Post by Bill Kirkpatrick, Denison University

Here’s an under-appreciated fact: Michele Hilmes is a talented singer, as in “sings in public and people want to listen” talented.

I mention that because the many encomia to Hilmes in the wake of her retirement from teaching are likely to focus on her academic accomplishments, so it’s nice to inject some tidbits about the person. But the real reason is because the metaphor of the voice is just too irresistible when discussing the leading figure in Radio Studies of the past two decades: she is someone who gave voice to the discipline, who championed its many voicings. In that way, Hilmes’ voice and legacy resound far beyond her own work, and well beyond Radio Studies itself.

Donald Hambrick and Ming-Jer Chen argue that successful new academic disciplines emerge when scholars build “admittance-seeking social movements.” In contrast to Kuhnian revolutions or divisive confrontations with the disciplinary mainstream, the admittance-seeking movement seeks to carve out a place for new scholarship within an existing area of study. A major part of Hilmes’ importance has been her success in persuading Media and Cultural Studies to recognize the value of Radio Studies and Sound Studies in the face of its original indifference or even resistance.

For an admittance-seeking movement to thrive, say Hambrick and Chen, three elements are needed: differentiation, mobilization, and legitimacy-building. First, “it needs to differentiate itself from other existing fields, making claims about how a class of important problems cannot be solved by these status quo entities.” Hilmes, as a cultural historian who thinks as much about media institutions, economics, and policy as she does about the social, cultural, and political roles of texts, has been able to make a strong case for differentiation, showing her colleagues how the study of radio contributes to important questions in the field.

She makes the case for radio scholarship along multiple axes: the interconnectedness of radio and film, the indebtedness of television practices and texts to radio’s precedents, the centrality of radio to questions of cultural politics and the public sphere, the transmedial problem of sound, and many more. The breadth of her work reflects, first and foremost, an extraordinarily creative mind that can’t help but identify interesting connections; along the way, however, and as a byproduct of that breadth, Hilmes brings radio studies into a range of other conversations, allowing scholars of film, television, policy, gender, nationalism, and many other subjects to see the significance of radio to the questions they are interested in.

Only Connect, Fourth Edition (Cengage Learning, 2013)

The second of Hambrick and Chen’s elements is the mobilization of resources, by which they mean building the infrastructure and social relationships that enable like-minded scholars to find and support each other, define the questions and objects of the field, share their work, and form a disciplinary identity. In this regard, it is no surprise that Hilmes was so drawn to E. M. Forster’s phrase “only connect” that she named a book after it (Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States). She’s a connector of the first order; for example, approaching her at a conference is always tantamount to getting an introduction to someone else in the field.  Among radio scholars, her generous mentoring and tireless encouragement of junior scholars is, without exaggeration, legendary.

But beyond being supportive at an interpersonal level, Hilmes has accomplished a lot of concrete, practical field-building for Radio Studies. Among the initiatives that owe a substantial portion of their success to Michele include the biannual Transnational Radio Conference, Radio Journal, the North American Radio Studies Network, and the expansion of Sound Studies within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). These initiatives brought together radio researchers from around the globe and helped them see themselves engaged in a common scholarly enterprise.

Teaching is equally critical to sustaining a discipline, and Hilmes contributed there, too: recognizing that we needed a textbook that did justice to radio within the history of broadcasting, and that she was in a position to write one, she did. She even deserves credit for some things that I’m happy to put on my own CV, like co-founding the SCMS Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group with Alex Russo: that was basically Michele’s idea. In other words, if Radio Studies is more vibrant than ever, it is because Hilmes, not alone but foremost, has mobilized resources and organized people in order to establish the enabling conditions for the field to emerge and expand.

“In Focus: Sound Studies” from Cinema Journal 48.1, Fall 2008; edited by Michele Hilmes.

Hambrick and Chen’s third element in field-building is: the new discipline must be taken seriously: “[T]he aspiring community must build legitimacy in the eyes of the academic establishment, by intellectual persuasion.” Hilmes’ work speaks for itself, of course, as does the legitimacy of radio scholarship through the Hilmesian work of her graduate students, colleagues, and respected scholars across Media and Cultural Studies. But she has also engaged in more active persuading: by editing an “In Focus” on Sound Studies in Cinema Journal, making the case for Radio Studies in a range of venues as keynote speaker or invited panelist, or simply asking the “What about radio?” question as an audience member at conferences.

