industries. Along the way, we compare and contrast methods, and apply them to key issues in the critical analysis of New Orleans news media.
Communication Studies introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings of Tulane's Communicat... more Communication Studies introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings of Tulane's Communication Department. The course explores communication through its tri-part focus on texts, relationships and identities, and industries and structures. This semester we'll be looking at these foci by learning about maps (geographic and cognitive), mutts (pets and such), and mobile technologies (phones, cars). The course will also introduce key concepts and keywords for continuing in the major. This course will be a prerequisite for major declaration and enrollment in the 300-level core courses.
When we think about stories in communication classes, we tend to focus on the stories we see and ... more When we think about stories in communication classes, we tend to focus on the stories we see and hear through mass media. Yet what stories can we tell about media themselves and their production as central parts of our politics, culture, and economy? This course looks at histories of media, with a focus on the different kinds of stories we can tell about it. We will be exploring historical trends, the nature of historiography (the study of history), and some fundamentals of historical research. As part of the course, you will be developing your own stories about media, regional production, and the past. This semester's class is partnered with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, a non-profit branch of the state of Louisiana. As such, this class is designated as a mandatory 4-credit service learning course, which carries a 40-hour workload. Students must register for this class in conjunction with Comm389.
This course balances the practical development of literary journalistic skills with academic inqu... more This course balances the practical development of literary journalistic skills with academic inquiry into the theorizing and development of journalism that conceptualizes itself as an alternative to mainstream news content, media, and practices. We will be reading examples of alternative journalism and contextualizing them in the history of alternative presses and reporting in the United States. We will also be examining the changing meaning of the word "alternative" in journalism in opposition to not only mainstream journalism, but also in relation to other journalistic genres, such as non-fiction stories, underground writings, ethnic presses, and community media. This knowledge will then provide the basis to experiment with our own writing and methods of critique. Through this process of writing and rewriting, students will have an opportunity to write articles for a community publication, radio program, or website. If selected, this class can be taken as a service learning course for an optional 4 th credit.
This is an interview conducted in 2006 by Ned Sublette for Afropop.com.
On the WSJ Blog Think Tank
Published in Flow 10(9): 2009
published in Youth Media Reporter 3(6): 2009
“Latino Media.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia on Latinos, Vol. 3, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deen... more “Latino Media.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia on Latinos, Vol. 3, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González, 92-98, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Global Media and Communication, 2010
Journal of Communication 57, no. 2 (2007): 404-407
Latino Studies 2, no. 3 (2004): 445-452.
International Review of Modern Sociology. 30, no. 1 (2002): 107-8.
The communication review, Mar 2, 2009
This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital televis... more This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the manufacturing hub for the digital technology. Through an analysis of three physical spaces in Manaus implicated in the creation of digital television, the article exposes the
Television & New Media, Nov 10, 2014
This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the... more This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the start of a coeditorship for the journal. A look back at Daniel Schiller’s book Theorizing Communication supports the coeditors’ conception of a media studies that broadly understands communication as labor.
International Journal of Communication, Jul 22, 2009
Critical Studies in Media Communication, Oct 1, 2005
This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popul... more This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series’ creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.
Television & New Media, Aug 1, 2016
Os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção possuem trajetórias de pesquisa bastante distint... more Os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção possuem trajetórias de pesquisa bastante distintas, apesar de suas compartilhadas preferências pela teoria baseada na realidade empírica e pelas metodologias de pesquisa. A partir de uma ampla etnografia de mídia das audiências e dos produtores, este artigo mostra como os sujeitos humanos dos estudos de audiência e dos de produção podem ser estudados em conjunto para revelar as relações de poder envolvidas nos processos da produção dos meios de comunicação de massa. Neste estudo de caso específico, fãs e figurantes da série de televisão Treme (2010-2013) compartilharam um discurso sobre o lugar da espectatorialidade e o da produção que se esforça para articular uma cultura comum, apesar das barreiras concretas hierárquicas entre públicos e equipe de produção. Palavras-chave: Estudos de audiência, placemaking, estudos de produção, Treme, valor ABSTRACT Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010-2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
Television & New Media, Sep 19, 2008
Duke University Press eBooks, 2019
In the snarky atmosphere of the Twitterscape, the short but public tiff between director David Si... more In the snarky atmosphere of the Twitterscape, the short but public tiff between director David Simon (The Wire, Treme), celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, and Bravo Television's programming executive Andy Cohen looked like it had all the makings of a street game of the dozens..
