Photo credit: Wrote's Flickr stream

Last week, I joined 250 international scholars in Gothenburg, Sweden for Internet Research 11, the 2010 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. The conference theme – Sustainability, Participation, Action – carried over into the emphasis on producing a greener academic conference, with programs available on USB sticks and an all-organic menu. IR 11 is wildly interdisciplinary, tied together largely by research topic, leading to a number of fascinating connections, disjunctures, and challenges. With up to seven concurrent sessions, however, my experience is obviously only a partial view of the work being done.

On Thursday, I began with a panel on user-generated culture, which included presentations on material fan practices that cross into the online, Chinese fans of US television, YouTube memes, and fan-made film trailers. Limor Shifman drew our attention to the role of the interent not just as paradise for memes, but “paradise for meme researchers,” who can more easily follow the flows of cultural material, and Kathleen Williams expanded on this theme by using spatial frameworks to understand the expansion of fan-made film trailers. Afterwards, the roundtable on “Sustainable Entertainment” offered a range of academic and industrial perspectives on what makes entertainment media sustainable, and how online content and distribution channels may contribute to sustainability. Featuring Jean Burgess, Mia Consalvo, Patrick Wikström, Martin Thörnkvist of music label Songs I Wish I Had Written, Wenche Nag of TelNor, and convened by Nancy Baym, the roundtable addressed the possibilities for the music industry, particularly the possible roles for services such as Spotify, in reframing the possibilities for sustainable entertainment careers, as well as the changing games industry, the challenges of creating the variety and change that sustain systems of culture, and the persistent question of e-waste and the materiality of the digital.

This question of sustainable ICT in terms of devices, hardware, and labor was revisited in Friday’s keynote by Peter Arnfalk of Lund University in Sweden. Arnfalk discussed both the greening of IT (making technology more environmentally friendly) and greening through IT (using technology to reduce the environmental impact of other activities). The audience, via Twitter (hashtag #ir11), appeared struck by the statistics that attempted to concretize the impact of technology – one Google search emits 0.2 grams CO2, and ICTs account for 2% of total CO2 emissions. Arnfalk went on to discuss the European and Swedish experiences with addressing green IT through business and policy channels in the past 15 years.

The final keynote featured Nancy Baym discussing the evolution of media production, distribution, and fandom in light of the internet. Starting from her personal interest in, appropriately, Swedish pop music, she went on to address the “Swedish Model” more broadly, as music labels attempt to work with the decentralization in music, sharing their products freely rather than clinging to old models. This involves looking for new possible revenue streams, including making money from sources other than listeners and fans, and seems to foster the rise of a “middle-class musician,” who can attain mild success in a diverse mediascape. The role of social media was addressed in terms of the relative rewards for fans and audiences, and Baym closed by asking whether this new landscape means academics need to interrogate our notions of “fans,” “audiences,” and “community.”

Facebook was omnipresent – presenters addressed surveillance, identity and personal branding, community, and of course, privacy. Michael Zimmer proposed that the “laws of social networking,” and its business imperatives, lead to a desire to “make privacy hard,” and thus attempting to influence Facebook’s privacy policies may no longer be possible. Instead, he suggested moving forward through channels of government regulation, developing alternate technologies, or encouraging media literacies. Alice Marwick and danah boyd discussed their recent fieldwork with American teenagers, who increasingly treat Facebook as a hyper-public space (“shouting to a crowd”) and turn to hiding their messages from parents while sharing with peers (steganography), or using alternatives such as private Twitter accounts (“talking in a room”).

AoIR also seems to be developing a robust games community, featuring a handful of dedicated sessions and the inclusion of games research in a variety of panels. While MMOs, particularly World of Warcraft, were central to many of the papers presented, scholars also addressed casual online gaming, game cultures that extend beyond the game space, digital distribution of games, gaming in social networking sites, and console games such as Left for Dead. Questions of identity, affect, and power within gaming spaces crossed between panels and conversations.