If the above reads as overly biographical, so simply overly fannish, I hope it nonetheless also illustrates for scholars in emerging fields what it takes to build and give voice to a discipline. Hilmes’ example shows that great scholarship is important, but it is not enough: new areas of study emerge primarily through the concrete labor, so different from the research we’re trained in, of making the case for new kinds of scholarship and organizing the people and resources to give it wings. Because she has been a great scholar and done that kind of work, Michele Hilmes can be assured that her legacy is not just on the library shelf; it is reflected in the journals, the listservs, the conferences, and above all the people who, collectively, are Radio Studies.

Radio scholars–and I include myself–tend to have a love-hate relationship with their marginalization within cinema and media studies, but that identity is fortunately becoming harder to sustain. This year, instead, I felt a palpable confidence among radio scholars that hasn’t been there in years past. That might be because of the Serial-driven “year of podcasting,” which helped aural media appear more relevant to a wider range of scholars; the continuing strength of the broader field of sound studies doesn’t hurt either.

But most of the credit should go to the hard work of field-building: the conferences and list-servs; the Radio Studies scholarly interest group and the Radio Preservation Task Force; the soon-to-be resurgent Radio Journal; folks like Andrew Bottomley here at Antenna and Brian Fauteux and Jennifer Waits over at Radio Survivor working tirelessly to keep the voices of radio scholars included in the broader media studies conversation; even the growing cohort of young (and decreasingly young) radio scholars finding professional success (however defined for them).

I wasn’t able to attend all the radio-themed papers and panels this year, but that’s part of the point: a few years ago I could; this year, no one could. (Before anyone reads that as a veiled critique of the conference program, in which a couple of radio-heavy panels were scheduled concurrently, please listen to my interview with SCMS scheduler extraordinaire Bruce Brassell and know that I have only respect and admiration for the folks who put the conference together.) Nonetheless, based on my subjective sampling, it appears that many of the goals that we have for radio studies are clearly being met:

• Quantitatively, the number of radio-themed panels (and the audiences for those panels) continues to grow
• Papers that consider radio are increasingly found on mixed-media panels
• The “donut hole” of scholarship on 1960s-1990s-era radio, which seemed so self-evident in years past, is slowly closing
• Radio scholars are increasingly engaging the kinds of broader disciplinary conversations that help move the field beyond justification to exploration

Of course, some goals remain on the horizon for us to continue working toward. For example, I had hoped that the Montreal location might bring more international scholars to the conference, but clearly we still have a lot of work to do if we want expand the conversation significantly beyond North America. There are logistic, linguistic, and disciplinary challenges to overcome, but that must remain a top priority.

The necessity of such work notwithstanding, the 2015 conference was clearly a moment of consolidation and advancement. As I write this on a plane out of Montreal, it is hard not to feel optimistic about the state of radio studies, within both SCMS and the broader field of film and media studies.

Why is this important to non-radio scholars? For one, we’re on ur panels, expandin ur themez. While there are still a fair number of stand-alone radio panels this year, SCMS in Chicago will be characterized by a greater number of panels on which radio is included alongside other media, such as Veronica Zavala’s paper on Spanish-language radio on a panel about Latina/o identity, or Chie Niita’s radio-themed paper on a panel about Japanese cinema. It will be as healthy for film scholars to hear a radio perspective on their panel topic as it will be for radio scholars to be more fully included in some of the broader transmedia scholarly conversations going on at the conference.

Second, it is becoming increasingly clear that what non-radio scholars think of as radio is probably wrong. Maybe radio studies is getting a little imperialistic, but one can now reasonably claim to be studying radio not just when the attention is on terrestrial radio, but also satellite radio, Spotify, PRX, Third Coast, Soundcloud, large swaths of YouTube, and much, much more. As with other media scholars, the object of study is constantly shifting and represents, even more than it ever did, structures and practices extending far beyond a specific technology or technologies. The distinction between a radio scholar and a new media scholar is, at this point, mostly just a sloppy shorthand. Experiments like this one demonstrate the power of refusing such distinctions.

This leads to the third reason this is important: the possibility that the days of broadcast history as a structuring other of “new media” are finally coming to an end. At the risk of further reifying the highly misleading “radio = history” trope that I just spent two paragraphs refuting, it is worth pointing out the ways in which a specialization in media history can be a tough gig these days. The number of jobs for broadcast historians this year, for example, is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by job calls for new media or digital technology scholars. This isn’t merely departments wanting to keep up with the latest trends but in some ways is constitutive of divisions within the field itself. As a friend pointed out, there is a risk of relying on the otherness of old media to help define the newness of new media, a kind of exaggeration of  how different the present is from the past. In that sense, jobs, publications, funding, and more can come to depend on artificial temporal distinctions that map all too neatly (and problematically) onto technological forms.

