This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Sripana Ray, completed her PhD in the department in 2014.

As part of my current job, I recently did an ethnographic study, looking at how young, urban, middle-class Indians—the target audience group for the entertainment portal The Telegraph is about to launch—engage with online spaces. The two key conclusions that we drew from the several interviews we conducted in cities such as Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore were that India’s young, urban media consumers only look for instant information and that they use that information to realize their aspirations for a better lifestyle. As several of the respondents stated, that information—whether on politics, sports or films—is chiefly consumed on laptops, tablets and smartphones. There is no denying that with the proliferation of media technologies, this is the age of instant gratification–instant download, instant messaging, an Instagrammed world that needs to be made instagood.

The producers of contemporary Hindi commercial cinema have accommodated this generation’s immediate needs by reaching out through various online channels, especially social networks. Online discourses, particularly the ones conducted by film stars, give consumers of Hindi films a sense of belonging to the carefully constructed “real world” of these stars, feeding and fostering consumers’ aspirations.

Promotions of Hindi films routinely occur on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Strangely enough, in the promotion exercise, there is a sense of fragmented gratification. The process has several stages, starting with the unveiling of the first look, usually a poster, followed by the release of the soundtrack and trailers. For some films, as was the case with Piku (Shootjit Sircar, 2015), a trailer is produced for the trailer—both of which were released on social media first. Thus, the Hindi commercial film becomes, to modify Tom Gunning’s term slightly, a cinema of staggered attractions.  (To view the clip below, click on the link to YouTube that appears after hitting the play button.)

The prefigurative route of assigning meaning to films, diverting from a strictly textual approach, has been a subject of growing interest among scholars. Martin Barker, in his article “News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials,” notes that prefigurative materials or secondary texts, which include posters, trailers, reviews and interviews, “shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of films are formed”[1]. These materials can give the audience a preview of what they would see and thus generate “expectations of pleasures,” or they might help form opinions about a particular film. These expectations and opinions, in turn, contribute to the construction of meaning of cinematic texts. The teaser of Piku, which shows the protagonists bantering about the quality of the upcoming trailer, gives viewers a hint about the characters’ personalities and the relationship they share, which is the premise of the film.

A central factor in the promotion of a Hindi commercial film is the star. In India, a film is labelled a blockbuster even “before the camera rolls,”[2] according to Andrew Willis. This means that the expectation of success determines the blockbuster status of a film. The elements that inspire such expectation include the director, the producer and the music composer, but most importantly the actors. The use of stars as a vehicle for promotion has evolved with time, primarily because of the public exposure stars get on television and online. The traditional methods of marketing a film, which included publishing and broadcasting sketchy information and gossip about film stars, have given way to a proper and more personal dialogue between actors and their audiences, abetted by the stars themselves. Through their Facebook and Twitter profiles, they talk about the films in which they star and give details about their personal relationships. In this sense, stars’ role in film prefiguration and promotion has now become much more direct. It is as if the stars have stepped out of the big screens to form an alternate narrative through an online discourse with fans that offers a glimpse of their “real” lives—the “reality” that these stars choose to reveal. It is a virtual transmission of projected reality.

Another strand of the promotional machinery becoming increasingly evident is the enmeshing of film stars’ virtual and real lives. Stars change their Twitter handles to the names of their characters in films–for example in Bombay Velvet (Anurag Kashyap, 2015) and Dil Dhadakne Do (Zoya Akhtar, 2015).

Anushka Sharma tweets about Bombay Velvet and displays her film character’s name prominently.

The Bombay Velvet trailer was released on Twitter, as was the soundtrack. As displayed in the image above, the film’s lead actress, Anushka Sharma, put the name of her character, Rosie Noronha, above her Twitter handle. The lead actor, Ranbir Kapoor, does not have a Twitter account. But his father, Rishi Kapoor (also an actor though not part of Bombay Velvet), ensured Ranbir Kapoor’s presence on the social network by continuously tweeting about him.

Actor Rishi Kapoor tweets about his film-star son.

For viewers, the public preview of stars’ private lives stimulates what Barker calls “expectations of pleasures.” However, the process of generating these pleasures is almost exclusively geared towards English-speaking audiences in urban India, especially with the Internet’s rising importance in this process. While the Internet can increase direct, close contact with the audiences, the interaction is meant for a particular section of the audience. Blogs, social networking and online gaming are all designed for urban audiences with Internet access and a requisite knowledge of English, since the web discourse is conducted solely in English.

The increasing use of English in discourses surrounding Hindi commercial cinema appeals to its consumers’ global aspirations. English proficiency constitutes symbolic capital that aids in the exhibition of urban, middle-class status and in gaining access to it. The cultural currency of education in, or at least knowledge of, the English language has emerged as a primary tool shaping middle-class identities and aspirations. It is also one that the Hindi commercial film industry increasingly uses as an essential mode of signification as it actively tries to draw the urban middle classes.

