Nick Browne built upon the notion of flow to suggest that “the network is basically a relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and advertiser” (74) and that the audience is active not “directly by what it wants, but through the figure of what is wanted of it.” To “read” flow as a whole for Browne is to read what he calls the “(super)text.” It is to recognize that television is not a medium of a priority in which programming is surrounded by commercials, but a medium in which commercials are surrounded by programming. Television shows thus become the connective tissue of the flow of advertisements, but are themselves really incidental to what television means within a commercial context.

But while Browne’s and to a greater extent Williams’ theories helped coalesce our field around a particular framework in these early years, there is not really an overwhelming body of flow work; indeed, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it actually deployed (please share good counterexamples in the comments!).

Perhaps because of technological convergence through DVRs and TiVo, television fragmentation, and the so-called post-network era, for many television scholars working on “important” texts – most often masculinized shows that air in primetime – flow has become passé, bygone, and moved beyond in television studies. Choosing not to engage with the (super)text and focusing only on the narrative elements of a show makes for concerning, unremarked-upon assumptions about “quality” audiences and spectatorship practices with strong implications for erasures of class and gender beyond what I can cover here.

But flow is, of course, alive and well and even, as I’ll argue, desired. Moreover, it’s not only characteristic of network broadcasting (especially in daytime), but cable and non-network spaces are themselves begging for ‘flownalyses.’ For instance, I’m an avid viewer of Logo’s #sitcomtherapy nights, which air old episodes of queer-friendly sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Roseanne, punctuated by bumpers showing gay men and couples, PSAs by gay puppets educating audiences about AIDS, and programs for queer shows with queer bodies like RuPaul’s Drag Race, all the while overlaid by Tweets, hashtags, and queer trivia.

This syndicated flow with its rich semiotics of queerness legitimates the queer readings long, though less-explicitly, tied to such shows by queer folks. I admit to becoming willfully complicit in my own exploitation as a live viewer, choosing to sit through commercials instead of popping in a DVD because I find the experience of flow pleasureful, and I long have. And I’m not alone.

Syndicating queerness, as I’m calling it, is something I’m exploring as part of a larger project and in the process of researching it, I’ve found many other instances of the derived pleasure and nostalgia of flow in the post-network, digital era online, one of which I’d like to remark upon here: nick reboot.

nick reboot is a 24/7 online live-streaming “channel” for 1990s and early 2000s Nickelodeon programming – both live action and cartoon. Fan activists (many from the so-called millenial generation) have long petitioned Nickelodeon to revive this nostalgic programming (shows like Salute Your Shorts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Rocko’s Modern Life) but every time shows have been revived, they’ve been situated within the wrong flow context, matching twenty year old programming with present-day commercial breaks. So in an effort to recreate the flow of the era, the creators of nick reboot scoured the web to assemble user-uploaded original and syndicated programming (once aired on Nick but perhaps later syndicated elsewhere) as well as commercials, station IDs, and bumpers from the era, VJing them in such a way as to create a mechanics and performance of 90s-era flow.

While DVDs and YouTube videos promise old programming, they remain scarred as edited – incomplete texts without commercials, bumpers, etc. that thus read as less televisual (the problem of the DVD archive). Fans long for flow and the (super)texts of their childhoods, finding in nick reboot pleasure from a place of nostalgia as they re-imagine and relive the subjectivities they inhabited as children viewers.

The single video stream “channel” is accompanied by a live chat room where users reminisce about the shows and advertised products in real-time, virtually recreating the communal characteristic of network television lost, some argue, in the present-day Netflixian era. What’s more, flow is illuminated in nick reboot by its somewhat random nature that seems itself unscheduled. You watch nick reboot, particularly in commercial transitions, often just to see what’s on nick reboot without the luxury of a digital guide that lists all the shows for at least seven days. Users can follow nick reboot on Twitter for a broadcast schedule or have it delivered to their inboxes but only a few hours ahead of air times – a newfangled variance of TV Guide.