As radio studies expands and becomes normalized within media studies, this dynamic increasingly loses force—and as that happens, the field as a whole gets stronger. It is with some optimism, then, that we can say the solidity of radio studies at SCMS this year portends a healthy decline in scholarly digital exceptionalism in the coming years. In the spirit of promoting that outcome, I’ll close with a public service announcement—a quick recap of where you are sure to catch radio scholarship and conversations next week:

Wed., 3/6, 10:00 (A12): Veronica Zavala on Spanish-language radio in the U.S.
Wed., 3/6, 4:00 (D12): Sindhu Zagoren on the struggle for airspace in early radio
Thu., 3/7, 11:00 (F22): Panel on Norman Corwin and transmedia authorship (papers by Jacob Smith, Mary Ann Watson, Shawn VanCour, and Alexander Russo; Neil Verma chairing)
Fri., 3/8, 9:00 (J21): Panel on gender and broadcasting (papers by Jennifer Wang, Kathryn Fuller‐Seeley, Catherine Martin, and Joanne Morreale)
Fri., 3/8, 12:15 (K14): Panel on the radio archive (papers by Katherine McLeod, Melissa Dinsman, and Ian Whittington; Debra Rae Cohen responding)
Fri., 3/8, 2:15 (L11): Chie Niita on Japanese cinema and radio
Fri., 3/8, 4:15: Neil Verma’s “Best First Book“ award
Sat., 3/9, 9:00 (M23): Panel on radio industries with Eleanor Patterson, Brian Fauteux, Jason Loviglio, Jeremy Morris, Elena Razlogova, and Alexander Russo
Sat., 3/9, 11:00 (N4): Panel on radio in transition (papers by Kyle Barnett, Cynthia Meyers, and Andrew Bottomley; Kathy Fuller‐Seeley responding)
Sat., 3/9, 1:00 (O14): Bill Kirkpatrick on disability and radio
Sat., 3/9, 3:00 (P18): Panel on economies in media industries (papers by Josh Shepperd, Colin Burnett, James Lastra, and Douglas Gomery; Brett Gary chairing)
Sat., 3/9, 5:00 (Q9): Isabel Huacuja Alonso on All-India Radio
Sat., 3/9, 5:00 (Q11): Kyoko Omori on radio satire in occupied Japan
Sun. 3/10, 9:00: Radio Studies SIG meeting (featuring Johanna Zorn of The Third Coast International Audio Festival)

Aca-Media (officially:  “Cinema Journal Presents Aca-Media”) is a new monthly podcast covering current media studies scholarship, issues in the media industries, questions in pedagogy and professional development, and events in the world of media studies. Believe it or not, nothing quite like that existed yet.  The terrific (and soon to be late great) Critical Lede podcast had become an invaluable way to keep up on communication scholarship, but its strong focus on rhetoric made it always slightly tangential to the concerns of film and media scholars.  Industry-themed podcasts like The Business and Tech News Today are good for news and exploration of current issues, but don’t have the specific academic perspective that Aca-Media seeks to offer; ditto the “media critics” type podcasts like my new favorite, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour.  Finally, one wants to like Toby Miller’s Cultural Studies podcast, but his (admirable) commitment to a transgressive aesthetics usually makes the show, for me at least, unlistenable.

That left a hole in the podcast universe—if I’ve missed a good one, please let me know in the comments—at the same time that CJ’s new editor, Will Brooker, took over with the goal not necessarily of exploding the traditional limitations of print-based scholarly publishing but certainly of finding new ways to overcome them.  The best word here is remediation, in both senses: correcting a deficiency and transporting content across media.

Cinema Journal will continue in its venerated form, but Brooker’s aim is to have it anchor an array of non-print outlets for media-related scholarly discussion:  online extensions of the journal, of course, but also blogs including this one, hybrid blog/magazine platforms like Flow, experiments in publishing like In Media Res, and now the Aca-Media podcast.  The formality and officialness of such relationships will vary from case to case, but the goal is a relatively coherent network of academically minded media studies scholarship: a “CJ-verse,” as Brooker puts it in our first episode.

What is remarkable to me is how many of the elements of a media studies aca-sphere are already in place and working well—if you peer through the technological superstrate, you find a vibrant network of media scholars who are doing qualitative, critical, and culturally minded film and media studies, and who are already well connected to each other through a range of listservs, Twitter, conferences like SCMS, Facebook pages like “Teaching Media,” etc.  It is tremendously exciting to see the energy and the dynamism of this space, and if there is perhaps a danger in such a community becoming too insular, the advantage is a lively conversation that is able to remain legible even as it multiplies and proliferates and remediates.

