In fact, a closer look reveals the broader problem: once-innovative formats now seem tired as their defining personalities have moved on and the medium has evolved. CBC has long been a leader in the public service information radio genre and its personalities have always been significant part of that. CBC Radio contributed much to the development of the phone-out, information magazine, and audio documentary program formats, but listeners valued its most popular programs primarily for their personalities.

Internal documents reveal that administrators recognized their importance as far back as the ’60s, when the onset of television and FM radio necessitated the renovation of the radio service. Personalities were the anchoring force that unified the disparate elements of the long-form program formats that would come to define the national information service. Longtime morning host Peter Gzowski’s popularity was such that he came to known as “Mr. Canada,” while Barbara Frum’s hard-hitting and irreverent interviewing style defined As It Happens’ most successful period. The host of Frum’s program, Alan ‘Fireside Al’ Maitland, was an avuncular presence for a devoted audience base. In more recent decades, individuals like Shelagh Rogers and Mary Lou Findlay continued the tradition of skillful interviewing and insightful commentary.

But while daily stalwarts like As It Happens (1968-) and Ideas (1965-) march on, their formats have come to seem tired and their most cherished personalities have moved on. Ghomeshi was one of the few contemporary CBC radio personalities with the ability to appeal to a large, inter-generational audience comprised of both the CBC’s established boomer audience and their offspring. After some early hosting gigs for CBC TV and radio, he moved to the afternoon to stabilize things in the wake of the disastrous Freestyle experiment (2005-2007). Q debuted there and enjoyed some success before moving to the crucial national late morning slot vacated by the conclusion of Rogers’ Sounds Like Canada program (2002-2008). In this morning slot, the program has established itself as a premier popular arts and culture program with a broad reach in Canada and internationally (roughly 180 stations carry the program). With the former indie musician Ghomeshi as its anchoring force, the program executed a partial pivot away from higher-brow arts and literature and towards the popular arts (especially indie rock) and culture. It also moved towards more of a modular approach to content production with a mix of shorter and longer features. This positioned the program to do an exemplary job of establishing a digital, on-demand presence through its website and YouTube channel. In its modification of the now-classic magazine program format and its digital endeavors, Ghomeshi’s Q established itself as both a valuable property and a bridge between CBC Radio’s still all-too-present past and its uncertain future.

All of this made Ghomeshi into one of CBC Radio’s few contemporary icons. And now, little more than a week after he delivered an audio essay about the recent events in Ottawa, he has been scrubbed from the CBC’s website and headquarters. As information emerges, the CBC’s decision looks increasingly wise and conscientious. And the show goes on with several capable interim hosts including CBC veteran Brent Bambury. But these are difficult times for the CBC. The television service is reeling from the loss of hockey and the Radio Two recently began to air commercials for the first time in more than three decades. Radio One lumbers on with reduced budgets and many repeats in the schedule.

The Ghomeshi incident lays bare the need for a bigger stable of core radio personalities with broad appeal, further modifications to the long-form magazine format, and more stability within the radio service. The CBC must do more to develop personalities if it is to retain its audience and its influence. They’re out there – or perhaps they’re already inside the building. I suspect that the CBC has an abundance of talented hosts and producers working at its regional outposts who could do a great deal to rejuvenate the broadcaster on a national level. How much more talent is there in the more peripheral parts of the country and the institution? Similarly, how many producers are there in the ranks with innovative program ideas waiting to be developed?

CBC Radio’s history tells us that personalities and formats make one another in a reciprocal manner just as they did with Q. My hope is that Ghomeshi’s departure serves as a wake-up call to CBC Radio to focus more attention on the development of more national radio talent both on the mic and behind the glass. This would position the CBC to play a larger role in shaping radio’s future as it evolves beyond the formats of national public radio’s heyday to meet the challenges posed by the digital convergence era.

Now in its 12th season, Canada Reads has been described as a national book club, a multi-platform media event, and a reality program, among other descriptors. Inspired in part by the rise of competition-based reality programs like Survivor and in part by book clubs like that of Oprah, the phenomenon is a reflection of the CBC’s middlebrow compromise position between the industrialized popular culture to which its audience often gravitates and the higher brow arts and literature material that this same audience typically holds in high regard, albeit often at a distance. Of course, literature has historically had a particularly close connection to nations and nationalism and the CBC has long been an ardent supporter of CanLit. In all of these respects, Canada Reads stands as a contemporary point in a much longer timeline.

The program seeks to both associate particular works of fiction with the national project and to draw Canadians into a national conversation about those works is consistent with the CBC’s mandate. This mandate calls, in part, for the institution to facilitate inter-regional conversation, ‘reflect the multicultural and multi-racial nature of Canada,’ and ‘contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.’ A lot of this is about making Canada ‘small’; it is a bit of an enigma as a settler society with a massive landmass and a sparse population. The CBC is often lauded for its ability to bind the Canadian across that space, effectively reducing the size of the national community. CBC Radio, in particular, is often discussed in terms recurring tropes of smallness, whether it is considered to be a forum for the nation as a virtual village, conversation, or, in the case of Canada Reads, book club.