TV scholars much stronger and smarter than I have long and successfully defended against the notion that television in the post-network/Hululian era is dead. To the list of the living and, indeed thriving, I add flow itself and encourage us all to challenge ourselves by keeping these “(super)texts” complete in our classrooms and our research where possible. Put down those clickers, put away your video editors, and bask in the flow of television.

Notes:
1. Not unlike the class exclusivity of Nickelodeon, nick reboot is exclusive itself requiring an invitation from one of the original members to join.

2. Scholars themselves struggle researching flow probably as off-air broadcast isn’t long protected by fair use, a problem of the limited television archive that will be a part of an upcoming TV Studies SIG workshop at SCMS.

Online, as each story from the bombing developed, web editors covered up traces of earlier (and perhaps inaccurate) versions of the events thus creating silences in a potential archive and skewing future researchers on its development. Few inaccurate reports may “make it” as important enough for archiving because of the way they were criticized by the FBI or by satirists like Jon Stewart.

Although in their own ways problematic, off-air broadcasts have been fertile places for media studies scholars hoping to make sense of an event, perspective, text, or celebrity. With the growing popularity of the “officially-licensed” archive and the death of VHS, these off-air broadcasts with commercials included are increasingly difficult to find (and may even be illegal). In other words, although we often remark on the concept of Flow, rarely do we actually perform Flow studies, largely because of a lack of access.

Today, Antenna is launching a new series, “Teach Hacks,” for our readers and writers to share their own tips and experiences using technology for research and in the classroom, a sort of “E-D-U How-To.” I’ll start this series by pointing out what I use to digitize broadcast and give you some tips on saving those files for posterity (note: fair use rules are for off-air broadcast aren’t as lenient as you think, so proceed with caution).

What You Need to Digitize and Save Broadcasts:

1.) TV Tuner: The first thing you need is a TV Tuner/Video Recording device. You will likely want a high definition (HD) device as the standard devices capture terrible quality. Because I have a Mac, I use the eyetv HD video recorder from elgato, and I love it (here’s a similar PC product).  Many such devices now also capture “game play” for those Antenna readers interested in archiving that realm. For example, Elgato has a game capture device (that works on PC or Mac) specifically suited to that purpose which can also be cleverly rigged for TV capture. Here’s a sample video of the device in action.

These devices make very large video recordings, depending upon the resolution your set-top box is set to output. HD channels on my DISH Network box output at 1080p (HD resolution), meaning that an hour’s worth of programming takes up about 8 GB of space. You then take that video raw file and, with included software, convert it/compress it down to an AVI or an MOV (or a variety of other available video formats) to make it as small as you have room for them. (VLC is a free program that will play all these formats, while Azul for the iPad will do the same for a nominal fee. If you’ve ever had a video file not play during a lecture, VLC will be your friend. It will also play volume levels by 200, 300, 400, 500 percent, so it’s especially useful for quiet clips.)

Maintaining a higher-than-necessary quality, most of my hour-long recordings will end up being about 1.8-2 GB in size. So far, I’ve used about 2 TB (terabytes) of disk space for my broadcast archive, which means I have some external hard drive needs.

2.) External Hard Drive: External hard drives and flash drives seem like convenient back-up options, however liberal estimates only give them a 6-11 year life expectancy. (!!) Many still will not last this long, particularly if you move around with them often and/or constantly plug and unplug them from your computer. Newer external hard drives like the Western Digital My Book Live work in the same way, except that they are connected directly to your WiFi network, and thus your computer’s connection to the hard drive is via “the cloud” and not a USB.

These devices also have mobile apps that allow tablets and mobile phones to also connect to your personal files instead of just computers. In other words, if you’re at a conference and your computer fails, you can borrow an iPhone an iPad or another computer and connect to your personal cloud for easy retrieval.

