Meet Tracy: an interior designer who can’t find a good house painter. Meet Bob: a wine store proprietor whose retail staff is unreliable. Meet Seth: a valet driver losing tips in an increasingly cashless culture.

Tracy is a founder of EasyPaint, a startup that matches house painters with individuals and companies seeking their services. Bob sells wine to Bjorn and Marissa Ovick, whose startup Staffly supplies retail workers to independent shops. Seth is a client of Bravo, which lets customers tip electronically.

Last week, each of these companies participated in the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt San Fransisco, the annual convention hosted by TechCrunch, AOL’s tech journalism site. The September 2015 Disrupt marked the thirteenth iteration of the event, which began in New York in 2012, and which now takes place each year on both coasts as well as in an overseas city. Each event features an exhibition hall, where software and hardware companies display newly launching products, panel discussions and “fireside chats” with executives whose companies lead the technology industry, and a hackathon that asks teams of coders to build something new over the course of twenty-four hours. Yet Disrupt’s main event, the centerpiece of the convention, is the Startup Battlefield. Billed as “the very heart of TechCrunch Disrupt,” the Startup Battlefield is a competition for investment capital and press attention. To win the competition’s $50,000 prize, preselected contestants must deliver a compelling pitch before an assembly hall of industry insiders, including investors and press, followed by a question and answer session with a panel of industry judges.

Disruption, a favorite Silicon Valley buzzword, signals the end of business as usual—yet the modes of engagement employed this week at TechCrunch Disrupt replicate, rather than rupture, industry norms. In their Startup Battlefield presentations, EasyPaint, Staffly, and Bravo took care to emphasize that the protagonists of their product narratives are real-life individuals affiliated with each company. Still other contestants opened their pitches with (presumably) archetypal or composite characters, imagined individuals whose struggles are solvable with the right company’s technology. In other words, each company set up its product’s desirability by introducing a person (“meet so-and-so”) who faces an obstacle (“so-and-so requires X but can’t have it because Y”) which the company’s technologies will remove (“I’m here to tell you about Z.”)

About half of the Startup Battlefield contestants invoked this presentational formula, which fits a range of industrial verticals: Emily wants to get pregnant but doesn’t know her fertility window. Abby needs school lunches but hates bananas. Scott needs medical care but hospital communication confuses him. Sam owns a car dealership but 401ks overwhelm him. Susie wants a divorce but lawyers are expensive. Tom grows peppers but can’t analyze his farming data. Gillian has asthma but can’t keep up with her treatment regimen. Kendall loves art and manicures but can’t customize her fingernails. Alex needs to notarize his will but must bring a full stack of paper to a notary public, and who prints anything anymore?

Having presented these protagonists’ perils on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, the startup founders quickly came to their rescue. Ava makes a smart bracelet that tracks its wearer’s menstrual cycle. Scrumpt lets parents order their children preselected lunches. Stitch streamlines communication between medical providers. Money Intel automates 401k administration. Separate.us helps divorce petitioners manage their own filing. Agrilyst, winner of the Startup Battlefield, analyzes the agricultural data produced by individual indoor farms. Cohero Health tracks asthma patients’ treatment adherence and lung function through a mobile app that syncs with a smart inhaler and spirometer. Preemadonna prints customized images from a smartphone onto users’ fingernails. Stampery provides digital document certification.

If there is a neoliberal logic undergirding the move to locate a would-be revolutionary technology within the life of a particular person, a narrative logic is also at play in these presentations. An irony of the Startup Battlefield is that the broader the implications of a given technology, the more difficult it is to explain in a matter of minutes. The plight of the pepper farmer highlights the revolutionary potential of Agrilyst for an audience likely unfamiliar with indoor farming on a broad scale.

Still, it’s worth considering what it means when, in the name of disruption, one of the tech industry’s most celebrated events for new, innovative technologies proposes the transformation of industrial sectors as diverse as agriculture, healthcare, and business administration using identical presentational paradigms. Sometimes “breaking shit”–to use another of the tech industry’s favored terms for innovation–means remaking it in Silicon Valley’s image.