These notions are useful to many, but also potentially problematic. Questions concerning the precise nature of the cultural work performed by the program have attracted increased attention from scholars in recent years. For example, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo conceive of the program as a ‘reading spectacle’ that favors major Canadian publishers and dominant conceptions of Canadian literature and national identity. Although they acknowledge that the program presents opportunities for resistant readings and interjections, they contend that the program’s cultural work is essentially conservative in its limited vision of Canada as a diverse and multicultural country.

This argument, and the questions that precipitated it, suggest the need to revisit the question of ‘national consciousness and identity’. The CBC surely contributes to this, but for whom and on whose terms? The CBC’s radio services attract a dedicated audience that is interested in content framed in terms of the Canadian ‘nation’. For these listeners, this radio programming provides an opportunity to tap into a sort of shared national consciousness that exists in the space created by the radio, the culture this space supports, and the mythological material that has accrued around the CBC itself. Clearly, this ‘national consciousness and identity’ extends beyond the CBC’s airwaves, but to what extent is it shared? On the other hand, what about those who listen with hyphenated identities or social positions that preclude straightforward identification with normative values and ideologies? It has been suggested by many that agonistic debate over the nature of Canadian national identity might be the basis of the national culture in this settler society. With that in mind, to what extent might the CBC provide a space for the negotiation and contestation of values through its explicit orientation towards the Canadian nation-state and its myriad issues and themes? Conventional scholarly wisdom about the CBC allows for the potential for resistant readings of texts like Canada Reads, but too often seems to downplay the role or place of resistance within those programs and the discourse surrounding them. I want to consider the extent to which the CBC serves as a site of negotiation and contestation of the norms in Canadian society.

Canada Reads provides opportunities for its participants and listeners to meditate upon the issues that characterize debates about Canadian national identity. For example, this year’s theme is ‘Turf Wars’, a combative spin on the regional fissures that have themselves become something of a defining national quality. The five books and their advocates hail from five West-East regions: British Columbia and the Yukon, The Prairies and the North, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. The regional designations are themselves indicative: They reflect the influence of central Canada and the tendency to flatten the vast North into the more extensively-populated South. Having said all that, the notion of a literary turf war along regional lines seems likely to bring certain key questions pertaining to the intersectional nature of Canadian identity to the forefront of a widely-attended conversation. If the CBC can be said to reflect a broader Canadian ‘public’ in any meaningful way, it is surely through the sort of agonistic national deliberations that result from this sort of setup and the inevitable debates and pieces of commentary that will endeavor to make sense of it once it passes.

While one would need to do extensive ethnographic work in order to assess the actual cultural work performed by these programs, this year’s theme boasts the potential for a reflexive and meaningful conversation about Canada, albeit one that has been had before under similar circumstances. Regardless of how the conversation plays out, this ‘Turf Wars’ edition of Canada Reads is a timely reminder that the recent history of CBC Radio merits increased scholarly investigation if we are to develop a nuanced perspective on the cultural work performed by this national institution.

In the end, however, the most culturally significant national spot from CBS’ broadcast might be Dodge’s ‘Farmer’ spot for its Ram truck line. This spot opens with a still shot of a winter landscape dotted by a solitary cow with the name ‘Paul Harvey’ laying over it. Harvey was a longtime radio announcer on ABC known for his folksy delivery and conservative views. The spot features Harvey reading his ‘And So God Made A Farmer’ piece accompanied by still photographs of farms and farmers with the odd Ram truck featured in a pseudo-subtle manner. As the commercial reveals stills of community buildings (a church, barns etc), farmers at work, young farmers-to-be in the fields, and the family dining table, the viewer gets a strong sense of shared values emanating outwards from the individual to the family to the community to the nation. In fact, it is actually a  remake of a very similar Farms.com spot from last year; the contrast between the two highlights the manner in which the Ram spot uses stylized images from the present to summon up a nostalgic conception of the past. It seems to be telling us that, even if things were better in previous era, the spirit of that time is still with us today.

As with that overt sense of nostalgia, the piece is straightforward in its ideological message, much like last year’s ‘Halftime in America’ spot featuring Clint Eastwood. Directed ‘to the farmer in all of us’, it articulates Ram trucks to an idealized conception of an America populated by hardworking folks who earnestly toil upon the land. It taps directly into what cultural historian Warren Susman called the ‘older, puritan-republican, producer-capitalist ethos’ that values a strong individual character emanating from sacrifice, earnest toil, self-reliance, and personal responsibility. This ideal still looms large in the dominant conception of the national psyche despite the fact that the country shifted to a consumerist ‘culture of abundance’ in the first half of the 20th century. One could even argue that, in a time at which the consumerist paradigm seems to be just about exhausted, this conservative ideal are more useful than ever for those who cannot envision an alternative future.