More secure still is something like drobo, a data storage device housing several hard drives (purchased separately) that each back each other up. So, when one hard drive fails, as they all will eventually, pop it out, pop another one into its place and all your data remains secure and uncorrupted. Here’s a geek explaining the drobo.

3.) Back-up Clouds: Finally, to make sure your new broadcast archive is as secure as possible, you need to make sure you’ve saved your files off-site, away from your server so that in case of natural disasters, fires, floods, etc., you won’t have depended entirely upon one device to save your stuff.

Many academics have used DropBox to house their records, which stores your data in a cloud (DropBox’s own server), but you may prefer a more intuitive data backup method with less space constraint. I suggest CrashPlan+. For a subscription fee, CrashPlan+ backs up your files automatically, constantly detecting changes and updates and saving as necessary. Certain CrashPlan+ subscriptions, unlike DropBox, will save an unlimited amount of data, which is good news if you plan on backing up an entire 100+ episode season of a talk show for instance. If your local server is destroyed, CrashPlan+ also offers a service of creating a new local server loaded and mailed to you with your files safe and secure, so you don’t experience this: How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted.

Professional archivists suggest saving your important data in at least two formats, and in at least two different places. By having both server-hard and cloud copies, you’ve accomplished both, protecting your files for years to come or until available software no longer supports it.

From Oz the Great and Powerful – Kansas once again represented monochromatically

A small Kansas carnival, 1905: From the four corners of the earth, acts to delight, to thrill, and to mystify. There’s a fire breather, a strong man, a stilt walker. A mammoth hot-air balloon looms in the distance and beyond that clouds promise a wicked storm. A magician cowers in his wagon after a young paralyzed girl begs him to walk again. She naively believed in his powers, as did her parents and all the good, simple-minded Kansans in attendance.

A knock on the door reveals the magician’s sometimes-love, Annie, who has come to tell him of her engagement–to see if he wants her back.

“You could do a lot worse than John Gale, he’s a good man,” Oz explains. “I’m not. I’m many things, but a good man is not one of them. See, Kansas is full of good men: church-going men that get married and raise families. Men like John Gale; men like my father, who spent his whole life tilling the dirt, just to die face down in it. I don’t want that Annie; I don’t want to be a good man. I want to be a great one.”

So begins the story of Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful, but its tale isn’t new. Everyone is trying to get out of Kansas, to get the heck out of Dodge [City, Kansas]; to get over the rainbow. And it’s no wonder, really, given what the pictures show.

Hollywood is baffled by Kansas and represents it as a simultaneously old-timey homeland as well as a sideshow of rural curiosities. Audiences watch their screens with wonder as Kansans willingly endure the plight of their harsh geography. These voyeurs know their visit to the prairie will be brief, and they’ll delight in retelling its banal but bewildering splendor: men tilling dirt just to die face down in it.

Kansas has become a carnival unto itself.

All black and white photography is abstract. Likewise, when Kansas is represented, monochromatic or not, it’s always an abstraction from an urban reality, and one saddled with disaster:

It could be something like a tornado (The Wizard of Oz, Oz the Great and Powerful, Greensburg), or a meteor shower (Superman, Man of Steel [upcoming]) that destroys your town and leaves you battling an unending parade of hybrid alien “supers”(Smallville). Maybe you’re attacked by nomadic American vampires (Near Dark), renegade Indians (Custer, Four Feather Falls), or just good old-fashioned aliens (Mars Attacks!).

If you’re lucky, you might only have to face down the occasional bandit (Gunsmoke, Winchester ’73, Dodge City, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, etc.), or mobster (Prime Cut, The Ice Harvest), or time traveler (Looper), or errant supernatural being (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Courage the Cowardly Dog).

If you’re not so lucky, you’ll be confronted with domestic homicide (In Cold Blood, Murder Ordained) the American Civil War (Dark Command, Touched by Fire: Bleeding Kansas), the Great Depression (Paper Moon), racial segregation (The Learning Tree; Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff), nuclear catastrophe (The Day After), or the subsequent post-apocalyptic world (Jericho).