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jun 1, 2001
Historical evidence reveals that the definition of Latino mass media is a fragile but useful way ... more Historical evidence reveals that the definition of Latino mass media is a fragile but useful way to examine how cultural identity is forged through economic and industrial practices. Focusing on the development of Latino media and their political economy in San Antonio, Texas, the researcher describes four constructions of Latino producers and audiences: segmentation, massification, pan-ethnicity, and fragmentation. These constructions demonstrate that these media were sites for Latinos to define themselves as producers and audiences within the structural constraints of race and class in two nations, Mexico and the United States. The paper concludes the coexistence of these constructions today could be interpreted as positive signs of growing multiculturalism or negative effects of global trends that divide Latinos by class.
New Media & Society, Feb 1, 2023
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local ... more Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
University of California Press eBooks, Feb 14, 2020
the trust-like activities of the largest studios, Congress still ensured that a cartel controlled... more the trust-like activities of the largest studios, Congress still ensured that a cartel controlled foreign distribution and U.S. exports. 21 The MPPDA meanwhile grew a managerial class of investors based in Wall Street finance, while keeping the creative workforce in place, both literally and figuratively. The real "genius of the system, " in the words of film historian Thomas Schatz, was the studios' use of assembly-line production to create film art. 22 Super profits from movie theaters were guaranteed by the block booking and the blind buying of cheap stock stories, enabling bigger budgets for expenditures elsewhere, generally on the copyrights for first-run films and the A-list stars that raised Hollywood's prestige. Selig also imagined that the production lots themselves could be a third line of income, for example by bringing in visitors to see the zoo as an attraction. Selig's dream never was realized personally. When his company was consumed by another one, he made a living selling the rights to stories he had bought cheaply from others and hoarded over the years. 23 His legacy lives on, instead, through a politics that benefits the industry, as much with regard to its famous moniker as to its infamous profits. RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES Associated with glamour and status, creativity and entrepreneurship, Hollywood now personified a protagonist in its own story, even as its doppelgangers in New York provided the crucial financial foundation. Throughout the golden age of cinema, the studios recreated low-budget jungles, castles, and other faraway lands, while a fantastic force of mummies, vampires, and zombies departed hallowed Hollywood in a scheme to dominate all media entertainment. The guaranteed double booking of these cheap filler films with their stock settings and characters offset any financial risks for their creators. 24 Having dominated the land, Hollywood mastered the labor HOME OF THE ZOMBIES Of course, the idea that there is a force so dark that it feeds off the bodies of the powerless in a quest for immortality has been a motif in contemporary popular culture and fiscal policy. Both owe a debt to Hollywood and its modus operandi, which, in turn, owes a debt to a city that inspired an imaginative essayist by way of Cincinnati. Lafcadio Hearn, fan of occult and fable alike, came to New Orleans in 1876 seeking good stories and national audiences. He found both through his creative depictions of voodoo, a hybrid of various black religious rituals with colorful tropes born straight from the writer's desire for a place that was unlike all others. His tales of funerals, ghosts, and the undead conjured a potent image of an American city that was completely distinct-neither North nor South, neither East nor West-inventing "the notion of Louisiana, more specifically New Orleans, as idea and symbol. " 32 It would seem logical that the first travelers seeking out authentic voodoo rituals soon followed. 33 Along with George Washington Cable, Hearn, and other professional romantics of the place, the late-nineteenth-century chroniclers of New Orleans created the basis for a cultural economy built on the labors of authors and artists, playwrights and performers, as well as the industrial organization of publishers, printers, and publicists. That the first Vitagraph film-exhibition hall in the United States would be located in 1896 at the foot of Canal Street, which was an artery of the city's commercial heart, should be no surprise given the already thriving pulse of the theatrical sector there. 34 Sponsored by an elite class of philanthropic patrons, and with the backing of the largest newspaper chains, New Orleans's arts scene produced visions of an authentically distinct city that sold pottery and papers