The obvious implication is that we can still connect to this ideal through the Ram, even if most Americans now lack even a tenuous connection to the lifeways depicted in the commercial. Alluding to this point, Yahoo Sports called it “Probably the most effective ad of the night, even if most of America doesn’t even know a real farmer.” This is a particularly sticky issue given the realities of farming today. In fact, Dodge has been criticized in various quarters for the spot’s lack of ethnic diversity  and the manner in which it completely ignores the contemporary reality of immigrant (legal and illegal) labor on massive factory farms. Of course, the spot is not concerned with the actual state of farming, but with a nostalgic image of the (white) farmer as an authentic entrepreneur who literally wrings his opportunities out of the American land. We know that this image bears little relation to the reality inhabited by most Americans (or people in America) for whom the notion of being a rural entrepreneur is completely foreign. But that does not mean that it is not useful: much like the a predominantly urban Canadian population that still identifies strongly with an idealized conception of the vast, untamed wilderness, there is a substantial subset of the American population that identifies strongly with the spot’s nostalgicideal. Ultimately, ‘Farmer’ is a good example of the sort of conservative national mythos that is always present, but which seems to take on increased prominence during times of hardship, uncertainty, and decline. This phenomenon is itself indicative of the sort of retrenchment of values – and denial of a certain aspect of a collectively lived reality – that tends to occur during these periods. In this respect, ‘Farmer’ is a sign of its time and, for this reason, perhaps the most notable commercial spot from Sunday’s broadcast.

Was there a particular spot that caught your eye (or ear) during last night’s broadcast? If so, please share them with our readers in the comment section. We would love to hear about any spots that you found to be particularly interesting, entertaining, or problematic.

When the lockout began, Dave Zirin observed that the NFL was pursuing this tactic simply because it could. He then laid out the material case for the NFL’s stance, contextualizing the league’s grotesque profits and extremely aggressive approach to labor relations within broader trends in American corporate culture. Yet Zirin’s analysis under-emphasizes the ideological and discursive dimensions of this situation. I contend that this lockout encapsulates the manner in which the material and ideological conditions of struggle between labor and capital have been reconfigured during thirty-plus years of neoliberal discourse and policy. The fetishization of the ‘free’ market and individual autonomy, the privileging of private interests over the public, and an increasing hostility towards organized labor have taken hold in the United States. We now find ourselves in a moment at which wealth is being funneled upwards as public debt balloons and poverty and unemployment continue to increase. Despite all this, we continue to see a persistent skepticism about organized labor and government intervention within the general public. In this context, the NFL intuitively understood that it could lock out its officials with impunity because public sentiment was inherently opposed to these workers.

This was widely apparent during the referee lockout. One seldom saw the non-union referees referred to as ‘scabs’; rather, media commentators called them ‘replacement officials’. Similarly, game analysts and commentators were often reluctant to criticize the ‘replacement’ officials (though there have been suggestions that some were duped). My own survey of user comments on articles concerning the substitute officials on Profootballtalk.com suggested that many readers were unsympathetic to the NFLRA with numerous hostile comments posted. Perhaps most curiously, while fans and commentators critiqued the performance of these officials and lamented the diminished quality of games – see the meme pictured above – few seemed to connect this to the NFL’s decision to lock out its professional referees after the NFLRA refused to accept the NFL’s take-it-or-leave-it offer during negotiations before the season. Fewer still made the obvious connections between this event and other recent labor disputes.

Here we have a massively profitable billion-dollar sports league that was willing to compromise the quality of its product, the safety of its players, and its own reputation in order to gain some meager savings – as low as $62,000 annually per team, according to some reports. Per Peter King, the primary sticking point in negotiations was apparently the retirement plan; the NFL sought to shift all referees from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution, market-based plan. While the referees initially balked at this, early reports concerning Wednesday’s deal indicate that this measure is set to go through in 2016. Despite their efforts to hold out, and their apparent leverage after Monday’s debacle, the refs ultimately became only the latest group of American workers to lose their pensions. A turn of events that would have been unthinkable three decades ago now barely elicits a raised eyebrow; in this case, the few criticisms of the deal have been drowned out by the cheers for the return of the real refs and the apparent salvation of the NFL season.

So, what can we take from this sequence of events? None of what has transpired here is new. These points bear repeating, however, because events such as this represent brief moments of clarity in which the material and ideological power dimensions of a given moment are exposed. It is perhaps a fitting sign of the times that, just as public consciousness of the stakes of this struggle seemed to be building, it was punted into the past through a hasty resolution. But the fact that this dispute even got to this stage is itself an indication of the extent to which the management-labor dichotomy has faded in the collective public mind. With this week’s agreement, this lockout becomes merely another disparate event in as yet unconnected cluster of struggles from the Wisconsin Uprising to the recent Chicago Teachers Union strike to the myriad private-sector labor disputes that dot our blighted economic landscape.

As with those events, it is unclear whether or not there will be any meaningful residual activity emerging out of this most visible struggle. Indeed, this is perhaps the defining quality of our time: the difficulty envisioning and articulating connections across classes, spaces, and events. As with the public-sector workers and the teachers in the preceding events, football fans could not seem to see their own diminished circumstances and prospects for the future in the referees struggle to hold the line against the league. This fading conflict now stands as yet another indication that the terrain of struggle that defined the twentieth century has yielded to something else. This new moment demands new ways of conceptualizing and articulating the dimensions of a more amorphous and atomized struggle over material goods and ideological territory.

