Speak No Evil: Mass Media Control in Contemporary China

https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/speak-no-evil-mass-media-control-contemporary-china

PRIMETIME PEDAGOGIES: RACISM, PRIMETIME TV, AND THE LIMITS OF DISSENT

https://www.flowjournal.org/2017/04/primetime-pedagogies/

Buffering

I wanted to share Neta Alexander's fantastic article on buffering (linked below). I think it's very relevant to our discussion of televisual Web platforms because, as she notes, buffering is a ubiquitous experience that doesn't get much attention. While it is often imagined to be an anomalous glitch, Alexander draws out attention to how the dread of seeing that spinning circle, and our obsessive refreshing of a page, produces a temporal disjunction that is actually fundamental to the phenomenology of web viewing and contradicts the techno-utopian promise that "waiting is over."

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645448

BRUJOS Artist Statement

This is from the BRUJOS Artist Statement (posted online):

BRUJOS addresses the current the landscape of television: Gay men and people of color are more apparent than ever in mainstream television. Sitcoms like “Blackish” and “Fresh Off The Boat” depict families of color attaining the American dream. Programs such as “Looking” and “Modern Family” feature middle and upper class white gay men searching for love or functioning as an all-American family. While these shows are representational achievements, they are not revolutionary ones.

In these cases, ethnic, racial and sexual minorities are portrayed in ways that support dominant culture, narratives, values and relationality. Commercial television studios and networks preoccupied with “scale” and “big data” seldom produce aesthetically or politically challenging work to secure mass viewership. This only further marginalizes non-normative people who’s lives, realities, and stories do not fit within their depictions and who devise new ways of being under the pressures of inequality that are never affirmed.

For the creators of Brujos, there is not much to be gained by larger strives in mainstream representation (I personally would not wholesale dismiss such endeavors for mainstream representation). They articulate a strong link between neoliberal incorporation of “diversity” for profit and the solidification of the same norms—just dressing up dominant culture in new clothes. Do we think that commercial television will always "seldom product aesthetically or politically challenging work?" Will this type of cultural work mostly be found in peripheral formats (increasingly more common in the post-TV world).

Side note: as a PhD student interested in cultural/queer/performance studies, I will now be binging this show through finals!

Core Post 5 - The Handmaid's Tale Marketing

It was very interesting reading the texts during the weekend of the LA Times Book Fair at USC, where Hulu’s new show The Handmaid’s Tale was being marketed, due to Margaret Atwood’s panel.

In order to maximise the digital show’s physical presence on campus, Hulu hired around thirty actresses to dress up in costume, and walk silently in-sync with one another amongst the book fair. Those brave enough to approach these silent women were handed stick on tattoos which stated “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down” - in Latin, no less ( "nolite te bastardes carborundorum”).

In her essay “Television Outside the Box”, Lotz writes about a “sort of quintessential marketing phenomenon” which “begs the question of whether film studies can continue to talk productively about texts, aesthetics, ideology, and identity in new media… without also talking about the industrial landscape and marketing practices that animate and fuel new media development on a wide scale”. This immersive marketing for The Handmaid’s Tale at the Los Angeles book fair illustrated a venture into this wider media interactive landscape -- these Latin clues act like a secret code, but it excites fans and non-fans alike, who can share photos or Tweet about what the see, as both the confusion and excitement for the series builds.

Similarly, for those baffled by the presence of these women, all they had to do was look up the hashtag quote on the cards they gave out. A simple commanding symbol which indicates where one may find the answers, again making this marketing more immersive, than didactic. This points towards another of Lotz’ statements, that “technologies involved in the digital transition enabled profound adjustments in how viewers used television and necessitated modifications in many other production processes” (49).

 And it is not alone in its unique "beyond television" marketing -- as noted by an article by Gizmodo; "South by Southwest, the Austin-based tech and entertainment expo, is known for hosting some experimental TV promos. This year, American Gods has a giant buffalo, The Man in the High Castle is opening a Resistance Radio station, Better Call Saul and Twin Peaks opened restaurants for Los Pollos Hermanos and Double R Diner. But none of those compare to the uncanny valley insanity that is whatever’s going on for The Handmaid’s Tale." (http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-bunch-of-handmaids-tale-handmaids-are-creeping-people-1793185332)

 The Handmaid’s Tale’s marketing is under scrutiny for Elizabeth Moss’s inflammatory comments declaring it “not a feminist” tale. Clearly this is a) untrue, and b) a line she must quip according to higher powers, in order to make the show more appealing to a wider audience. Which takes us back to conversations around “feminism” being a dirty word -- which Atwood herself managed to tactfully navigate without treading on the marketing hopes of the producers, by saying: "I always want to know what people mean by that word. Some people mean it quite negatively, other people mean it very positively, some people mean it in a broad sense, other people mean it in a more specific sense. Therefore, in order to answer the question, you have to ask the person what they mean."