Aca-Media’s role in this conversation, as it is emerging in these early days, is to speak to the needs of film and media scholars across their professional lives:  keeping up with scholarship and currents in the media industries, exploring issues in pedagogy and professional development, and providing an outlet for discussion of events affecting the community (for example our coverage of the tribute to the late Alexander Doty in our first episode).  The producers (Christine Becker, Michael Kackman, Todd Thompson, and me) are striving towards professionalism (relative amateurs though we may be at this point—I’ve already had to republish episode 1 on the iTunes feed due to a rookie mistake), but we also want the podcast to be inclusive and community-oriented with correspondents, vox populi segments, and guest hosts.  (In fact, click here to find out how you can participate as early as episode 2.)

We also aim to augment Cinema Journal with those qualities that radio is especially good at providing: the immediacy of the human voice, the personality of spoken conversation, the “intimate publicness” of individualized address to a community of scholars that, we hope, will embrace this venture.

Photo credit: Houston Press

In the media policy wars of the early 2000s, when the Michael Powell-led FCC was hell-bent on eviscerating ownership restrictions, one corporate villain stood out for its egregiousness: Clear Channel Communications (Hissssss).

And deservedly so: as Exhibit A for the dangers of conglomeration run amok, Clear Channel and its 1,200 stations hit a kind of media-monopoly trifecta, bulldozing the values of diversity, localism, and market competition. They bought up all the stations they could in a given market, making sure to hit the maximum number of demographic niches, then programmed them centrally (and unimaginatively) from some computerized studio located in who knows where.

“Thank god,” both music lovers and radio fans said frequently during the Bush II years, “for college radio.”

Well, don’t look now, but guess who just went to bed with Clear Channel: college radio. Clear Channel – destroyer of adventurous playlists, scourge of the live local DJ – has now signed up more than a dozen top college stations for its iHeartRadio distribution service, including such esteemed stations as Radio DePaul, Seton Hall’s WSOU, and the terrific station at my own college, WDUB at Denison. Public stations are available through iHeartRadio too, such as New York’s WNYC, and more are on the way.

Clear Channel is bringing these local stations to the mobile space, competing with satellite radio’s national programming by offering a plethora of interesting local stations over cellular networks. Whereas Sirius XM often replicates the narrow market segmentation and tightly controlled playlists perfected by terrestrial broadcasters like, well, Clear Channel, iHeartRadio counter-programs them with “GOFR”:  good old-fashioned radio, with real DJs in real local studios producing real local programming. The only difference is that the GOFR is arriving through your cell phone instead of your radio antenna.

To be clear: exploitation is still Clear Channel’s game. The company sells ads against these college radio streams, and none of that revenue is going back to the students or their institutions. In other words, the great enemy of radio localism has now found a way to co-opt localism, using these quirky local stations to add value to its national offerings but offering no revenue-sharing or other financial support in return.

Although one station manager I spoke with welcomed the potential for new listeners and greater exposure that will come from partnering with iHeartRadio, the material benefit to participating college stations will be minimal at best. Maybe alumni in Boston or Boise will tune in and, somewhere down the line, write a slightly larger check to their alma mater, but that’s about it.

In the meantime, the economic and policy supports for independent radio in the U.S. remain threatened, and ever more colleges and universities are selling off their radio stations. In fact, one of the college stations picked up by iHeartRadio, Rice’s KTRU, had its transmitter sold out from under it last year by the university; it has since streamed online and leased the local Pacifica affiliate’s HD radio capacity, which few can receive. In that specific case, distribution through Clear Channel seems like an improvement, but it is difficult to see how this deal does anything to preserve college radio nationally over the long term.

Be that as it may, the deal is further evidence that “radio” is undergoing more change, innovation, and excitement (for better and worse) than perhaps at any time since the 1920s.  All that talk of “convergence” and “revolution” in visual media?  As is often the case, it’s nothing compared to radio, which currently boasts more new platforms, technologies, business models, and programming forms than TV can shake a stick at.

Many people have a tendency to imagine, as they did in the 1950s, that radio is a dying form.  It’s easy to do: none of my students seem to listen to much traditional, over-the-air radio, and if it weren’t for NPR, neither would most of the adults I know. But if Arbitron’s latest survey can be believed, more than 93% of Americans age 12 and above still listen to some radio each week, and in some demographic segments (e.g. Hispanics) the radio market is positively booming as a growth industry.

In terms of infrastructure, you now have your choice of satellite, analog terrestrial, digital terrestrial, and internet distribution offering you local and national programming.  Sitting in your car, you can direct your own programming (e.g. Spotify and Pandora), choose your genre (Sirius XM and most terrestrial radio), listen to local stations from all over the country (iHeartRadio), or just plug in your phone or iPod and listen to your podcasts or your own music library.