According to Janet Staiger, “the reception of the film by the spectator is determined by the object, not the spectator.”[3] But how does the object function at a particular time and for particular people? Staiger argues that a specific object, in this case a film, cannot be consumed in the same way by a group of viewers since “individuals have multiple (albeit socially constructed) identities.” But these self-identities are shaped by certain historical and social agencies such as nationality, class and gender that homogenize certain facets of identity, which in turn creates a collective consciousness. In developing India, the way secondary texts affect processes of viewing and the collective consciousness of Hindi commercial-cinema audiences is being recast through a continuous modernization exercise.

[1] Martin Barker, “News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials — A Critique and Research Proposal,” Scope, February 2004 (http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=feb2004&id=246).

[2] Andrew Willis, “Notes on the Hindi Blockbuster, 1975 to the Present,” in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 257.

[3] Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 51.

Post by Cynthia Chris, City University of New York

Late in July, a lion named Cecil became an Internet sensation. Unfortunately, his global glory was posthumous: on July 1, an American dentist named Walter Palmer shot Cecil. News accounts report that a professional hunter and guide, who the dentist paid $50,000 or so, lured the lion out of a conservation park and onto private farmland. Both the hunter and the farmer have been arraigned on poaching charges, and Zimbabwe has launched extradition proceedings against Palmer. At this writing, Palmer, who returned to Minnesota after the hunt, appears to be in hiding.

By some accounts, Cecil was already a star at Hwange National Park. He was a handsome example of just the kind of charismatic megafauna that draws tourists on safari, and supporters to environmental causes (small, slimy, or scaly creatures, not so much). He was well documented by picture-taking tourists as well as by researchers from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Unit. Since 2008, Cecil had worn a satellite-tracking collar for the group, which is studying the declining population of the Southwest African lion; Palmer’s guide seems to have tried to destroy the device after the animal’s death to hide evidence of the illegal hunt. So it should come as little surprise that when details of the animal’s death emerged—Zimbabwe officials made an announcement on July 25—social media lit up. What did this sudden burst of interest in lion poaching mean? Initial observations seemed to suggest that social media users’ engagement with political issues is fickle, and that privileged white Americans care more about one lion than they do about crisis-level racist violence that has been in the news steadily for over a year, since the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, July 17, 2014. I’m not so sure that a surge in Facebook shares is indicative of anything so dire; at worst, however, it might mean that most of what passes for politics on social media is direly superficial.

A first wave of responses to the news of Cecil’s killing was mournful, disgusted, and angry. When I posted an early Guardian story (which misidentified Cecil’s killer as a Spaniard) on the subject to Facebook, a friend posted the following: “What the hell, humanity?”; another, “People—especially wealthy people—are such shits.” Still another posted a link to Yelp, where people were commenting about the lion’s death on Palmer’s dental practice’s webpages. Some wished Palmer a death as gruesome as the one he had inflicted on Cecil. Animal rights activists and animal lovers alike gathered to protest at the Palmer’s shuttered dental practice in the suburban Minneapolis area, and dropped stuffed toy lions, leopards and bears at the doorstep, creating a makeshift shrine.

Within days, online petitions set agendas and garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. One at whitehouse.gov called for Palmer’s extradition and quickly reached 100,000 signatures, a threshold that often leads to public comment by President Obama. By August 3, over 1.2 million people signed a call for the U.S. and E.U. to ban importation of animal parts taken as hunting trophies. Almost as many petitioned Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, to demand an end to the practice of issuing licenses to kill endangered species, and to implore the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to finalize listing African lions under the Endangered Species Act and to enforce existing laws that would prevent hunters like Palmer from importing illegally obtained animal parts.

This is not to say that social media responded to Cecil’s death uniformly.

Some observers lamented all the attention paid to the loss of one big cat, while human injustices proliferate. On July 29, feminist writer Roxane Gay tweeted, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.” Later in the week, she wrote a more thoughtful, even wrenching op-ed for the New York Times, which pointed out that too many people have more empathy for Cecil—not only on social media, but on late-night TV, where Jimmy Kimmel shed tears for the lion—than for the victims of police violence, whose deaths are too often burdened with blame: “There are always those,” wrote Gay, “who wonder what the fallen did to deserve what befell them. He shouldn’t have been walking down that street. She should have been more polite to that police officer. He shouldn’t have been playing with a toy gun in park. We don’t consider asking such questions of a lion.”

She’s right, of course, as are other bloggers who wrote passionately last week on the necessity to keep police brutality and terroristic white supremacist violence at the top of the media agenda. While there is a sustained critique of police brutality, bolstered in part by the remarkable use of social media to build the #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName movements, there is also far, far too much indifference, and antipathy, toward the victims.