I believe that the difficulty we’ve experienced in imagining and articulating these new ways attests to the all-encompassing tension between the nostalgic cul-de-sac of the ‘American Century’ and the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideologies. The way we never were, to borrow Stephanie Coontz’s phrase, looks better and better as the status quo continues to deteriorate. Then again, three decades of rampant individualism have limited our ability to conceive of ourselves in terms of broader social entities. The lockout should provide a stern indication that the old terrain of struggle has been reconfigured in material and ideological terms. Its lesson is surely that, if those of us who labor do not get engage in the practice of imagining new ways of community-building, organizing, and resisting, we will undoubtedly face diminished prospects in the future. Of course, its deeper lesson may be that the twentieth century is fated to be remembered as a brief golden cycle in a much darker longue durée.

Fast forward two years and I finally got around to watching the series and my viewing happened to coincide with the program’s tenth anniversary. In the decade since its release, BOB has become a phenomenal success on DVD – it has generated upwards of $250M in DVD and Blue-ray sales – while drawing consistent audiences in rerun showings. So what is the key to the miniseries’ enduring appeal?

It is difficult to come up with a straightforward answer to this question. Certainly, the fact that this story is grounded in a concrete sequence of historical events featuring a group of visible characters lends the program a compelling degree of immediacy and authenticity. At a time when we are losing our last tangible connections to World War II, the story of “Easy Company”, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment assigned to the US’ army’s 101st Airborne Division resonates broadly. The story of this tight band of paratroopers is notable and somewhat familiar thanks to Stephen E. Ambrose’s popular history , Major Dick Winters memoirs, and the posthumously published war memoir of David Kenyon Webster. There is also We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company, a documentary that features surviving members of the company describing their experiences in the war in a somber manner (this was included on the DVD release of the miniseries). All of this material lends a certain heft to the dramatization of the battalion’s experiences, particularly given the way that each episode opens with relevant reflections from unidentified company veterans. This has the effect of establishing that this account has been sanctioned by those who suffered through the events depicted.

The program itself is beautiful in appearance and impeccable in its plotting and detail, albeit with a fair bit of poetic license and the odd inaccuracy. Executive Producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks evidently took a great deal of care in mapping out the story and the result is a taut, exceptionally well-paced series that manages to feature a variety of perspectives while maintaining its focus and momentum. The episodes trace Easy Company’s progression from its initial training period in Toccoa, Georgia to England and D-Day and the subsequent Market Garden and Bastogne campaigns. The final episodes, which see the company taking Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ in the Bavarian alps and then functioning as an occupying force provide a welcome perspective on a seldom seen side of war.

Major Dick Winters is the ostensible center of this ensemble cast, but he is the narrative focal point of only three episodes (“Day of Days”, “Crossroads”, and “Points”). Other episodes focus on secondary characters in a manner that provides a well-rounded overview of life in the company over the course of these difficult campaigns. This is one of BOB’s major strengths as this technique provides multiple points of identification while highlighting the complexity of the events depicted. This variety of perspectives helps BOB to avoid the tendency to slip into a simplistic glorification of classic war tropes like courage, sacrifice, and duty. Depictions of soldiers dying through preventable accidents, attempting to avoid exposure to harm in the war’s later stages, and grappling with alcoholism undoubtedly contribute to BOB’s credibility in this regard.

One other quality of BOB bears mention: the camera has a way of stalking the soldiers whenever they are in a position where they might potentially encounter the enemy. The perspective provided by this practice ratchets up the tension in scenes where this is deployed. For example, Day of Days (Episode 9) sees a patrol head out to explore the woods surrounding the occupied German town of Landsberg am Lech. The camera moves through the trees around the small group of soldiers as an eerie quiet descends. Just when the viewer thinks that the group might be subject to ambush, the soldiers encounter a clearing wherein they see a Nazi concentration camp for the very first time. The viewer’s anxiety over a potential ambush gives way to a sense of horror at this discovery in a brief sequence that exemplifies the way that shot composition and plotting combine to produce moments of tremendous dramatic tension.

All of these these factors helped me to get past my skepticism and surrender to the narrative. Where I would normally be predisposed to a critique of the program’s overt nationalism and its depiction of historical events, I quickly became wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of Easy Company. This is a function of the factors outlined above, along with BOB’s superb production values and fine performances. Reflecting on the program, it occurs to me that perhaps the miniseries is the television format that best utilizes the medium’s strengths. The format allows sufficient space for a long-form narrative to unfold while its set length and budget shield it from the economic concerns so that so often come to structure television productions. In the case of BOB, it provided the means to create a perfectly contained storyworld that illuminates an aspect of the past in a manner that is often instructive and always entertaining. My experience with this program has motivated me to seek out other miniseries. While I think I will begin with The Pacific, HBO’s companion piece to BOB, I would welcome any suggestions readers might be willing to provide in the comments.