But more often than not, yours will be a crisis of identity. Dorothy, Superman, Oz: As queer figures unable to assimilate, they struggled through the exceedingly mechanical, zombie-esque homogeneity of Hollywood’s Great Plains, where idle-minded Kansans are born and die without living–a spectacle so unspectacular, it’s a kind of curious queer rurality. But Hollywood’s representations of Kansas go far beyond the mere trope of the rural vs. the urban. Kansas is at once more sinister as it is more sympathetic.

In the pictures, Kansas’ story is one of Bildungsroman, where a character completes a coming-of-age moment, a transition from naiveté to maturity that often involves leaving the state in one capacity or another.

It is only in so doing that they too will learn of Kansas’ banal allure. Superman doesn’t become the Man of Steel until he leaves his small farming community to help those who really need him in Metropolis. Oz doesn’t understand the power of goodness and the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio until he crash lands in his future kingdom. And, sure, Dorothy heads back to Kansas, but does so knowing that on the other side of the rainbow is a splendid world of technicolor with yellow brick roads, giant lollipops, and a wicked witch who skywrites.

Dorothy’s unyielding pursuit to return to banality only proves Hollywood’s rule: Something’s the matter with Kansas. Its bearded ladies and conjoined twins, its dog boys and elephant men, all dressed over to appear as paeans to normativity. But their queer particularity shows at the seams, and queerer still is that they’re all willing participants in their own spectacularization. They all want to be in Kansas where they could be meteored, bombed, abducted, or tornadoed at any moment, and “isn’t that queer?!”

Wax figures at the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas, home of the creepiest Glinda ever made. Wamego also hosts Kansas’ annual Oztober Fest with special guests: the remaining munchkins.

As a gay Kansan (and I’m talkin’ tumbleweed Kansas) with a weakness for Judy Garland, few people can identify with Dorothy’s journey more than me. Given the nature of the film, I should think it would surprise some of you to hear that The Wizard of Oz is a highly cherished icon-cum-commodity for the Sunflower State. We have regarded it as a great love story to Kansas. But it’s not really, is it?

It isn’t Oz, the munchkins, the witches, or even the eccentric Emerald City dwellers that are queer to the “mass audience” of the film. Not really. The world they know is in color; it’s filled with good and evil, and often draws those lines based on appearance. The world of wonder, then–the queerness of The Wizard of Oz–was always in the telling of Kansas–it was always on this side of the rainbow. There really is no place like home!

Thank you, thank you very much,
I can’t express it any other way.
For with this awful trembling in my heart,
I just can’t find another thing to say.

I’m happy that you liked the show,
I’m grateful you liked me.
And I’m sure to you the tribute seemed quite right.
But if you knew of all the years,
Of hopes and dreams and tears
You’d know it didn’t happen overnight.
Huh, overnight!

I imagine these words whispered back to all the moving tributes from family, friends, and fans of Alex Doty, an influential scholar whose generosity exceeded any metrics of greatness and whose untimely passing will be mourned by many generations of scholars to come. These words I use because they preface a lyric with which Alex introduced himself: “I was born in a trunk at the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.” But I also use them here because they were first uttered by one of Alex’s own early inspirations, Judy Garland, in the same number in the same film, A Star is Born (1954), which also happens to be the year in which Alex was born.

Alex with friend and colleague Mary Gray who he helped lasso into participating in my Console-ing Passions panel this year.

I did not know him personally as many of you did, nor do I share the library of memories you may have of him. But I wanted to write a piece about how his life and his work has inspired my own as a young academic to demonstrate the ways in which, like such diva figures as Judy Garland, he will continue to inform and empower young queer individuals such as myself long after his or my time.