But a great deal of social media activity—all those easy retweets, shares, “likes,” and electronic signatures—is reactive, impulsive, and not necessarily indicative of a great deal of investment in any particular idea. Sure, clicktivism has its proponents, but tears jerked by news of Cecil’s death were quick to dry. By July 31, the lion was noticeably less visible, at least on Facebook. Follow-up stories (one erroneously reporting the death of the male expected to take over Cecil’s pride) barely registered. Nevertheless, the world’s best known conservationist, Jane Goodall, found a silver lining in the groundswell of opposition to poaching; indeed, legislation that would expand restrictions on trade in animal trophies was promptly introduced in Congress, and major airlines banned some trophies as cargo.

So, claims that “Cecil news” had pushed other issues off of electronic news feeds seemed premature. In the short run, social media trends are poor indicators of the greater zeitgeist (though tracking longer term trends may be informative), and that to make too much of a temporary blip on the screen may be to appear to suggest that good politics are single-issue politics. This can’t—and can’t be allowed—to be true. In fact, the outrage over Cecil’s death seems to be driven as much by rage against the “1 percent” as it is about animal cruelty or the sixth extinction. After all, the $50,000 or so that Palmer paid to kill the lion is more than three times what a person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 earns in a year of 40-hour work weeks.

In other words, when social media buzzes with the latest lost dog story or dead lion, is not the case that one issue thoroughly displaces another. It is that there are too many tragedies, too many crises, and too much violence of many kinds to take in at a glance, on any screen or page.

We must recognize that environmental issues, from global warming to wildlife protection, are moral imperatives and human rights issues. It is not only possible but essential to fight for justice and against exploitation on multiple fronts. We must remember Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and Samuel DeBose. Sandra Bland and Raynette Turner. And others far too many others to mention in this short space. To name another victim of corrupt bloodlust—this time, a non-human one, Cecil—is not to claim equivalence between the animal and individual human subjects, and doing so doesn’t trade one issue for another. The Internet is big enough for more than one kind of rage. It has to be.

So what’s good is, first of all, that Facebook connects us meaningfully to one another. It allows for people to keep in touch even when they are no longer seeing each other face to face. It gives us ways of overcoming isolation and loneliness. It gives shy people an outlet that might be more comfortable than communication in person. Its asynchronicity makes it possible to be in touch without being synced on one schedule. All this in a world where people live far from friends and family and have too little time for leisure.

Facebook is gratifying to the active, sharing user who gets positive feedback even from minor notes about everyday life. Like Twitter and many other forms of social media, one of basic functions of the network is to reassert our identity and existence. One subtext and function of many messages is, here I am speaking, this is me. When someone clicks “like” they are affirming you, recognizing you, giving you a wink or pat on the arm. The thumbs up like button icon is a token of the body, and clicking on it is a gesture of affection. There is no question we experience the gratification of likes and comments affectively. We know, as well, that like doesn’t mean you like it. I don’t like it that my friend’s mother is sick, that my friend’s pet died, that my friend is recovering from addiction in a rehab facility. But I am touching my friends when I click like and they are touched.

Facebook is also a creative endeavor. Its ordinary uses are writing, photography, video, and sharing links. Facebook users are vernacular artists making and sharing objects of meaning for their community. Of course much of what one finds in the news feed is ordinary and banal. It can be obnoxious or trivial. Some of it is more pictures of babies or exclamations over a football team’s loss or win than you like to see. But this is life in all of its mystery and boredom and frustration and glory. And it is only against the backdrop of life’s quotidian rhythms that the dramatic Facebook status updates have their impact. Births and deaths, triumphant PhD dissertation defenses and new jobs, collective upheavals over elections and disasters, make Facebook into a magnet for our attention and feeling. Facebook’s literary, visual, and affective impacts are expressions of the traumas and pleasures of life, making them not just into documents of reality but artefacts in communal rites of passage.

Like everyone else, I have misgivings about investing too much of myself in this web space which, ultimately, will serve corporate interests ahead of the people’s. I care about privacy, about the unforgiving permanence of online culture, about context collapse when everyone from your whole life span converge at once in your social networks. I’m also annoyed by Facebook’s news feed algorithm, which chooses for me to see some items and not others. Perhaps the social web would have been better if we had all just gotten our own blogs and RSS readers. We can’t do it over, though. One reason Facebook is succeeding as a mass medium and blogs and RSS readers didn’t is that users found Facebook easier and more secure. They felt comfortable in its environment. Now the people are on Facebook, and if you want to be with them online, that is where you go. You can, theoretically, opt out. You can refuse social media, or can be a Twitter snob. You can lament that as soon as Facebook let in users outside of the early college-only restrictions, it lost its mojo. Probably true. But it gained something aside from the scale that leads to economic success. It became society, and you can’t really opt out of that.