We’re also seeing the effect on programming, such as the experimentation we’re seeing in the podcast space and innovative uses of audio in shows like 99% Invisible and Radiolab, and alternative business models such as “cottage networks” like TWiT and success stories like Jesse Thorn’s “Maximum Fun” podcast-based empire.

So while we continue to keep a wary eye on Clear Channel and the other behemoths in the radio industry, let’s also admit that, compared to a decade ago, it’s not the worst time to be a radio listener—or for that matter, a radio scholar.  I don’t heart iHeartRadio, but I still heart radio.

So what was it like to watch Dirty Dancing two decades after most everyone I know?  Well, with a title like that, it was bound to either be more dirty or less dirty than I expected–turns out it was slightly more dirty, which is to say that I hadn’t quite anticipated the pelvic grinding of the titular dancing nor the constant beefcake of a shirtless Patrick Swayze. For what it’s worth, I now understand the outpouring of affection at Swayze’s death, the strangely sexualized nostalgia for someone I had always dismissed as an inoffensive B-lister.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the explicit class struggle that saturated the film, and it made me realize again how much of 1980s cinema overtly thematized class conflict and/or class mobility.  Was it that, in the early days of neoliberal ascendancy, Hollywood still had the stomach to talk frankly about class? I won’t provide the whole long list of ’80s movies in this category, from 9 to 5 to Trading Places to Pretty Woman, but is it cultural near-sightedness to think that the film industry has mostly dropped the Reagan-era class consciousness?

Be that as it may, in this iteration, the cultural work of the film is to disarticulate working-class masculinity from the threat of moral subversion.  Baby may be the protagonist, but Johnny Castle is the hero, and his achievement is to convince the bourgeoisie that he’s no less moral than the Ivy League kid.  This lesson both never goes out of style and yet has curiously waned, such that Johnny as a character–the blue-collar man of gritty integrity and perfect pectorals–now looks and feels as dated as the Springsteen of Born in the USA.  (I love Castle’s name, by the way: evoking both the dancing legends Vernon and Irene Castle and the markers of aristocracy that Johnny will never enjoy.)

When the famous line finally appeared, I was disappointed that Johnny, not Baby, actually delivered it; he, not she, ensures that Baby will remain uncornered when all is said and done.  After everything she had gone through to claim her own destiny, validate her own judgment, and pursue her own pleasures in the film, it felt wrong that she didn’t get to formally declare her own independence. Thus the one moment I had been anticipating was a bit of a letdown.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the scenes (implausible, but so what?) of Baby turning into a passable dancer in less than a week.  And though it doesn’t take much to make me cry in movies, I teared up when she nailed the lift at the end.  Another highlight: Jerry Orbach’s subtle performance as a basically good-hearted dad trying to make sense of a-changin’ times.  Overall the movie holds up as an emotionally satisfying experience.

What doesn’t hold up is the atrocious decision to adulterate that wonderful early ’60s soundtrack with the lamest of ’80s pop. Why the hell is Eric Carmen, an artist unfit to mop up Otis Redding’s flop sweat, imposing himself on my Camelot-era resort?  And I don’t care that  “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” won, appallingly, both an Oscar and a Grammy–it’s a boring song that has no business being in the same multiplex, much less the same film, as the Ronettes (and I say that as a Jennifer Warnes fan).

Cringeworthy musical cues aside, the film retains its ability to please, and Jennifer Grey holds her own against the star power–I see it now–of Swayze.  And at a time when even the so-called liberals in power refuse to launch a serious critique of class privilege–and the prospects for the Johnny Castles of the world have only continued to decline–the film’s blunt treatment of social inequality was refreshing. Finally, I hope there will always be a place in our culture for films that celebrate dancing: as something joyful, as something liberating, and as something always at least a little bit dirty.

But the intriguing part of this weaker ACTA is:  we’re not exactly sure whom to thank. Canadian professor Michael Geist, tenacious as a wasp in keeping public pressure on negotiators?  The less gung-ho countries who, tired of being Yank-ed around (or perhaps just not seeing what was in it for them), insisted on scaling back the agreement’s ambitions? Maybe the U.S. Trade Representative blundered by pursuing the most undemocratic path available; as James Love suggested, the USTR’s circumvention of Congress may have cost ACTA important legislative buy-in. Or perhaps we should thank “You”—the Time magazine Person-of-the-Year You—for all Your watchfulness and activism.

But no matter to which address we should gratefully ship the Chivas, the ACTA retreat is indicative of a larger crisis in how the policy sphere works today. Specifically: we have no idea how the policy sphere works today.