The first article I ever presented in a graduate seminar and one of the first queer theory pieces I ever read, was the first chapter of his book Making Things Perfectly Queer entitled “There’s Something Queer Here.” I found myself fervently and excitedly highlighting passages as though they’d been written especially for me and jotting them down on a legal pad so as not to lose them in the sea of other articles I was struggling to read week after week.

I come back to it often and reference enough of his other work that Alex seems to hold a consistent spot in my bibliographies. Indeed this chapter made me recall one of the first moments in which a media text informed my own struggle with sexuality and the feelings of difference I was beginning to experience as a young child raised in a rural, homophobic environment, which I wrote about later that fall:

“I can, with great clarity, remember the precise moment when everything fell into place: I sit motionless on the couch, staring at the TV, images flickering before my glazed but pensive adolescent eyes. Bewitched is on, and I’m left alone in the dark basement, sheltered and away from the homophobia and hate shouted at me all day in school. I’m in a sort of meditative state—receptive to what I’m watching, laughing on cue, performing my role as the audience but understanding only the face value. Something snaps, and I think, ‘Why should she have to hide a part of herself to fit in?’ And then there comes this single, beautiful, intimate moment. My eyes water, my nostrils flare, and I breathe out a sigh as I begin to smile. Samantha is me.”

I did not have the language at that young age to describe my experience of Bewitched as a queer reading nor did I give any other interpretation of it much more than a passing thought. I might not have understood what sexual identity meant or in what ways I was different, but something about dissolving myself into Samantha’s colorful world with her unwed, flamboyant, and powerful mother along with a parade of queer magical beings made me covet life outside her broom closet. These sorts of reading strategies–of finding or making a space for queerness on television (perhaps not strategies at all)–are not, as Alex writes, “‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”

Building on Alex’s influence, I am launched into scholarship invested in finding other rural queer individuals and relaying their stories of using the media for identity work. Drawing from a pool of other reception scholars, Alex encourages the use of ethnographic work to re-imagine the audience not within pre-established categories but rather to investigate their daily life and how they integrate media into it. Putting the “I” back in our work in feminist tradition and being reflexive of our own media practices and subjectivities, as Matt Hills argues, is useful in conveying “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments” of the communities from which we write that our own voices can help illuminate. These are the stakes involved in our research, and as Alex himself writes defending his use of the word queer, “I want to recapture and reassert a militant sense of difference [and] suggest that within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.”

Alexander Doty presented on what he called the "Beefcake Paradigm" at Console-ing Passions 2012. He noticed a challenging of dominant understandings of narcissism as feminine, and that men in such shows as Spartacus, Jersey Shore, and Ultimate Fighting Championship were attempting to assert conventional masculinity while allowing themselves and others to admire men's bodies, often themselves engaging in queer behavior.

My future in research will be difficult as it cannot rely on essentializing or over-theorized assumptions about audiences and does not have many precedents from which to be informed. I am often subject to a feeling of “imposter syndrome” and constantly worry that I will be “found out” as a fraud. In our email exchanges, however, Alex’s magnanimous generosity with me by showing interest in my work has and will continue to make me feel as though I’m on the right track. Found in the lyrics that open this post, which I imagine to be true of Alex’s life, success comes from years of hopes and dreams and tears, “it didn’t happen overnight,” and as I move forward, I like to think I’ll remember and be encouraged by the words that close his song: “This is it kid, sing!”

Anderson in a 2008 issue of The Advocate I also contributed to!

Anderson Cooper’s “outing” this week beautifully illustrates something I have been writing about for a while: the imperative of coming out. The paradox of homosexuality is and has been that one must at once not be gay while at the same time publicly (confessing/admitting/declaring) that (s)he is. But what does that mean, exactly? If the presumption is that we are straight until we say otherwise, then why are the most common reactions to Anderson’s outing, “We already knew!” or “It’s about time!” Hollywood legend might describe the alleged homosexuality of figures like Agnes Moorehead or James Dean as an “open secret”–something about which to argue at pretentious dinner parties. But I bracket “outing” with quotations marks because if everybody already knew Anderson was gay, why was he constantly hounded to declare it? And why aren’t people satisfied with his declaration?