Finally, Friday’s roundtable on the futures of academic publishing combined exciting possibilities and success stories with warnings about the inherent unsustainability of the current US system of journal and book publishing as it relates to defunding university libraries, tenure and promotion, and the peer review system. Participants included Nicholas Warren Jankowski, Clifford Tatum, Steve Jones, Alex Halavais, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Stu Shulman. Projects such as Media Commons and open peer review were discussed, as were the possibly changing roles of journals and books in an era of self-publishing and alternative forms of scholarly conversation. Panelists advocated writing for more popular audiences – or at least making scholarship accessible outside the academy – as well as the necessity of senior scholars participating in new publishing forms and of all of our active participation in reforming journal hierarchies and the standards by which tenure and promotion are determined.

The Flow Conference Reception. Photo credit: Myles McNutt

Given that Erin so eloquently captured the buzz of the scholarly conversations this weekend and the freneticism of media scholars running between the AT+T conference center and various Tex-Mex restaurants, I’m going to focus on some of the roundtables that I found most intellectually stimulating.

Max Dawson’s roundtable “Putting the TV Back Into TV Studies” invited us to reconsider how we deal with media technologies.  Daniel Chamberlain asked us to think more about the infrastructures and networks necessary for media transmission.  All of the panelists raised issues faced by media researchers as we examine how sociohistorical contexts, industrial imperatives, and textuality interface with communication technologies that allow and disallow particular uses, viewing/listening experiences, and distribution policies.  Together, the panelists asked us to consider how to take the structuring power of media technologies seriously without being labeled as technological determinists.

I found Jeff Scheible’s remarks on the “Left Behind” roundtable fascinating.  Scheible’s exploration of where videotapes go when rental stores close their doors and his insistence that we understand “left behind” media in both spatial and temporal terms call attention to a focus on newness that may blind media scholars to the persistence of older forms of media experience.   Daniel Kimball’s discussion of how old media influence new media policy via the case study of Internet radio policy illustrated the need to think about the regulatory power of media systems in decline.  His point that Internet radio must fall below a “threshold of interactivity” in order to be called radio provided an ironic twist to the panel.

On my roundtable (“Managing Media Production in the Age of Convergence”), I was impressed by Erin Hill’s comments about the methodological issues she has encountered in chronicling low status “women’s” jobs in the studio system and the contemporary period.  Micky Lee’s discussion of macro- and micro-level labor issues surrounding Google Books, Peter Alilunas’ exploration of the industrial history of the porn business, and Brett Boessen’s points regarding the messiness of the term “fan-made” and how we should teach our students to read producers’ social media posts in critical ways point to the continued importance of interrogating convergence and how we can use the signifier of convergence to historicize media production.

The participants on the roundtable “Tuning in to the Fine Print: Law and Social Change in Media” asked us to consider the policy positions taken by guilds and unions (Miranda Banks), possibilities for vernacular policy construction (Bill Kirkpatrick and Liz Ellcessor), the need to make policy arguments in economic terms (Lucas Logan), the need to consider industrial policy alongside legislation and judicial decisions (Carly Kocurek), and the need to historicize policies surrounding journalism (Jamie Lund).

Finally, the participants on the “‘Featuring Music From’: Song, Sound, and Remix” roundtable addressed how television and games offer “interesting provocations” for sound studies scholars (Lisa Coulthard), how the presence of radio in games structures the audiovisual experience of gameplay (Racquel Gonzales), how viral videos such as the “Bed Intruders” phenomenon invite both economic and political analysis (David Gurney), how the “allusive qualities” of popular songs are used in teen television (Faye Woods), how the changing role of the music supervisor asks us to write more histories of the recording industry (Kyle Barnett), how classic network system series used popular music (Lindsay Giggey), and how the Wu-Tang Clan’s body of work asks us to consider “polytextual clusters and mise-en-synergy” (Andrew deWaard).

It was a great weekend filled with robust conversations about the future of media studies, the sounds of the Texas “ya’ll,” and migas.