As with many new technologies, the identity of an ideal user is central to the cultural status and widely shared meanings that define the object. When the ideal Facebook user was young and upscale (Harvard, then college), Facebook had cachet. Now that your mom, your aunts and uncles, your grammar school teachers and parents’ friends are liking your status and leaving comments, it’s not so cool any more. But note my choice of “you” in these characterizations. Who is this imaginary person? The assumption is that a normative user is young, and that older folks are marked as different if not unwelcome. The age and gender connotations of Facebook’s waning cool are hardly surprising. Fashions of all kinds tend to rise up from youth culture, while the kids move on when their elders catch wind of emerging trends. But if Facebook is to endure as a social hub of value, a force for community and sociability, we will need to think of it inclusively and not be tempted to put it down it on the basis of a distaste associated with technologies used by moms and aunts. We need to see it in a more egalitarian fashion, and recognize the value in this.

What’s good about Facebook, finally, is that it gives us, all of us, a place to give and receive of ourselves, and that we have taken it up in this way. (A network with better architecture and policies will not ultimately be better if the people don’t take it up). My wish for social media’s future is that we will keep on extracting this value from Facebook, or something like it, without the dark side of the digital overcoming us.

Michael Z. Newman is on Facebook and Twitter.

Unlike some of the common complaints launched against the “Look Back” videos, mine showed no evidence of overzealous partying, cringe-worthy status updates, photos of exes who were totally wrong for me (although “my first moments” section was oddly filled with images of other couples who have since called it quits), or even photos of unfortunate haircuts. Although it’s interesting to see some of my most liked posts appear in succession on the screen, it’s equally interesting to note what they say — work related announcements, personal or professional accomplishments, asking for tips about future travel plans – and what they don’t say. Although I’ve enjoyed some highs and endured some lows during my six-year tenure as a Facebook participant, these events don’t show up in my video. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the algorithm is faulty or that I’m not using Facebook “properly”, or that I’m “over sharing”. There’s a reason the automatically generated visualization of my Facebook history looks the way it does. I refuse to believe that it’s because I’ve aged out of knowing how to have a good time, or that nothing monumental has happened to me since I’ve joined Facebook in 2007. Instead, no matter how I choose to edit it, my Facebook anniversary video takes me through a history of the different privacy and impression management strategies I’ve employed over the years, the shifting audiences and contexts for my Facebook content, and how I’ve decided to fragment, multiply, and disperse my online identity across a variety of platforms (even though Mr. Zuckerberg and company would probably like me to stick to just one.)

For example, my “first moments” are directed toward college and close friends only, and represent a Facebook account that was strategically scrubbed (but not completely clean) when I began friending future colleagues and professors. My “most liked posts” reflect an effort to cater to an imagined audience of weak ties, as several of my college and close friends have “dropped out” of Facebook, that I don’t feel the need to perform my social ties and connections (especially with strong ties and family members) in the same way that I did when I was six years younger. All of this in addition to a growing consciousness and attentiveness to the shift in contexts and audiences that came with being on the job market and becoming a junior faculty member. The section of the video titled “photos you’ve shared” is exemplary of what danah boyd has called “social steganography” and represents noticeable changes to the types of images I post to Facebook after joining Instagram.

What’s shown in my “Look Back” video is rather humorously unrepresentative of what it aims to show. The tranquil yet swelling music, and the life cycle narrative which culminates in the camera’s lingering gaze on my current profile picture imply that the images and text displayed should be nostalgic, sentimental, a personal archive of emotionally-significant events. (This life cycle narrative is reminiscent of other Facebook features, social media and locative media apps, and other ad campaigns that emotionalize the ways that our digital technologies grow alongside us — a trope so familiar, yet undeniably touching, that it has even been fictionalized as a highly effective marketing tactic for consumer electronics in shows like Mad Men).

However, what the Facebook video exhibits is not that I somehow eschew an ideal construction of the Facebook user (although this is implied), or that I haven’t accomplished or shared enough personal information on the platform (though this might be true), but it creates an intriguing visualization that offers another window into my social media life on Facebook, and other platforms by comparison. Is it a “success”? I guess that depends on who’s asking and why, but at least for me, the “Look Back” feature serves as a moment to pause and examine my life not as a daughter, significant other, friend, scholar, etc., but as a Facebook participant and to reflect on what the company expects and hopes its users do, and how we’ve negotiated those expectations.

A few weeks ago, I had finished my Friday lecture and retreated to my office in order to get some work done with what was left of my day. As is my ritual, I allowed myself a half hour to check email, Facebook, and other tools of digital sociality. On this day in particular, my Facebook feed was filled with links to different versions of this story.

As most of us know, the academic job market can lead to emotional mood swings. On this day in particular, I was recovering from a crisis of confidence suffered the previous night. I felt better, but was still pretty raw. Luckily, I had the office to myself because Batkid was just too much for me at that moment. The real-life melodrama of Batkid fulfilling a life’s dream seemingly so close to the end of his short life (I had not yet read that he was in remission) struck deep. I cried. After catching my breath, I decided that Facebook was not going aid my productivity and I headed over to Reddit, where I saw more Batkid stories. “Alright. . .no more social media this afternoon.” Later in the day, after I emerged from my office to interact with people, Batkid again came up in conversation with people who had read about him via Facebook posts. I had to explain that he was “just too much” for me that day. Still, my request to not be made to think about Batkid was not entirely respected.