The CCA began in a stirring fashion with a pair of panels entitled “The Crisis of Universities, Parts I and II”. These panels were related to a special issue of TOPIA that is set to focus on these issues. Ian Angus addressed the diminishing availability of standpoints for reflection at a moment in which these institutions are changing extremely rapidly. He utilized changes to the form and function of university libraries, citation systems, and the rise of the network society to interrogate the effects of three decades of neoliberal policies on the university. Bob Hanke applied cultural theory to pedagogical practice in order to conceptualize the changing nature of pedagogy in these institutions while outgoing University of Western Ontario Faculty Association President James Compton drew on his recent experiences in labor negotiations to address the pervasive trend towards micromanagement and rationalization in the Canadian university system. Alison Hearn then addressed the emergence of various metrics to measure performance in this new ‘spectacular economy of the university’; her talk on performance audit and promotion practices clarified some of the key changes occurring in our educational institutions. These panels affirmed the extent of the threat that the neoliberal political climate poses to the university and confirmed the need for broader collective action as the university enters a time of increased scarcity and scrutiny.

Darin Barney gave a thought-provoking presentation about the Alberta town of Battle River’s purchase of its branch railway line as a democratic act constituted through the collective embracing of an uncertain but self-determined fate. Calling his work ‘critical agricultural studies’, Barney inquired into how infrastructural technologies mediate the experience of geographical spaces and what happens when communities refuse to embrace the twin poles of the imperative of technological progress and the nostalgia for lost lifeways. Tamara Shepherd, Sara Grimes, and Leslie Shade combined to offer a stimulating panel on youth engagement with digital spaces, the gender dynamics inherent in those activities, and the pressing need for adequate policy initiatives in these areas.

The CCA also featured excellent keynote addresses by Lisa Nakamura and Charlotte Brunsdon. Nakamura’s talk, entitled “Race, Labor, and Indigeneity: The Birth of the New Media in the American West”, presented a pre-history of ‘new media’ that focused on the ways in which various dominant groups or entities in American society (i.e. adherents of the counterculture movement, technology firms) have appropriated or exploited Native American culture to suit their own ends and interests. Examples included the application of Navajo weaving skills in the production of complex tech hardware and the fetishizing of the native American’s authentic relationship to the natural environment on the part of hippies, which Nakamura adroitly connected to discourses of techno-utopianism. Nakamura utilized this discussion to explore the social relations involved in the material production of digital devices and to expose the race and gender dynamics involved in those processes. Suggesting at one point that women were the first form of software for the ways in which female workers operated the first mainframe computers, Nakamura drew an insightful distinction between ‘free workers’ (those who possess various forms of mobility) and unfree workers (those who do not). This discussion reaffirmed the persistent need to write against overly optimistic assessments of digital technology and the utility of historical work in this endeavor.

Charlotte Brunsdon’s talk, which was co-sponsored with the Film Studies Association of Canada, focused on British Film and Television history and emphasized the need for an historiographical re-assessment of the audio-visual arts in Britain. Brunsdon focused on the issue of medium specificity and the ways in which various media forms depict other media forms and thus help to fix their discursive meanings for populations. Her focus on this area was in part a function of her belief that, as platforms become less important in the face of digital convergence, it is becoming more important for texts to assert or specify the sort of attention that they require. Brunsdon contended that medium specificity is a function of accumulated textual gestures rather than a property of media themselves. She analyzed examples of the ways in which British films have depicted television at different points in time in order to make the case that television has evolved from a force that constitutes a threat to the domestic space to an institution that often helps to constitute ‘home’. However, this progression has lent the medium a socio-cultural meaning that tends to overpower it. Brunsdon argued that British television in the late twentieth century carries a metaphorical weight of banality and liveness that overwhelms any sense of historical fact. Thus, as the films Brunsdon featured demand a mode of engagement that is ‘not like watching television’, they also reiterate discourses of medium specificity that obscure our actually existing relationships with those media. Brunsdon then concluded by making the historiographical claim that Britain’s audiovisual culture is properly located on television and not on film, as has often been argued. “We’ve looked in the wrong places,” she said, as a sort of exhortation to use digital convergence as a means to look anew at historically-established discourses of textual specificity.

CCA 2011 featured an abundance of papers, gatherings, and activities that stretches far beyond my limited space here. It was a deceptively intimate conference that was defined equally by a fierce sense of intellectual curiosity and political urgency and by a pervasive sense of warmth and conviviality. This was my first CCA, but I can already say that I am eager to return for CCA 2012 in Kitchener-Waterloo.

With this in mind, Antenna is proud to debut a weekly column that intends to address various aspects of Treme as the new season unfolds. Given the range of topics and themes covered by the program, we feel that it is an ideal candidate for extended discussion on Treme. We have lined up a diverse group of media scholars to contribute their perspectives on the program over the course of the season. We encourage you to come back to this space each Wednesday for a fresh take on that week’s program and the broader series in general.