Doctor Who Official 50th Celebration in London, 2013.

For Doctor Who the fiftieth anniversary, as Matt Hills has described, is not just a way of marking a milestone for the television series, but also an “epic collision between fandom and brand management.” This collision can be seen not just in the way the BBC releases minisodes to appeal to fans in a fashion that Hills has called “trans-transmedia,” but also in the many in-person celebrations being held at the anniversary. These celebrations have taken many guises: from professionally-run, BBC-organized affairs, to academic conferences (the report of which Derek Kompare has nicely written), to fan/scholar celebrations of Doctor Who, to fan–run conventions, to record-breaking cinema extravaganzas, to fan-oriented screening parties, the sheer number of fan celebrations demonstrate the continued affective and communal power of a cult television franchise like Doctor Who.

Chicago TARDIS convention.

This past weekend (November 28–December 1), I attended (and presented at) Chicago TARDIS, a local fan-run convention with over 2,500 attendees, 30 guests, and 160 panels and events. Chicago TARDIS manifests the collision between fandom and branding. The panels at Chicago TARDIS included both professional actor/crew presentations (three original Doctors were present, as were a number of companions and ancillary content creators), while also featuring more fan-oriented panels like “Fangirls are Real Fans, Too,” “The Danger of Fandom Entitlement,” and “Heroes (or Chumps?) of Cosplay.”

TARDIS has been running under that name for 13 years, and emerged after the demise of HME/Visions, a Chicago area Doctor Who convention that ran from 1990­–1998. In her book The Doctor Who Franchise, Lynette Porter describes how “some guests prefer” attending smaller events like TARDIS or other fan-run US conventions like Gallifrey One and Hurricane Who, “because they provide that personal touch and are smaller, less stressful events” (151). Although fans of Doctor Who have met informally since the beginning of the show, organized fan conventions for Doctor Who started in earnest in the UK on Saturday 6th August 1977, with the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s convention, later named Panopticon. The first US convention was held in December 1979, with Fourth Doctor Tom Baker and producer Graham Williams in attendance (there because of the last minute cancellation of the production of Shada).

Program from the first Doctor Who convention in the U.S., 1979.

Doctor Who fan conventions are different than Doctor Who exhibitions, as Philip Sandifer describes. In her chapter on the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff Bay, Melissa Beattie points out the exhibition has served not only to revitalize Cardiff, but also to reinforce the dominant, commercial meanings of Who. Indeed, unlike fan-run conventions like Chicago TARDIS, more official, BBC-sanctioned events tend to seem “much more like a traditional museum with… displays and structures,” according to Beattie (178). The famous Doctor Who Exhibition in Longleat or the Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool were both long-running museums of Doctor Who props, monsters, and memorabilia.

Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool, UK.

In general, professionally-run conventions like the Doctor Who Experience or the BBC’s own 50^th anniversary celebration tend to reinforce the dominant readings of the show with panels articulating authorized behind-the-scenes information or discussion with actors and crew. In contrast, smaller, more fan-run conventions tend to allow a plurality of voices, with panels discussing fannish activities like “Fandom Culture Clash” and “You Know You’re a Doctor Who Fan When…” That being said, many fan-run conventions also have crew and special guests in attendance, and many feature fan-friendly fare. There may also be a UK/US difference in convention styles, and the line between guest and participant is often more blurred at fan-run conventions.  According to Zubernis and Larsen’s Fandom at the Crossroads, more corporate organizations like Creation Entertainment tend to reinforce the barrier between fan and celebrity, even while simultaneously seeming to erase it. At Chicago TARDIS, interaction with guests is less regulated and often happens seemingly on accident – in the hotel bar, in the lobby while waiting for a cab, even walking across the street to Target (last year I literally ran into Sarah Jane Adventures actress Anjli Mohindra while making my way through the hotel doors).

As we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, it’s important to recognize that meeting in-person to celebrate the show is nothing new. Many Doctor Who conventions are now decades old. 2013 may mark a higher level of visibility for the program than ever before, but its fans have met for decades before now. What is different today is what Hills notes of TV anniversary celebrations: they “take on different meanings within reconfigured industry/audience contexts” (p. 217). Fan conventions are similar, and the annual consistency of conventions allows them to take on new dimensions. Unprecedented levels of access to behind-the-scenes news, celebrity personal lives, and production details make professional conventions often a reiteration rather than a revelation of information.