Hollis Griffin recently wrote about the experience of online dating in an environment of ubiquitous connectivity, noting how thoroughly “the intimacies enabled by technology get braided into the rhythms of everyday life.”¹ Griffin specifically describes the potential for the hurts associated with love to be “relentlessly” distributed throughout our daily lives. There are distinctions to be drawn between Griffin’s cell phone love and my Facebook-inspired empathy. Significantly, Griffin’s interactions are, I assume, largely person-to-person, whereas my connection to Batkid was filtered through my relation to a virtual group and a collection of publicly-shared performances. When people shared this story, they invariably added short notes to personalize their connection to Batkid. Some declared civic pride in the city of San Francisco or the state of California, while others simply expressed the emotional impact in personal terms.

These performances indicate an attempt to mediate between personal experience and the social body that is assumed to be experiencing the Batkid story at the same time. Milan Kundera writes that “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass. It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”² Setting aside the negative connotations of kitsch, Kundera captures an important aspect of the Batkid story. Not content to simply imagine all of mankind crying together, a number of people within my digital sphere of influence felt the need to actively encourage such reactions. Their desire to share in these feelings was apparently so ubiquitous as to make the story inescapable.

Although Batkid was covered by traditional television and print media, I was not exposed to him through those forums. Instead, it was social media that first made me aware of him and it was my inability to effectively avoid social media (or the social media of others) that made Batkid such an insistent story on that day. Public performances of emotion in relation to mass media events are not particular to online interactions. But Batkid suggests something particular about how and why this story spread the way it did. Strong affect played a particular role in this story’s spread through online media. The emotional impact of that story demanded a kind of sharing in search for the tears of “all mankind.” That this is a socially acceptable way to share in moments of civic emotion and requires little effort suggests that it was a particularly infectious case of digital virality.

Though Beasts features offensive, retrograde race, gender, and class politics, it has elicited deferential online discussions that rarely voice any critique (although bell hooks and some bloggers call out its flaws). Perhaps its poetic sheen, with lots of lens flares and handheld jiggling, has inoculated the film from political analysis, despite the fact that it portrays poor, rural, African American people speaking minstrel-show English, with lines like “they be talkin’ in codes” explaining how the six-year-old protagonist can hear animals speak. Along with a few drunk, dirty, working-class whites, heroine Hushpuppy and her father Wink live in filth and disarray, yet the film proffers them as an idealized utopian community. Beasts trucks in the recirculation of all-too-familiar clichés about people of color and the working class: closer to nature (“we’s who the earth’s for,” Hushpuppy tells us), working roots and shooting gators (Louisiana—exotic!), fiercely loyal, and explosively violent. Wink’s open-handed slap knocks Hushpuppy to the ground, yet because he later expresses his love for her on his deathbed, many viewers forgive his abusiveness.

Hushpuppy narrates in voiceover the tumultuous period in her life when Wink falls ill and a hurricane floods their rural community, The Bathtub, outside the south Louisiana levees. But the post-Katrina context in Beasts is submerged in the miasma of magical realism, which mystifies the extreme weather events in the film. We see many Bathtub denizens evacuating before the storm, but Hushpuppy and drunk Wink hunker down to ride it out. The threat to the Bathtub is ascribed vaguely to climate change, as Hushpuppy’s teacher explains: “the fabric of the universe is coming unraveled” which means “the ice caps gonna melt, water’s gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under.” Waters rise, not due to any human causation, but a mystical rupture in the universe. Redeemed father Wink watches approvingly as Hushpuppy faces down prehistoric aurochs, loosed by the melting ice.

Given this mystification of climate change and environmental degradation through noble savage primitivism, the movie is astonishingly popular. The Beasts Facebook page has over 76,000 likes, with posts touting a live performance of the film’s score in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and wishing readers “Happy Earth Day from the Bathtub!” The movie has inspired a Twitter hashtag #BEASTit, mainly used as encouragement in sporting and racing events; its @BeastsTheMovie twitter handle has over 3600 followers. On the official Beasts website, we can read about its four Oscar nominations and see animations of review snippets: A.O. Scott’s “a blast of sheer, improbable joy,” Bryan Alexander’s “spellbinding,” and Manohla Dargis’s “hauntingly beautiful.” Along the sidebar scrolls a procession of tweets, mostly expressing fans’ hyperbolic praise: “this movie has inspired me and changed my life” says jessicamartinez.