Where the first season saw the characters taking the first steps towards some sort of emotional, cultural and economic recovery, the second season promises to follow these characters into the second phase of the city’s gradual renewal. The cast will no longer have John Goodman, whose tortured writer Creighton Bernette committed suicide towards the end of the first season. In his place, Treme has added Jon Seda, who is set to portray Nelson Hidalgo, an opportunistic property developer from Texas. In the picture to the left, Seda is seen surveying his surroundings as he rolls into New Orleans.

It appears that this change may herald something of a shift in focus towards some of the structural socio-economic issues associated with New Orleans and the aftermath of Katrina. Treme‘s first season alluded to these concerns, but it often seemed to be most interested in the city’s cultural recovery and the emotional impact of the Katrina debacle on its residents. Film Quarterly’s J. M Tyree observes that, “Treme presents [New Orleans] as a fragile but living community of wonders, a sort of ongoing work of performance art which, like the city’s music, remains effervescent and improvisational yet brilliantly coherent.” Indeed, season one often seemed like a cultural argument for the importance of New Orleans to a forgetful American nation. The program reveled in the city’s music and food, meditated upon its treatment in the media, and considered various forms of tourism in relation to questions of cultural authenticity. Yet, there are were also points at which Simon and company darkened the corners of this picture with a bleak assessment of the socio-economic dynamics within New Orleans and the traumatized city’s relationship with the world beyond it. Season two may move further in this direction as it seems poised to use New Orleans Police Dept. Lt. Terry Colson (David Morse) to examine the resurgence in crime that accompanied the recovery. At the same time, Seda’s character might provide a means for Treme to reconcile its cultural side with a consideration of the forces at work in the rebuilding of the city’s infrastructure. In one of the trailers for the season, Seda’s character is seen discussing the rebuild with a well-dressed older man. The man opines, This is a unique opportunity to fix New Orleans. Crimes, schools, infrastructure. Enough people say, ‘why rebuild New Orleans at all?”. To this, Seda’s property developer says, “Never let a disaster go to waste’.

That line may seem rather obvious, but it cuts to the heart of the dynamic in post-Katrina New Orleans that George Lipsitz so forcefully describes in a 2006 essay. For Lipsitz, there are two opposing constituencies involved in the real-life drama. There are the wealthy people, corporations, politicians, corporate media outlets, and bourgeois tourists on the one hand and the urban residents, service industry workers, and local cultural custodians on the other. Lipsitz notes that, for the first group, “The black residents of the city who suffered so terribly are not people who have problems, but instead are the problem.” It seems that, now that Treme has shown its audience why New Orleans should matter to America, the program may now proceed to utilize its setting as a means to interrogate some of the socio-economic problems that plague American society. Perhaps, Katrina and its aftermath might serve as a point of rupture that, when re-imagined through fictional television, could facilitate a broader consideration of the structural inequities obscured by neoliberal policies and their attending discourses.

This is, however, merely a hopeful prognostication for we do not yet know what season two will bring. I do know that I am excited to see it unfold and hopeful that we might have a rich and rewarding discussion about Treme and the issues it raises here on Antenna. With this in mind, we encourage you to offer your thoughts about the program and your wishes for its second season in the comments below. We’d love to hear what interests you about Treme and your thoughts on what makes the program significant at the present time.

We also hope that you’ll return each week as our contributors offer up columns addressing a variety of topics including Treme’s representations of social and cultural groups, its production, its use of music, and many more.

On, Archives! A Conference on Media, Theater, and History was a fitting tribute to the Wisconsin Center. Featuring a special symposium on broadcasting in the 1930s and a variety of other offerings on all manner of topics, the four-day conference saw a diverse group of scholars from North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom engage in a series of panels that drew many useful connections across eras, nations, and media forms. The presentations and discussions consistently reinforced this need to examine issues and events in terms of broader contexts, whether it be the historical longue durée or the transnational development of mass media systems. It also emphasized the central role of archival research in these endeavors.

The 1930s were a particularly critical decade in radio’s development as a mass medium and this era was addressed from a number of perspectives. Len Kuffert examined the development of taste communities in relation to Canadian radio during this period. Hans-Ulrich Wagner looked at the relationship between the prevailing regional identities and the emergent national culture in German radio of the 1930s. Anne F. MacLennan presented some of the early findings of her Remembering Radio project, which seeks to preserve and analyze the recollections of those Canadians who participated in this early period when individuals were still ‘learning how to listen’. Sian Nicholas also presented her findings pertaining to 1930s radio columns in Britain. Her analysis elucidated the relationship between print and broadcast media forms during this period, highlighting the role of newspaper writers in the production of meanings around the BBC. Nicholas astutely reminded those in attendance that the the BBC had served a discursive “function” for various social actors during this period, and that these early formulations established the basis for the way in which the BBC would be perceived in the decades to come. Jason Loviglio’s paper analyzed the aesthetic and thematic similarities between 1930s radio soaps and contemporary NPR hit “This American Life” to interrogate the meaning of the medium’s representations of domesticity in different eras. His presentation provided a timely reminder that contemporary radio is deserving of increased attention from media scholars.