I was able to attend five sessions over the course of three days, and they were all engaging and thought-provoking.  I could tell you what was discussed at each of those roundtables, but I truly think that there’s something about Flow that’s more valuable than the material productivity of each session, and that’s what I’d like to discuss in this wrap-up.  Flow is not about finding answers, it’s about facilitating dialogue, and what struck me, in particular, was the way that all of the roundtables (including, from my perspective, those I was unable to attend) seemed to be in conversation with one another.  In each roundtable, either a contributor or audience member (and usually both, many times over) would invoke an idea from another session.  The Twitter feed for the conference (#flow10, if you’re interested) was full of conversations happening in backchannels that allowed for a wonderful flow (*rimshot*) between roundtables.  And perhaps this is the greatest strength of the Flow conference model: the ability to facilitate dialogue not only within panels, but among them.  With a relatively small (compared to a conference like SCMS) number of attendees and roundtables, it’s possible to have a sense of what’s going on throughout the entire conference–not just the sessions you attend.  And so you hear audiences comment that the “Left Behind” roundtable’s discussion of the issues plaguing video stores actually comes to bear on the “State of American Network Television” roundtable’s discussion of the value of localism.  Flow endeavors to do something different from the usual conference model, and the result is something particularly community-building.  I enjoyed the experience in 2008, I enjoyed it over the last few days, and I look forward to reuniting in Austin for Flow 2012.

Beginning on Wednesday afternoon with a keynote by Kurt Squire of UW-Madison, a tone was set for the conference — it is no longer sufficient to think of games as mere learning tools or simple entertainment, but to begin to think of games as “possibility spaces,” ripe with potential for driving learning practices beyond the simple conveyance of limited educational content. As was picked up by many of the participants at the conference, Squire exhorted a Montessori approach to thinking of gaming, focusing on how it can open up curiosity in the learner. With such a variety of attendees to the conference, we saw fostering conversations between these many disciplines and professions as a central theme to GLS 6.0.

After a fantastic Wednesday night poster session, Thursday morning began with a joint keynote by Drew Davidson of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon and Richard Lemarchand, game designer at Naughty Dog and co-designer of last year’s award-winning Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Part of Davidson’s Well-Played series of talks and books, this keynote contained both a careful read of the game, with Davidson highlighting the ways that Uncharted 2 constructed meaning and experiences for the player, paired with Lemarchand’s thoughts on the designers’ goals for each scene/section of the game. This kind of cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional conversation is a hallmark of the GLS conferences, and it was wonderful to see Davidson’s series of these talks now foregrounded as a keynote.

The conference also offered sessions ranging from a social game design workshop led by Eric Zimmerman in which participants prototyped games that could be implemented on Facebook, to empirical studies, such as Rebecca Black‘s report on the constraints to literacy learning presented within virtual worlds for tweens. Sessions on science learning, environmental literacy, governance, computational literacies, and identity were all well-attended, and illustrated the range of topics that games and interactive learning media are being applied to. GLS featured a variety of innovative formats — including “chat n’ frag” interactive sessions, smaller “fireside chat” conversations, and “worked example” sessions. The field is maturing and in what appears to be useful directions, bringing diverse sets of scholarship to the table.

Design was, in particular, a strong theme this year, explored in terms of using games to create valuable contexts for learning, engaging students in design (a topic addressed by Ben Aslinger, among others), the design of commercial video games, and creating game experiences for specific learning goals. This emphasis branched out into research on mobile gaming (UW-Madison’s ARIS platform for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad was given great focus), fan cultures and productions (addressed by us, as well as Derek Johnson), multimodal forms of literacy, and youth education and development.

The greatest thrill at GLS this year, however, came from Thursday night’s keynote by USC’s Henry Jenkins. As he was presenting at the Fiske Matters conference subsequent to GLS, Jenkins clearly took the opportunity to touch on the applicability of many of Fiske’s themes to games and learning. Thinking of the forthcoming tasks for the games and learning communities not so much as delivering embedded learning content but instead understanding how fandom and the “active audiences” of game cultures are empowered toward social action, Jenkins argued that the playful environments of participatory media are not trivial, isolating forces, but are fostering political engagement and activism around the world.

Overall, we found it to be a wonderful experience, and one in which we were happy to see a broadening of scope and increased diversity in forms of participation. Conference chair Constance Steinkuehler reported that GLS 6.0 was significantly up in attendance over last year’s conference. We hope to see this growing community further come to understand how Squire’s concept of games as “possibility spaces” might be fruitful in developing educational reform, and also in foregrounding learning and literacy as critical approaches for media studies.