Unlike Beasts, nobody sees SharkNado as life-changing. Likewise, it cannot be mistaken for an art film—it positions itself consciously in the tradition of B-movies, in a line of SyFy made-for-basic-cable schlockfests such as SharkTopus and Chupacabra vs. The Alamo. Special effects hearken back to Bride of the Monster’s Bela Lugosi wrestling a plastic octopus, the tornadoes are CGI, with scripting and acting to match—but SharkNado’s genius lies in catering to fans of B-movies (tagline: Enough said.) Such fans (and others, presumably) went online en masse via Twitter during the premiere broadcast, peaking at 5000 #SharkNado tweets per minute, which Twitter ranks among the biggest trend surges in its history. Although video on demand is touted as the wave of the future, the simultaneity of watching a show as it airs along with millions of other viewers remains a strong component of viewer pleasure.

I'm not so sure about the science in this movie you guys. #SharkNado

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) July 12, 2013

Wil Wheaton’s (@wilw) popular tweet, “I’m not so sure about the science in this movie you guys. #SharkNado,”  encapsulates the sarcastic, Mystery Science 3000 tone of the TweetNado. Unlike the storm in Beasts, which hazily alludes to Katrina, the extreme weather event in SharkNado is never credible. Nevertheless, it ably conforms to weather disaster movie conventions such as shots of bending palm trees and driving rain, and the reconstituted family unit at the end: hero-dad Fin gets back together with his ex-wife after rescuing her and their daughter along with lots of other people (although his ex’s husband is conveniently eaten). We even get the added pleasure of seeing the reporter eaten by a wind-propelled shark. Before she dies, we learn that sharks from the Gulf of Mexico have migrated into the unusually warm Pacific, where Hurricane David is now driving them up the California coast and “experts are saying global warming is the reason for this unprecedented event.”

SharkNado’s knowing nods to the pleasures of bad movies, as well as its many allusions to Jaws and other classics, suggest a target audience of savvy, sophisticated viewers, a group that may overlap with Beasts‘s demographic. But the affect SharkNado generates is less serious, less misty-eyed, and dedicated to the fun of hurling ridicule at a B-movie. With its spoofing tone, SharkNado produces a sharper, more critical mode of viewing than the art film, though it doesn’t pretend to Beasts’s intellectual depths. Both fantastical films employ extreme weather as a backdrop for adventure and heroism, including rejuvenating the father as the patriarch of the family; both the derision heaped on SharkNado and the precious sentimentality of Beasts operate to sideline any engagement with extreme weather beyond a staging ground for cliché.

I used to have a Facebook, years ago, for a very short time. In that brief time it connected me with some friends from high school, my abusive ex-boyfriend, and my college roommate. Only one of those was a pleasant surprise. So when Facebook suddenly installed new privacy features that forced me to lay open my life to the public or delete various information about myself, I took the (admittedly for me easy) step and deleted my account.

I have boycotted all things Facebook since, but it is hard and getting harder. My friend sends out invitations for a cookie swap, and I cannot see it because it is on Facebook. My favorite restaurant offers discounts, and I cannot use it because it is on Facebook. My favorite podcast asks me to vote for them in the iTunes podcast competition, and—even though I have iTunes!–I cannot vote because it is on Facebook.

What all of these things have in common, besides exhibiting how stubborn I can apparently be, is a complete invisibility and unawareness of the nature of Facebook for those who are members. We all know that Facebook has a variety of privacy settings, we all know about the dangers of nametagging, and we may know about the recent attempt to sell access to its users. Some of us may even have followed the concerns surrounding tracking users. But what I find interesting is the way few who are on Facebook are conscious of the fact that not everyone is.

I can’t call it privilege, because I clearly have the ability to get over myself and just make another account. But it shares with privilege the quiet invisibility of those without accounts, the inability to conceive of anyone not having access, and the resulting lack of consideration for those who choose to remain outside of Facebook’s walled garden. And this is where the crux of the matter is for me—and where this post turns from my whining about not getting to join in these amazingly intimate and supportive shared spaces where many academics gather to a post about the costs of the interfaces we use.

Because yesterday something more momentous happened than my inability to access Facebook: we learned that Google Reader will close down, destroying the most-used RSS feed reader and leaving those of us who relied on it desperately looking for alternatives. Now a savvy reader might ask me why I make a strong categorical stand with Facebook yet support a company at least as evil and exploitative of its users, who also happen to change their products with little input. Who doesn’t remember the nymwars of the summer of 2011? And I will have to admit that I am weak and apparently my conscience only goes as far as my Gmail account. But I try not to assume everyone is on Google, so when I collaborate on Google Docs, I have learned that not everyone is a Google puppet and have learned to create workarounds.

When the Organization of Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own were but a glimpse in its founders’ eyes, one of the battle cries was: “I want us to own the goddamned servers.” What fans had learned the hard way was that you may be allowed to post virtually anything online, but only as long as your ISP doesn’t send you a cease and desist letter. Even more serious is the control ISPs have over the other side, our actual access to the Internet. This, of course, is a lesson that across the world has long been known by oppressed groups and citizens of oppressive regimes (and not only those!): the Internet may be free, but it is only as accessible as your ISP. In the United States, we are slowly becoming aware of that limitation: with many ISPs ascribing to the new six strikes rule, they are threatening that they can remove our Internet access at will.