Meanwhile, the growing popularity of fan-run celebrations seems to be developing just as social media and the web provide copious avenues for fans to meet and congregate online. In my own research on Doctor Who fan conventions, I found that, for many fans, coming to Chicago TARDIS was less about meeting guests and more like “a family reunion,” where they could see the friends that “got” each other’s quirks. That TARDIS is always the weekend of Thanksgiving increases its familial quality: Thanksgiving is to celebrate with our family, to relax by the hearth, and to enjoy the company of those – and the shows – we love. The fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who may now be behind us, but like the Doctor himself, they will continue to develop and regenerate for many years to come – and, judging by these cosplayers, below, the future is assured.

Cosplay. (Photo Credit: Jef Burnham)

Paul Booth wishes to thank Ian Peters and Jennifer Adams Kelly for providing information about TARDIS and background on Doctor Who conventions in general, as well as for their help in the early stages of this post.

This is the fifth post in The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who, Antenna’s series commemorating the television franchise’s fiftieth anniversary and its lasting cultural legacy. Click here to read the previous entries in the series. Stay tuned for Piers Britton’s upcoming entry on the costuming in “The Name of the Doctor” this Thursday, December 5.

Photo courtesy of Lindsay Hogan

In Part One of this series, Erin Copple Smith offered perspectives on conferencing from graduate students. In Part Two, she continues with advice from faculty at various stages of their careers. 

Each respondent was asked: What did you do during SCMS? What were your strategies, if you had them? And how do you think your decisions reflect where you are in your career? Please note that the contributors here are not meant to represent a full spectrum of SCMS participants–many perspectives are missing. I encourage you to contribute your own strategies in the comments.

Early Career Assistant Professor

This year, I spent SCMS connecting and reconnecting with my academic network. My goal was to spend time with my grad school cohort, other conference and social media friends, current colleagues, and new connections. Since so many of us are flung all over the U.S. and beyond, this conference is an intense few days of bonding, bitching, and general shenanigans. Therefore, organization was vital. The best strategy I had prior to SCMS was setting up meetings, coffees, and lunch dates weeks in advance. One of my favorite dates was a happy hour with other new junior faculty. It was an opportunity to check in on the first year and share everything from how we are adjusting to our new campus cultures to decorating our offices. No matter where you are in your academic trajectory, from graduate student to full professor, spending time with others who are experiencing similar career points or transitions is incredibly cathartic. Maybe next year I will spend more time in panels or the book room, but this year was about reinforcing this support system. I truly believe that investing time in relationships and growing my community will help me shape the experience I want from this crazy academic game over the next 20+ years.

Advanced Assistant Professor

Because I am deeply involved with one of the Special Interest Groups, there was more tension for me than usual at this conference: do I attend all the SIG-sponsored and -related panels (which could have consumed most of my week), or do I skip some of those panels and thereby risk undermining the efforts of the SIG (not to mention running the risk that some of my friends and colleagues might feel snubbed).  Ultimately I decided that, if the SIG thrives, it will be because many people work to support it; letting go of that sense of responsibility freed me up to attend more panels that would help my teaching:  topics that students are perpetually interested in but that don’t directly relate to my research.  I also skipped more of the workshops that I would have attended in the past; I’m at the point where I kind of know what most of the participants are likely to say, and social media will cue me to anything really novel. Finally, my social time was spent almost entirely catching up rather than networking, but in actual fact I’ve found that there’s usually at least one person at the table who is new to me, so “catching up with old friends” and “making new connections” seems more and more like a false dichotomy.