I’ll admit some guilt here; as an Oprah scholar, I’ve long thought Anderson’s semi-successful talk show suffered by his Donahue-esque journalistic fourth wall, something Oprah deflated by making herself always already one of her own guests. I draw this parallel because soon after his “outing,” Star Jones quite ickily suggested on The Today Show that Anderson outed himself to boost his ratings just like when Oprah admitted she used crack, got pregnant as a teenager, and considered suicide.

“I’m a little bit of a cynic; you know I’ve been in daytime television a long time…. There are times that you generate information for ratings.” Shame on you, Star Jones.

But why didn’t Anderson come out on his talk show, instead choosing to write a letter to Daily Beast? Will that letter be good enough, or will he be expected now to discuss it on television? And, indeed, can he discuss it without the kind of appalling accusations constantly volleyed in the news? That afternoon, Anderson, his syndicated talk show, was a rerun (it’s on hiatus) and he was absent from his late night news program, Anderson 360. If he came out to help his ratings, he sure has bad timing.

Our media culture often portrays coming out as this great moment of personal achievement–a bourgeoisie notion of psychological wholeness or self-actualization after which (and only after which) we can become our true, complete selves. This trope is then used to justify our demand that celebrities (and by extension our culture of celebrity mimics) come out of the closet “for their own good.” Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, people (like Oprah) often say, ignoring the six or so years after her outing that she was out of work and out of money. We can throw all kinds of Foucault at this: although he never specifically addressed coming out as we understand it today, confession for Foucault functions not only as a mechanism of articulating but also making truth as well as establishing one’s own credibility and authenticity. In other words, the lie we tell ourselves now is that we come out for ourselves, when in reality, we’re mostly supplying the demand.

Anderson's sensible closet (photo parody).

The coming out imperative comes from an old association between gayness and deception, dating back at least as far as McCarthy and the 1950s (the Lavender Scare) when homosexuals were indicted as deceptive individuals prone to blackmail. After gay activists in the ’60s and ’70s made the coming out process (as a political tool to combat invisibility) relatively commonplace, talk shows began quietly suggesting openness which ultimately became a demand when AIDS and HIV made homosexuality a “dangerous deception” for unsuspecting heterosexuals (see Gamson, Freaks Talk Back). We might say we’re coming out to our friends and family just for ourselves, but if that were the case, I might ask why the repeating line “they deserved to know the truth” is such a staple in coming out stories.

In her remarkably articulate response to Anderson’s outing, “fruit fly” Kathy Griffin deftly discusses the continuing dangers of outness: “[D]espite the very real, the very necessary, and the very life-changing progress we have made in this country … America–the world–is not fully represented by Chelsea in New York City … [it] is, in larger part, small towns like … Wichita, Kan., where I was [asked], ‘Kathy, how do you deal with so many goddamned fags?'” Foucault writes that our society believes confession “exonerates, redeems, and purifies … unburdens [us] of [our] wrongs, liberates [us], and promises [us] salvation.” But none of those attributes are particularly true of many coming out narratives in certain areas of the country (or the world) where outness can and does lead to greater isolation, bullying, suicide, or homicide.

In his letter, Anderson writes: “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something — something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed, or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true…. The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”

Anderson is an astute television personality–he could have exploited his outing for ratings, and who knows, maybe he will discuss it openly when his show re-premieres in Nate Berkus’ former studio this fall. But instead of folding to and perpetuating the cultural myth that public confession psychologically liberates us, Anderson decided to address his sexuality in a well-crafted letter that demonstrates a new, old reason for coming out: to break down invisibility. I applaud him for it.

As a culture we must be more sensitive of our demands and our expectations (of both our celebrities as well as our friends), for the realities of queer individuals all across the world are different–and just because someone isn’t out to you or your family, doesn’t mean they are living their life in a closet.