Both modes of access are controlled by commercial entities (and, in many cases, by national oversight to boot), and we have little control over any of it. Facebook and its ever changing rules, Google and its ever changing products, and commercial web sites with their eager willingness to delete fanworks on the say-so of media companies with little recourse for the injured party, all of these are reminders that we live in a world where everything seems at our grasp and easily accessible—until we suddenly stand outside and get reminded that these are corporate entities who do not exist for our good but for their profit.

1) Over 6 years after their last console release, Sony announced their latest gaming console, the PlayStation 4. While they did not reveal what it would look like, they did detail its functioning, new controller, hardware specs, and user interface. The system will include iOS and android apps to enhance the gaming experience.

2) The Academy Awards, or rather the Oscars, took place on February 24th. Six of the films nominated for Best Picture had earned over $100 million at the box office, making it the most commercially successful group of nominees to date. In the documentary short category, Inocente became the first Kickstarter-funded film to win an Oscar. The big news of the night became Seth MacFarlane’s hosting, which elicited a lot of criticism and sparked discussions about Hollywood’s potential sexism and racism. The Academy stood behind MacFarlane’s performance, and in fact this year’s Oscar ceremony showed increased viewership, especially in key younger audiences (which had been a concern for the producers). MacFarlane was not the only one in trouble on Oscar night, as The Onion faced an intense reaction towards a tweet, for which they offered a rare apology (And for anyone who is wondering how Ted came to life at the Oscars, here’s how!). The Independent Spirit Awards, which honor independent films, also took place last weekend.  Silver Linings Playbook came away the big winner, irking some people because the film’s $21-million budget technically put it outside of the classification for “indie film.”

3) Although they won an Oscar for visual effects for their work on Life of Pi, Rhythm & Hues filed for bankruptcy last week. They were cut off from discussing the plight of the industry in their acceptance speech, which upset many visual effects workers. Visual effects artists are protesting the layoffs and bankruptcies their industry is facing using any outlet they can, including social media and open letters (including a second one to Ang Lee).

4) New copyright alert system is launched by the film, TV, and music industries. The warning system gives people six strikes before they begin enforcing consequences. Sony has also developed a patent that would be able to distinguish between piracy activities and legal downloads. Internationally, France is also looking at increasing their (already very strict) anti-piracy laws. Thinking of piracy, how much does “free” music actually cost to artists involved?

5) For the first time in 12 years, music sales grow a small but symbolically important amount. In other music news, Billboard is beginning to include YouTube plays of a song in their formulation of their “Hot 100 List.” This change will allow YouTube hits like “Harlem Shake” to boost their stats. Most of YouTube’s top channels are music-based, suggesting the importance of this connection. Google is considering getting into the streaming music business. Pandora has put a limit on free listening, citing increased royalty fees as the reason, and Spotify is meeting with the record industry to ask for price breaks on royalties.

6) The 2013 box office totals are off to a slow start, 13% behind last year, and Jack the Giant Slayer opened to a disappointing $20-30 million. After taking a big loss on Rise of the Guardians, DreamWorks is forced to lay off 350 employees. The news is not all bad though, as Oz the Great and Powerful debuted with $75 million and The Hobbit closes in on $1 billion worldwide. In other movie news, Hollywood plans to cut back on sex and violence? And Regal Entertainment gets even bigger by buying Hollywood theaters.

7) In the publishing world, New York Times plans to sell Boston Globe. Variety announced they are making big changes–dropping their daily print editions, eliminating their paywall, and adding three new editors in chief.  Tim O’Brien, The Huffington Post‘s executive editor, has decided to leave.  Reader’s Digest files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And are digital book signings the way of the future?

8) Numerous companies are reporting hackers entering their systems, including Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, NBC.com, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook (no user data was taken; but if it is compromised in the future, how would Facebook recover?).

9) In TV news, it’s pilot season! ABC is developing a miniseries How to Survive a Plague, based on the Academy Award-nominated documentary about the continuing AIDS crisis. A&E hit a record number of viewers for their reality series Duck Dynasty. Nielsen ratings are changing to reflect the new ways that people access television. Kaley Cuoco of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory tweets positively about Dish Network’s Hopper, though CBS is in the process of suing them. AMC fought with Dish about licensing fees, and AMC’s fourth quarter profits took a hit as a result. The FCC is being pushed to modify the current standards of TV product disclosure to create more transparency with regard to show sponsorship. Cablevision, with the support of Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Viacom, claiming that they practice illegal block booking of stations (an accusation that Viacom leveled at John Malone 20 years ago).  The lawsuit could lead to people being able to more selectively sign up for channels, only paying for the ones they want.

10) In other miscellaneous news: Clive Davis comes out as bisexual. Girls Gone Wild files for bankruptcy. And future technologies–the iWatch? Transparent Smartphones? A computer that never crashes? Or what about touchscreen T-shirts?