Once upon a time, it was possible to imagine that we understood policymaking.  There was an official policy sphere comprised of the state (in the U.S., Congress, the FCC, etc.), business, and the public (either public interest groups or individual citizens making their wishes and displeasures known).  Policy emerged from these players working out differences using the (unequal) power at their disposal. To effect policy change was to work through established channels of regulatory authority.

It was never as tidy as that, of course, but the fact remains that today, the legible official policy sphere has been blown all to hell through a combination of new players, differently empowered old players, new technologies for policy, and new technologies of policy.

We also have, importantly, new ignorances. With previous technologies, policymakers may not have understood the technical details but they could usually grasp the basics of the questions they were grappling with, and even some of the implications of those questions.

Today, not so much.  Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” became a sensation because it was the perfect metaphor for the profound ignorance driving policy today.  The recent Ninth Circuit opinion in Vernor v. Autodesk reaffirms that our policymakers—in this case, judges—are dangerously ignorant of fundamental technological and even legal distinctions. In the other direction, ACTA demonstrates the ignorance of negotiators who, incredibly, believed they could hammer out their agreement in absolute secrecy in this day and age.

But we need to acknowledge our own ignorance of policymaking power as well.  Instead of imagining that we still understand the policy sphere, we need new models, new metaphors for contemporary policymaking. Our old conception of a legible policy sphere won’t cut it anymore.

Some contenders:

The Fraserized Policy Sphere:  Remember how Habermas theorized a unified public sphere for democratic deliberation, and then Nancy Fraser pointed out the existence of subaltern counterpublics?  Maybe that’s what happened to policy: we need to contend with a proliferation of new (or newly visible) subaltern policymaking bodies, from local school boards getting into media regulation, to programmers building policy into their products (“code is law” and all that), to spammers driving policy from the bottom up.

The Networked Policy Sphere:  Borrowing from Yochai Benkler’s own reworking of Habermas, perhaps the better model analyzes networks and nodes of policymaking authority.  Like the Fraserized Policy Sphere but more complex and webby.

The Pains of Policy Stretch:  As discussed by Danny Kimball at the recent Flow Conference, we’re using legacy policy formulated for one set of technologies to govern a new set of technologies, and the resulting legal and regulatory contortions are dislocating a lot of joints.  Maybe we need new regulatory calisthenics to maintain policy fitness, to overextend a metaphor.

The “Spinning Pool Table” Model:  The added complexities of distributed power and technological multiplicity has led to an explosion of unintended consequences, and no one understands where the billiard balls are going, or even where the pockets are.  This is the case in the wrong-wrong-stupid-wrong decision in Vernor, which in the most dramatic interpretation just separated legal transfer from ownership.  That’s what we call a scratch.  How might we begin to establish a new physics of policy so that we can at least regain our ability to estimate the consequences of our policy shots?

I could go on, but the point is that, even if we figure out what really happened to ACTA, we’re left in a state of profound confusion about the range of forces at work in policymaking today.  May those working for the public interest be the first ones to figure it out.

[The photo above is modified from an original by Paul Goyette, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.]

The paragon of this model is Leo Laporte’s TWiT network (named for its flagship program This Week in Tech), which takes a basic area (new media) and spins out variations including This Week in Law (tech news from a legal perspective), This Week in Fun (tech-related human interest stories) and MacBreak Weekly (Mac news).  From his cottage in Petaluma, Laporte produces programming for around $800 an hour, compared to minimum $10,000 for cable news networks, enabling profits with just one or two sponsors (paying higher CPMs than most “real” television could ever charge).

As a future for network television, this model has obvious limits.  TWiT, TechCrunch, Revision3 and similar operations won’t be doing scripted or reality television anytime soon:  it’s mostly commentary, interviews, and news (e.g. CNET TV, which leverages the newsgathering resources of CNET News).

Nonetheless, some distinctive features of the cottage network model make it interesting, such as:

• The apotheosis of simulcasting:  Most of TWiT’s or CNET’s shows work equally well in audio as video, allowing them to exploit a range of distribution methods, technologies, and audience preferences.  This isn’t a 1950s network trying to overcome legacy hardware (i.e. radio); it’s a 2010 network practicing hardware agnosticism.  (Thanks in part to Audible.com‘s advertising strategy, audio is also where a lot of the money currently is, just as radio financed the transition to television.)
• The fully-integrated audience:  Because most shows are streamed live, audience discussion isn’t just a post hoc backchannel–the Chat Room is a fully developed character, showing up at important moments to supply information, move discussion forward, or provide comic relief.  “The chat room will know,” say hosts when unsure of a fact, and sure enough, the Chat Room always does.  Hosts read the audience’s wittiest jokes and smartest comments in real time, and use the Chat Room’s questions to monitor their clarity.  Lost fans—heck, Talk of the Nation fans—can only dream of being so important to the moment of production.
• The high-tech videolow: Cottage networks boast of their distance from older media:  techno-mammals running circles around TV dinosaurs.  It’s an old trope, of course, which makes it even curiouser that it is invoked so often.  You won’t listen long to the TWiT network before Laporte tweaks his slow and greedy former bosses at TechTV.  Similarly, The Sound of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn, a talented interviewer who parlayed his college radio show into a cottage mini-network, frequently mocks (and thereby highlights) his lowly position in the mediascape. More is at stake here, obviously, than pride; in a reputation economy, chastising big media firms that “don’t get it” helps establish credibility and independence.  Thus Skype becomes another character on these shows: the frequent technical difficulties are a charming return to the “Please Stand By” days of early television, but also underwrite claims to “videolow” through which technological elites position themselves as outsider-underdogs.
• The tech-personality ecosystem:  Remember those ads for the WB—Dawson dancing with Felicity, Angel flirting with Prue? Cottage networks instantiate that fantasy by promiscuously mixing personalities across a spectrum of old and new media. For example, one of MacBreak Weekly’s most popular guests, Merlin Mann, is also a blogger, podcaster, and Twitter superstar; Xeni Jardin (of über-blog Boing Boing) is an occasional guest on the TWiT network as well as a mainstream radio and television personality; geek goddess Molly Wood, aside from her regular gigs on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud and (the just cancelled) Gadgettes, frequently shows up on TWiT; and so on.  The result is a self-reinforcing star system supported by the multiplier effects of a self-reinforcing media system, one (adjusted for scale, natch) that even the TV-Hollywood nexus should envy.

I don’t know whether this model is currently just a geek phenomenon, but there is little doubt it will spread, demonstrating the power of leveraging social networks, tapping into personality ecosystems, exploiting different revenue streams, and knowing one’s audience well.  It’s Yochai Benkler’s “networked information economy” finally come to television production.

(Photo Credit:  Leo Laporte;  released under a Creative Commons License – CC BY-NC-SA)

With those words, Pam Wilson captured the urgency of the Fiske Matters conference: Over two days in Madison, Wisc., some sixty speakers and attendees reasserted John Fiske’s still powerful, still relevant ideas for a field in danger of losing them. Among the diagnoses:  Fiske’s examples are now dated, making it challenging to teach his books; the cheap caricature of Fiske as a naïve populist Pollyanna continues to function as a convenient straw man; the new media landscape invites revision of Fiske’s analyses.

But as several people noted, theory is an ongoing dialogue, and the conference demonstrated the value of staying engaged with Fiske’s ideas. Speaker after speaker showed how Fiske’s productive and provocative theories continue to illuminate our current cultural moment and media landscape.  Presenters drew on Media Matters and Power Plays to understand racial politics in the age of Obama and the imperializing populism of the Tea Party movement, or showed how Fiskean approaches to technostruggles, active audiences, and pleasure allow us to analyze power and participation in a range of media forms and practices, including the internet, video games, satellite technology, scrapbooking, poetry, and even—in Fiske’s own keynote address—17^th-century furniture.  This short report can’t capture the breadth and quality of the contributions, but I’ll put my favorite moments in the comments (and hope others will too), and the Twitter feed provides snapshots of how presenters mined the richness of Fiske’s oeuvre.

A modest subtext of vindication also characterized the weekend:  although Fiske has been pilloried and ridiculed, the last ten years have proved him mostly right and often prescient. Henry Jenkins’ keynote, for example, coolly and effortlessly showed Fiske’s theories of active audiences demonstrably borne out in online activism and pop-cultural participatory politics today.  Anyone tempted to mock Fiske along the lines of “Listening to Madonna = liberation ha ha” must contend with Jenkins’ wealth of examples in which the skills, literacies, and pleasures of fandom are deployed for political action.  At the same time, Jenkins showed how Fiske’s approach could be productively updated, e.g. by replacing “resistance,” appropriate to the industrial information economy, with “participation,” which better describes cultural politics in a read-write age.

Fiske himself, despite claiming to have done no theoretical thinking for ten years, continued to offer new ideas and challenges for the field.  An hour into the conference he casually tossed off the insight that norms, which used to be produced at the centers of categories, are now emerging at the margins.  He also suggested that the most interesting problem for this generation is the “technologization of the inner self” through social media, a phrase that should immediately enter the literature (and our classrooms).  It was a delight to see Fiske still producing such generative ideas.