VCR and Post-TV (Core-Post 5)

In Lotz's paper "Television Outside the Box," the VCR was cited as one of the "first technologies to trouble understandings of television" by being a transitionary development between traditional forms of tv, which dictated when you watched a type of content, to what we describe today as Post-TV digital media (52). Not only did VCR's allow people to view film, which at the time was considered more artistically credible, but gave viewers freedom from the bombardment of commercials that traditionally interrupted a story's flow. Reading this paper gave me a sense of nostalgia towards my old VHS tapes but also led me to think about how corporations have evolved advertisements to make them more watchable and how they’ve worked around viewers’ to watch commercial-free content.

Like in early television shows like The Goldbergs, corporations seemed to find ways to embed their advertisements into tv/film-like content, some specifically disguising commercials into VHS-ready plot/character-focused story-telling. With this in mind, McDonald’s straight-to-video series The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald is a perfect example. From 1998-2003, McDonald’s sold VHS tapes in stores and used popular Nickelodeon-esque animation and humor to create brand loyalty in children (in fact they were created by the same creators/musicians from popular Nickelodeon shows). These videos put McDonald’s trademark characters into a world and situations that children could respond to, keeping their interest for longer than a one or two minute commercial. What seems smart about this strategy is that it used a tangible object (a vhs tape) to create the idea that what is essentially an extended commercial can actually be seen as a gift or reward from parent to child. The convergence was from store to TV, creating a new means of increasing revenue in addition to brand awareness. Moving forward to today, these VHS tapes might be obsolete but McDonalds has found new ways to appeal to children in contemporary forms. happymeals.com is an interactive site where children can play games, watch videos, and check out the new toys offered in happy meals. They can do it with more mobility than a VHS tape, which has to go directly into a television, which allows them to interact with McDonalds at anytime they want. The site is essentially an extensive advertisement whose sales-based agenda is more entertaining and less skippable than a commercial.

Core Post 5 - Post-TV

As television shows fight to stay relevant in an increasingly crowded market, the guarantee of audience becomes much less definite. In order to distinguish themselves, shows often resort to the post-TV techniques laid out in Tara McPherson’s article, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” to varying degrees of success/mockery. For instance, to release the date for the upcoming Game of Thrones season premiere, HBO used a Facebook Live feed that would allow viewers to actively participate in the announcement. However, the somewhat perplexingly bizarre format they chose to deliver this information was, in fact, a melting block of ice, with the date hidden within.

The choice to present the premiere date via ice perhaps best evidences McPherson’s assertion about the web surfer’s desire for transformation, as in an “activation of our desire for what’s next” (204). Since the premiere date would remain unknown until the ice literally transformed into a melted state, viewers were encouraged to watch the largely static shot carefully, noting any changes that might provide hints. Similarly, the (illusion of) liveness—as foregrounded by the use of Facebook Live broadcasting—allowed viewers to await this transformation en masse.

Viewers watching the livestream were encouraged to comment on the feed with the words “FIRE” or “DRACARYS” in order to melt the ice block more quickly. These comments were ostensibly tracked with a “fire meter” in the corner of the screen, which showed how close they were to releasing the next burst of flame. The use of the fire meter also seems to clearly indicate an appeal to the web’s desire for volitional mobility by “structuring a mobilized liveness which we come to feel we invoke and impact” (202). Due to the large number of people watching the feed, however, it would have been virtually impossible to correlate one’s own commenting efforts on an actual scale, as the fire meter seemed to refill regardless of individual efforts. Thus the intention to provide volitional mobility was in place, but the actual sense of true volition was not readily apparent.

Finally, the melting ice display also seemed to be designed to appeal to the scan and search practice, which McPherson terms as “a fear of missing the next experience or the next piece of data” (204). Surely, the majority of viewers watching the ice melt were not riveted by the display itself, but simply didn’t want to miss the information and have to rely on secondary sources. However, even with the interactive component, the video stream of melting ice more closely aligned the viewing with the typical TV scan-and-search experience—i.e. not wanting to change the channel—than the typical web experience. In an environment where people are used to being able to click away and search for their own information, a 40-minute, nearly silent livestream contrasted with that ingrained experience, and thus made the announcement hugely vulnerable to criticism and memes.

Game of Thrones season seven premieres July 16.