To find out more about the conference, see the GLS 6.0 site, or the official Flickr stream.

One of the great aspects of this year’s CP (and there were many) was the fact that the organizers had arranged for campus wifi access for all registered participants–the access codes were tucked in our name badges. The result of this was an active Twitter backchannel, a welcome change from the lack of backchannel at this year’s SCMS due to no wifi in the conference hotel. Many expressed hope that our European colleagues who were unable to join us because of Iceland’s volcano Eyjafjallajokull (and many other folks elsewhere) could follow the progress of the conference from afar through Twitter.

The number of tweets at CP overtook the total number of tweets at SCMS on the first day. The healthy Twitter backchannel at CP raised some interesting issues that I think merit further discussion, but since that discussion’s already taking place elsewhere, I’ll focus here on the content of CP’s panels. Please know that my report says more about what I did at CP than the conference’s offerings as a whole—I really hope readers will share moments they enjoyed with comments below and in other online venues. You can also follow the CP tweets on Twitter using the CP hashtag #cpuo.

This year’s conference programmed four to five daily panel sessions of four concurrent panels each. My day on Thursday began with a panel on Twilight (on which I was a presenter). The crowd was respectable for 8:30 on the first day (thanks for coming!) and the panelists (including Jennifer Stevens Aubrey and Leslie A. Rill) and I enjoyed sharing our research on Twilight’s audiences and exploring the meanings fans and non-fans have made of the Young Adult book series and film franchise—and the way the franchise has marketed its young stars to stoke fans’ fires.

From there, I enjoyed an exciting panel entitled “Star Studies 2.0: From Disney to Bollywood.” The panelists (Lindsay H. Garrison, Sreya Mitra, and Anne Helen Peterson) discussed the media’s role in the creation of female celebrities (on and offline) and in the negative attention brought to women in the public eye. It was a great panel that explored celebrity from a range of perspectives.

Next, I headed to another terrific panel, “Reading Race in ‘Post-Racial’ Television and Popular Culture.” LeiLani Nishime, Mary Beltrán, and Ralina Joseph gave provocative talks about Kimora Lee Simmons, Ugly Betty and Glee, and Sonia Sotomayor. This was a particularly important panel because it explored the intersections of gender and race—and because I heard many attendees say that they wished race had been taken up in more of the panel’s presentations. I think as feminist scholars, it’s important to push ourselves to include intersectionality in our analyses and this panel was a great example of just how we could be doing just that.

The final panel I attended on Thursday was the first of two panels discussing Mad Men (many attendees joked that Mad Men is the new The Wire). The panelists, Mary Beth Haralovich, Michael Kackman, Mary Celeste Kearney, Joe Wlodarz, and Chris Gettings offered stimulating analyses of the program, focusing on the show’s representations of women in the business world, “quality” historical narrative, DVD extras, and ancillary publicity. It made me excited to see the sister panel the following day.

Friday morning began bright and early with a panel on “New Media and Fandom.” Panelists Anthony Hayt, Liz Ellcesor, Darlene Hampton, and Suzanne Scott gave great talks on Supernatural slashfiction, character blogs, the performative nature of online fans, and the fangirl spaces available at Comic-Con. All of the panelists encouraged a useful rethinking of fan activity on- and offline.

My next panel was the second panel to focus on Mad Men. In it, Kyra Glass Von der Osten, Mabel Rosenheck, and Marsha Cassidy gave fascinating papers on Don Draper’s mistresses, Betty Draper’s fashions, and the characters’ “corporeal breakdowns”—including Betty’s vomit. Together, both panels on Mad Men gave us plenty of food for thought (about the text and its extratexts) as we anxiously await the show’s 4th season.

The CP plenary was Friday’s anticipated event. The plenary, titled “Publishing What We Preach: Feminist Media Scholarship in a Multimodal Age,” included Bitch’s Andi Zeisler, the Queer Zine Archive Project’s Milo Miller, and scholars Michelle Habell-Pallan and Tara McPherson. While Zeisler discussed blogging’s utility in feminist activism, and Miller discussed the web’s utility for archiving “twilight media,” Habell-Pallan discussed the importance of new media in American Sabor, the first interpretive museum exhibition to tell the story of the influence and impact of Latinos in American popular music. All three speakers communicated important messages for feminists wishing to bridge activism and scholarship, but it was Tara McPherson’s polemic, “Remaking the Scholarly Imagination,” that captivated the audience and had conference Tweeters typing like crazy. McPherson challenged the CP audience to adjust to the changing nature of the humanities by engaging with “the materiality of digital machines,” namely code, systems, and networks.