There were many fine presentations of archival research, but there were also presentations that examined the role of the archive and the researcher in contemporary life. Tim Wall and Paul Long of Birmingham City University called for academics to consider how they might operate as public service intellectuals. They asserted that, beyond the more conventional practices of conducting archival research and examining the institutions behind them, academics might have an important role to play in preservation and cultural memory projects. Long’s presentation detailed his attempts to secure the resources needed to clean and catalogue the collection of deceased BBC producer Philip Donnellan. This provided a tangible example of the way in which such efforts of advocacy and facilitation might help to turn buried collections into accessible archives.

On, Archives! featured a  number of excellent keynote addresses. Tino Balio initiated the proceedings with a history of the early years of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.  Kate Lacey concluded the first day with an excellent address that used her research in 1930s radio in Britain to urge those in attendance to look beyond the gendered active/passive dichotomy that pervades so much thinking about media engagement. Her talk set the  tone for a number of addresses that would deploy archival findings as a mechanism through which to interrogate dominant discursive constructs. On Wednesday, Matthew Bernstein talked about his own experiences as a film researcher in the Wisconsin archives, while noted film theorist and historian Marc Vernet gave the final keynote on Thursday in which he addressed the relationship between film theory and film history at the present juncture.

Obviously, On, Archives! featured far more than I can cover in this very limited report. The conference has to be considered  a tremendous success on all fronts. It boasted excellent presentations, invigorating discussions, and thought-provoking keynotes. It even featured an active Twitter backchannel via the #OnArchives hashtag. More than this, it generated a sense of excitement about archival work and its role in contemporary scholarship and public life.  While the event may be over, it seems that it has inspired many conversations that are only just beginning.

Like so many sporting events these days, however, the Tour is also a media event. The competitive drama, intrigue, and the French ambiance have made it an ideal candidate for expanded media coverage. In North America, the post-cancer ascent of Lance Armstrong coincided well with the expansion of the cable realm to facilitate a boost in television coverage. Where ESPN had previously offered a slim highlights package on certain key days, the cable channel Versus (formerly the Outdoor Life Network) has expanded its coverage to include several hours on all race days (and as much as six hours of coverage on key mountain stages). The result is that avid cycling fans can now take in all of the action, provided that they have the right cable package.

Versus’ coverage developed a solid audience in large part due to Lance’s success, but the credit for its ability to hold much of that audience must be given to its leading personalities. While the video footage draws heavily on the standard race feed, the legendary commentary team of Paul Sherwin and Phil Liggett add a particular flavor to the race experience. Former professional cyclists, these two enliven the race as they mix creative expressions, tender banter, and incisive observations about the race and its participants (you can see a collection of Liggett’s endearingly absurd characterizations of events here and hear some of his classic calls here). In fact, a number of these  ‘Liggettisms’ were re-fashioned into poems and published in 2005 to some acclaim. They deliver knowledge and passion in an endearing manner that effectively allows the North American audience to engage with professional cycling.

The footage to which Sherwin and Liggett lend their voices is also unique in professional sports; with the cyclists typically either bunched together in a fast moving pack (the ‘peloton’) or strung out along the course, the video feed is generally comprised of a mix of motorcycle-cam shots and helicopter-cam shots. The former offer close-ups of cyclists – be they grimacing, feuding, or placidly rolling along – while the latter bring France’s diverse range of landscapes into the mix and provide a crucial degree of perspective. The reliance on motorcycle cams makes for great theater in the mountains as the cameras moves through the course, discovering riders who’ve been dropped and catching those who are breaking away. This makes for exciting moments of discovery as one attempts to sort out which of the suffering warriors are ascending to greatness and which are going backwards. The cameras consistently cut from one spot to another in order to follow attacks, collapses, and crashes as they occur in real-time on the course.

This year’s race is a bit of a throwback in tribute to the 1910 edition. There are plenty of traditional flat stages, few mid-mountain stages, and, for the first time since 2004, there will be cobblestone stretches in the route, which are invariably dangerous and unpredictable. There are few mountaintop finishes, but Stage 8’s (July 11) Categorie 1 climb up to Morzine-Avoriaz in the Alps could produce early fireworks. Once the race hits the Pyrenees, Stage 14 (July 19) will see the riders climb the massive ‘Hors Categorie’ Port de Pailheres ascent before they finish at the top of the Categorie 1 Axe-3 Domaines. On Stage 17 (July 22), the riders will mount two Categorie 1 climbs before finishing with the legendary Col du Tourmalet, which could be decisive given that this will be one of the last opportunities for the favorites to sort themselves out. The sprints and time trials also offer their pleasures, but I think that there is nothing quite like the spectacle of suffering involved in a grueling race up one of France’s massive mountain peaks. Stage 10 (July 14) could also prove to be interesting as it features two significant climbs and the French are sure to attack like mad in search of Bastille Day glory.