Advanced Assistant Professor

This has been a trying year on the personal and emotional fronts. In addition, confronted with the prospect of explaining myself via the tenure dossier and exhausted from life on the grinding treadmill that is the tenure track, I needed to use SCMS to recharge my batteries and to renew my excitement (and perhaps even faith and confidence) in my work. This year at SCMS I spent most of my time outside of panels catching up with the friends from grad school who helped me finish the dissertation and have provided the online and offline network that has provided me with both encouragement and sober reason. At this point in my career, I’m realizing that the most interesting projects I have worked on and have been working on have been hatched over dinners, glasses of wine, drinks, or espressos grabbed quickly between panels. This year, though, I wasn’t thinking about networking; I was thinking about renewal. To twist the prompt of this post from what we should be doing at major conferences, I think we need to think about what we need to be doing, not necessarily for professional advancement, for  securing book contracts, or for enlarging our personal network of acquaintances and collaborators, but for ourselves, especially during the stressful moments in our lives and our professional journeys.

Advanced Associate Professor

This is an interesting assignment. I decided before the conference this would be my last SCMS for a while and almost didn’t attend this year. I find myself at a career point where I’m not getting a lot out of the conference, and rising service demands at my home institution have me needing to shift my service load. I’ve attended SCMS every year since 2001 and have held some position in the organization since 2005. So for the span of the last five years I’d say a lot of the purpose of the conference was the opportunity to network with collaborators and perform whatever duties my various roles have required. Until this year, I usually presented personal scholarship at some point and maybe attended a handful of panels, but the most meaningful experiences have been the coffees and lunches where I caught up with colleagues elsewhere and often brainstormed projects.

I’m not sure how much of my questioning the utility of the big conference is a function of career space versus how technology has changed the world of academia. In recent years I’ve tended to Skype with collaborators and maintained projects by email, decreasing the necessity of the annual meet up. I can’t say I’ve ever seen or gotten substantive feedback at a conference like SCMS—the panel format rarely leaves much time for questions, though now and again a workshop will come together nicely, and I’m now at a career point where I have relationships with those whose opinions I most respect, and am more likely to approach a colleague directly for feedback (though I must acknowledge that attending all these years is largely what has helped me cultivate many of these relationships). I’m also not a particularly auditory learner and have always preferred to read work. I review about 10-12 article submissions a year and usually 2-3 book manuscripts, and find this a better way to stay abreast of the work in my field. I still find smaller, interest-focused conferences to be worth the effort and enjoy the extended conversations and engagement those venues allow, and faced with competing demands on time and tightening university support, will likely focus my conference travel to those venues in coming years.

Now it’s your turn!  What are some of your conference strategies, and how do you think they reflect where you are in your career? Chime in with comments!

Photo courtesy of Lindsay Hogan

While at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference in Chicago this year, I found myself suddenly very aware of my recent career shift from dissertator and visiting assistant professor to tenure-track faculty. I kept thinking, “Wait. What am I supposed to be doing here? Should I be meeting up with far-flung friends and colleagues? Should I be networking? Should I be attending panels intended to enrich my research, or attending panels intended to enrich my teaching? Should I be expanding my horizons, or renewing my ties?” In talking with some of my fellow conference-goers over the weekend, I realized that many of us were dealing with similar tensions, and we all had different strategies. (Indeed, I’m apparently not the only one thinking about this, as Tim Havens so nicely articulates in this SCMS blog post!) It occurred to me that a roundtable presentation of perspectives from scholars at different stages of their careers would be really interesting and potentially very useful–much more so than my rambling thoughts! Talking this over with so many colleagues had me thinking differently about conferencing, and I hope the insights from the contributors below will have the same impact for everyone reading.

I’ve kept the contributors anonymous, so they could speak candidly and freely, but I’ve explained where each person is in their career, because I think that makes a difference. Each respondent was asked: What did you do during SCMS? What were your strategies, if you had them? And how do you think your decisions reflect where you are in your career? Today’s post offers the perspective of graduate students, tomorrow’s post addresses faculty perspectives. Please note that the contributors here are not meant to represent a full spectrum of SCMS participants–many perspectives are missing. I encourage you to contribute your own strategies in the comments. My takeaway from these conversations? There is no “right way” to conference; it’s all about being thoughtful about who and where you are, and what you want to get out of the experience.

Graduate Student at Dissertation Proposal Stage

Graduate Student, ABD