Discussion about McPherson’s call to have us move out of our “field shaped boxes” continued at the conference’s next event (and on Twitter and various blogs), a reception at Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum. Sadly, this reception was my last CP event. The space was beautiful, the food and drink delicious, and the company delightful. It was nice to let down and socialize a bit.

Thank you so much to everyone at the University of Oregon for such a stimulating conference—I know I am one among many who truly enjoyed the experience. I hope you will share your experiences of Console-ing Passions 2010 (both on and offline), and help fill in the blanks for Saturday’s panels—I have no doubt they were as amazing as Thursday and Friday’s. I hated to miss them.

Next year’s conference will be held at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and organized by Jackie Cook. I can’t wait!

1) SCMS is big and small at the same time – This is my fifteenth year since my first SCMS and I see a lot of the same faces I have seen over those years in the hallways but less so in the seminar rooms. The effect of growth and specialization within the organization has effectively made it possible for TV scholars to see nothing but TV panels, film scholars to pursue their interests, and so on. On friday my interest in sound and music drove me to three panels, one on radio, one on music in TV and film (in which I presented) and another on music in Japan’s Imperial Cinema of the late 1930s. The care and quality of the work was terrific, however I fear the serendipitous connections that come from a lack of choice are being lost through emergent specialization. No doubt, this should be a topic for future conference committees who wish to foster both specialization and cross-pollination of thoughts and ideas.

2) Workshops are worth their weight in noisy buzz – Following the #scms hashtag (by the way I tweet at #scms and #scms10 as I believe that the #scms10 is simply more specific for this conference), the postings for the workshop I was in, “The Future of the SCMS conference” made quite a splash. This despite the lack of WIFI and in-and-out phone connectivity. It was easily the best attended most robust workshop have ever been involved with and the importance of it will come as attendees become more involved through their demands and concerns. As someone who really hates conferencing (the logistics of travel and uncomfortable lodgings, combined with a longstanding aversion/anxiety over obliged socialization make four days in another town quite stressful), I have found that new modes of social networking extremely beneficial. In fact, twitter has singlehandedly made my experience conferencing one of great joy by giving me a new mode of association. The workshop allowed me and others to bring this up and demand adequate WiFi. As we will see, this kind of noise is no substitute for organized engagement, but I believe that what result from this and other “noisy workshops” such as yesterday’s other most tweeted moment, “The future of publishing workshop”, will most likely be a spur for change.

3) The future of SCMS will be one of more transparency – SCMS is not an evil organization, nor is it secretive. However, to scholars like myself, someone who has wanted to be involved , it is formidable because it has never been clear to me how to be involved. Nominations to committees seem to require self-promotion, which I tend to find an unseemly necessity, and the question of “how do I get involved?” seems to betray a careerism that scholars of all levels must engage. Something that the “great economic reset” is offering us is a new moment of valuation and we must make ourselves valuable. The best way to do this will be with robust metrics and and the exposition of best scholarly and career practices. For example, I am happy that it looks like the executive committee is interested and actively pursuing a membership census to better understand and promote who we are. I am openly advocating for a survey that better understands a variety of metrics devoted to understanding the value gained from conferencing and precisely how members invest in the experience. Having such information at our disposal will not only allow us to articulate to administrators what the value of conferencing is, but also for us, as an organization, to be exacting and honest as to what we need to value and let go of over time.

Finally, my favorite comment of the time came from a graduate student who noted that she was looking for mentoring and career guidance from a future conference experience. Despite what many may believe, these questions of “how do I go forward?” and “how can I contribute?” still feel like secrets to many of us. While not every conversation need be recorded and every favor recorded, it feels like there is a demand for a new openness, an openness and transparency that will better enable our members and organization to operate and protect their interests. It is an attitudinal change that I have never felt before at any other SCMS conference. Stay tuned…