The Tour is not for everyone, but those who enjoy it can now follow it in myriad ways. Versus provides ample coverage, websites like cyclingnews.com and dailypeloton.com offer up tons of commentary and discussion, and there are numerous rider Twitter pages that offer a rare insight in the life of the professional cyclist (see @lancearmstrong for an example of this). I should also add that classic moments and excerpts can be viewed on YouTube, for those who are interested in the race’s storied history (for example, check out this classic attack). Still, nothing compares to watching the action live with Phil and Paul. When the peloton hits the high mountains, you can be sure that I’ll be bounding out of bed before the rooster crows in order to catch all the action. Watching the Tour with the day’s first cup of coffee is one of my most cherished summer media rituals.

In the week since the World Cup kicked off, much ink has been spilled about the vuvuzelas, those long plastic horns that produce a sound like swarming bees when they are blown en masse during a soccer match. This cacophony, which is audible on the telecasts, has been the defining story from the first round of group games at this World Cup. It is the early days of the tournament when teams play in a cautious and uncertain fashion as they feel themselves and each other out. With lacklustre soccer after the protracted run-up to the tournament, many fans and pundits have chosen to focus their energies on the vuvuzelas. Their vague and persistent din appears to be that much more audible when it serves as the aural backdrop to a dull match between a desultory would-be contender and a reluctant hanging on for dear life. The aggravation caused by these horns has prompted many a columnist to weigh in on the matter, inspired plenty of Twitter activity, and resulted in a Facebook group petitioning FIFA to ban the horns that has attracted more than 250,000 users as of this writing.

While it is difficult to know how many of those users will stick with the cause as the tournament evolves and becomes more interesting, the mere existence of this group reflects what is arguably the larger story of the 2010 World Cup. This is the first World Cup to be conducted during the Web 2.0 era and participants on every level – from coaches to players to commentators to fans – have taken to platforms like Twitter and Facebook with tremendous alacrity. Newpapers like The Guardian have assembled multi-media World Cup web centers that feature recaps, opinion pieces, podcasts, and tweets among other sorts of content. In North America, ESPN has made all of the games available as streaming content via its ESPN3 web channel and on smartphones. With all of these mechanisms that enable one to follow the event over the Internet, fans have more ways now to take in the games and engage with the event than ever before.

The vuvuzela controversy is in part a function of this. The mildly irritating buzz has become something of a phenomenon through an abundance of media coverage and fan discussion. One wag even created a Twitter account for the item – @The_Vuvuzela – that produces entries like “Things to do today: bzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, BZZZZZZZZ, and the laundry” and there is the score for the vuvuzela concerto that has been making the rounds (the horns can play but one note, a bflat).  This has produced a stream of tweets that satirize the fact that the vuvuzela effectively produces the same response to every event that might occur over the course of a match, particularly when it is wielded by over-eager foreign fans. Meanwhile, the BBC has revealed that it is contemplating offering vuvuzela-free broadcasts. For those who love the sound of the vuvuzela’s Bflat monotone, there is always the free vuvuzela iPhone app, which will turn your smartphone into a virtual vuvuzela.

Yet for all of this engagement, we might observe that the vuvuzela controversy has thus far obscured two arguably more significant and problematic issues: the decision of security workers to strike over missing pay packets and the swathes of empty seats that have been visible at most games thus far. The former has resulted in South African police stepping into the breech to cover the games while the latter has been variously attributed to ticket brokers failing to unload their stocks, foreign supporters not making it to South Africa, or visitors misjudging the distances between various match venues. As in the case of the vuvuzela, FIFA has mostly responded to these situations with platitudes and non-committal statements. Football’s governing body knows as well as anyone that, once the quality of the matches picks up, these issues are likely to be forgotten or overlooked by football-mad supporters. They also know that these issues on the ground are of only limited interest to foreigners following the game via live broadcasts and the Internet. The vuvuzela controversy exemplifies this in an odd way. These little horns have become so controversial in large part because they affect the viewing experience for those at home. It is unfortunate that the potentially more important issues concerning compensation for event workers and ticket availability have not attracted anything close to the same degree of attention in the virtual realm. As often seems to be the case with participatory culture, individuals only see fit to participate when they believe that their interests are directly affected by the events that are occurring. As a result, we have a massive Facebook group in favor of banning the vuvuzela, but little in the way of protest or commentary concerning these other issues.

The coming weeks are likely to bring a higher caliber of play to the tournament as weaker teams are eliminated and the games grow more important. These events will likely push the vuvuzela controversy off the front page and eliminate any chance of the world casting an eye towards the larger social issues positioned just beneath the tournament’s ebullient facade. If this should occur, this writer might be forced to acknowledge that Terry Eagleton makes a fair point when he writes that football is a distraction that primarily serves the interests of capital. In the social media era, more people are engaging with the “beautiful game” in more ways than ever before. This participation is the story of the 2010 World Cup, but it won’t mean much unless fans and onlookers set aside petty concerns to engage with the more substantive  issues that lurk just beyond the fringes of the world’s largest sporting event.