Part 2:  “I am John Fiske”

The conference celebrated not just Fiske’s ideas, but also Fiske the teacher, mentor, and colleague.  There was an “Old Home Week” quality to the weekend, a reunion of friends drawn back to Madison by their deep respect for Fiske (an indisputably great teacher) and the intellectual community he fostered. His students carry his instructional style and philosophy into universities around the world, leading Steve Classen (with many nodding in agreement) to declare “I am John Fiske.” That might sound cultish if you weren’t there, but it simply speaks to Fiske’s students’ attempt to imitate his pedagogical example: clearly explaining difficult concepts, remaining gracious to opponents, and fostering a climate of “serious fun.”  The conference got emotional at times as John’s former students articulated this dimension of Fiske’s legacy, and as a choked-up Fiske himself put it, “Ideas go out there, they float. It’s the people that matter.”

There will be next steps.  The papers will be compiled and published in some form; the website will hopefully become a repository for resources about Fiske; participants will return to their work re-energized as teacher-scholars. The straw-man abuse of Fiske will undoubtedly persist, but Fiske’s ideas will continue to inspire new scholarship and—the ultimate point—help us understand our culture and ourselves. Fiske himself is ever the optimist, thus it seems appropriate to believe that time will continue to prove the central assertion of the conference:  Fiske matters.

The public’s response to Google’s plans ranged from delightfully silly stunts to movingly earnest appeals. Most famously, Topeka renamed itself Google, Kansas (and Google, on April 1, honored the effort by renaming itself Topeka for a day), but the variations were rich and creative.  To help their towns compete, mayors in northern states jumped into frozen lakes while mayors in southern states jumped into shark tanks. An Oregon microbrewery produced a “Gigabit IPA” for the occasion, and citizens in Greenville, SC gathered in a park to spell out “Google” in light sticks:

Google’s YouTube became a rich repository of these appeals.  Bellingham’s vision of community was genuinely touching, while Fresno’s “I Want My Google Fiber” rap was simply awesome.

This competition for Googlish affections might be dismissed as an especially theatrical “politics of supplication,” a demeaning beg-a-thon in which the fame whores of reality TV meet the eternal desire to get something for nothing.  After all, these campaigns have little to do with policy as understood by the official regulatory apparatus.  They are trivial diversions to the “real” work done in Washington.

But what if we take these Google Fiber campaigns seriously as a kind of popular policymaking?  They reveal what people can do when asked to imagine themselves as empowered stakeholders in policy decisions. In articulating why their communities deserve the fiber, citizens were required to identify local needs and construct local civic identities, assess the impact of infrastructure options and organize coordinated responses.  In other words, they had to become policymakers.

And unlike what writers on localism often tell us, this grassroots policymaking was not restricted to local elites; the campaigns were truly popular in participation, as even the sample above begins to demonstrate.

In contrast, how should we assess the National Broadband Plan?  Instead of calling for popular policy production, the NBP was an invitation for insider political posturing.  Instead of inspiring rap videos, it inspired … comments.  Lots of comments. The Commission boasts of 23,000 comments on its public notices, 1,500 comments to its blog, etc.  And check out this inspiring statement:  “Public comment on the plan does not end here. … The public will continue to have opportunities [to comment] all along this path.”  Hoorah, more comments!

If we want Americans to think creatively about media policy in a networked society, perhaps the place to start is the difference between wonks posting blog comments and mayors swimming with sharks.  I want more of the latter.

The FCC means well, and this particular commission grasps the need for public involvement  better than previous ones.  But there’s a structural imbalance built into the process, a divide that makes decreasing sense between policymakers and the “policymade,” i.e. those citizens whose lives will be shaped by compromises devised elsewhere.  The FCC seems only able to imagine the public as Providers of Comments, all of which will be politely considered until, at the end of the day, they write the rules.  The FCC is saying, “Your call is very important to us.”  Go ahead and leave your message at the beep; in the meantime, we all know that Julius Genachowski picks up when Ivan Seidenberg rings.

What alternative roles might official policymakers imagine for the public?  Put another way, what might the politics of popular policymaking prove to be?  They must be distinct from the politics of “capture,” of officialness, and of insiderdom.  They must build on–not remain loftily above–the public’s creative energy, competitive spirit, and taste for fun. Google can provide a model here:  the FCC has to choose those first 100 million homes somehow, and if officials can re-imagine popular policymaking in the process, they might shift not just the tone but the outcomes of policy debates. After all, when the public doesn’t bother commenting, but simply acts, the official policy world gets nervous, and making powerful incumbents nervous is always in the public interest.