Cultural Sociology, Feb 1, 2016
with different participants. Through these interviews Light traces an act he calls as disconnecti... more with different participants. Through these interviews Light traces an act he calls as disconnective practice: ‘Disconnective practice [...] involves potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs in relationship to a particular site, within a particular site, between and amongst different sites and in relation to the physical world’ (p. 17). Disconnective practice is a question of power; the user has the power to connect but also the power to not to connect. Light shows that the power in disconnecting exists equally in the domains of private and public. One of the illustrating examples is the coming-together of personal and work life in which social media plays a significant role. Users have to choose if they ‘friend’ their colleagues on Facebook, and if they do they enter the regime of self-censorship. As one of the interviewees mentioned ‘I’m not friends with anyone on Facebook that is senior to me at work [...] I do not want to be connected with them in a kind of social sense’ (p. 83). Furthermore, in the workplace the question of using social media is not only a personal choice but also a way for employers to use disconnective practices as means of power. By implementing either technical blocking or organizational policies, employers can prevent employees from spending time on social media. The examples where users have to negotiate whether they choose to connect or disconnect with these sites and the services they provide are important and shed light on our current culture of connectivity. Light shows in a compelling manner that our connections and disconnections with social networking sites mediate public life and shape ways we interact with each other. Looking at disconnection, or examining, mapping and using disconnective practices, will allow us not only to understand human relationships on social networking sites but will also give insights into how these platforms work technically, culturally and politically. I find it is easy to agree with Light’s concluding argument that in addition to connections we need to understand and develop scholarship around disconnection: ‘Connection is fundamental to the operation of SNSs [...] But connection cannot exist without disconnection and therefore I believe it is just as fundamental to our understandings of what SNSs can be and how we make sense of them’ (p. 159).
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Nov 1, 2012
I spent five days without electricity this fall. It wasn't totally unexpected either. Hurricane I... more I spent five days without electricity this fall. It wasn't totally unexpected either. Hurricane Isaac was lumbering into the Gulf at the pace of a drunken tourist. I dutifully prepared as I always do when it looks like we're in for a tropical visitor. I bought the batteries and candles, canned goods, water and ice. I filled the tub with water too. I had a flashlight in every room, a shortwave radio in the den, and then I charged two smart phones, leaving one off as the back up. When Isaac showed up at 5 a.m., the lights went off. At the time, I could still cheerily joke about The Love Boat's insistent but innocuous bartender, now personified as a category one, coming to announce last call.
Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2015
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. eBooks, Jan 13, 2014
The communication review, 1996
This essay relies on descriptive-historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the... more This essay relies on descriptive-historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk-radio program. After a political-economic analysis of the more general rise of the talk-radio format, the authors ...
Television & New Media, Apr 16, 2012
Production Studies, The Sequel! explores the experiences of media workers in local, global, and d... more Production Studies, The Sequel! explores the experiences of media workers in local, global, and digital communities—from prop-masters in Germany, Chinese film auteurs, producers of children’s television in Qatar, Italian radio broadcasters, filmmakers in Ethiopia and Nigeria, to seemingly-autonomous Twitterbots. Case studies examine international production cultures across five continents and incorporate a range of media, including film, television, music, social media, promotional media, video games, publishing and public broadcasting.
Using the lens of cultural studies to examine media production, Production Studies, The Sequel! takes into account transnational production flows and places production studies in conversation with other major areas of media scholarship including audience studies, media industries, and media history. A follow-up to the Production Studies, this collection highlights new and important research in the field, and promises to generate continued discussion about the past, present, and future of production studies.