1. Moviefone’s Drew Taylor highlights ten good films you likely didn’t see in 2012, while Indiewire critics pick the ten best films you definitely didn’t see, because they went undistributed. Indiewire also warns you about the films you shouldn’t see, plus the site offers an A-Z summary of women in film in 2012 and an assessment of LGBT representation in American films of the year.

2. 2012 is looking like a best-ever year for Hollywood box office grosses, both domestically and internationally. Among the studios, Universal did have its best year ever. And among individual films, The Avengers easily takes the 2012 box office crown, while Zero Dark Thirty is heading toward the critics’ poll crown, followed by The Master.

3. The Economist Group has a slew of revealing digital publishing charts that look back on 2012, and while 2012 was a tough year for newspapers, some, like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, are at least still profitable, while the Washington Post’s multiplatform model may be one to keep an eye on in 2013. Newsweek’s shift to online-only status (ending not with a whimper but a hashtag) marked 2012 as a digital year for magazines, and most recently, Spin and the 126-year-old Sporting News announced they’ll only be available online in 2013.

4. Fifty Shades of Grey cleaned up in 2012 print book sales, and Amazon’s rankings show that Gone Girl put up a good fight too. The e-reader market shrunk noticeably this year, with tablet sales rising correspondingly. Apparently indie bookstores are still doing ok through all of this.

5. Billboard looks back on the year in music, one it calls tumultuous. According to iTunes downloads, it was a good year for Adele and Carly Rae Jepsen, while Britney Spears out-earned all other women in music.

6. VentureBeat has a series of bleak charts detailing 2012 video game sales. In brighter news, Mass Effect 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II sold well, while the game that people spent the most individual time playing was Borderlands 2. Back to bad news, Call of Duty is under scrutiny for the amount of time Newtown shooter Adam Lanza spent playing it.

7. YouTube had a big year, from news to ads to lip-sync vids to Gangnam Style. Looking ahead, we should keep an eye on Maker Studios, channel renewals, and Iran’s YouTube. Plus, as always in internet video, porn.

8. Google’s annual report on searching reveals the trends borne across 1.2 trillion searches in 2012. We also visited Google a lot in 2012 simply for the awesome doodles. Using all search engines, we apparently sought out Facebook the most (haven’t most of us found it already?). We also sought out a lot of GIFs.

9. Once we figured out where Facebook was, we talked about the presidential election and Duck Dynasty a lot there. Even dead people found things to like on Facebook. Over at Twitter, its year in review offers a personal perspective, and over 200 million users are now laying the groundwork for 2013’s results.

10. News for TV Majors has its own Best of 2012 critics’ lists post, and here are some other informative posts from the past two weeks: Value of Older Demos, Mazzara Leaving Walking Dead, Hulu’s Direction, Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, ABC Making C7 Deals, TWC Dropping Ovation, Nielsen Buys Arbitron,  Newtown Impact, Media Violence, Newtown Analysis, Amazon Gets TNT Shows, Golden Globe Noms, Top Rated & Buzzed Shows, Regional Sports Surcharge, Ownership Vote Delayed.

1. The MPAA is touting findings that the shutdown of Megaupload was a huge blow to piracy while battling against research claims that box office revenues have been negatively impacted by Megaupload’s disappearance. Such anti-piracy rhetoric will step up a notch in January, thanks to a new initiative with internet service providers, and MPAA head Chris Dodd is turning to Silicon Valley for more help along those lines.

2. While plenty of Oscar bait is still coming down the pike, we now have the shortlists for live-action shorts and documentary nominations. Of the shortlisted docs, Searching for Sugar Man is gaining some early awards momentum. Among scripted films, Beasts of the Southern Wild impressed in Indie Spirit Award noms, Zero Dark Thirty turned on the National Board of Review, and the Gotham Awards rewarded Moonrise Kingdom.

3. Tax credits are again in the news, with New York job numbers showing a boost from production tax breaks and one small Georgia town experiencing revitalization thanks to production credits. However, one Michigan city is now on the ropes due to banking on tax incentives that the state subsequently eliminated. Back in Hollywood, LA production might be slowly on the rise.

4. Disney preceded its big Netflix deal with the announcement that it is shuttering its online movie service, offering a blow to transactional VOD prospects. It does seem like subscription streaming is coming to dominate, and along those lines, details are emerging about Verizon and Redbox’s upcoming Instant service, though we won’t see it until next year. Meanwhile, good old Blockbuster will now start selling mobile phones, because it has just about nothing else going on.

5. Internet ad spending will soon surpass ad spending in all newspapers and magazines, and a striking chart shows that the decline of newspaper ad revenue has outpaced the growth of Google’s ad revenues. That would be why the New York Times is trimming staff, as not even a paywall is making up the difference. A UK study says journalists are keeping their chins up, though.

6. With the death of The Daily, it’s clear that magazine apps are struggling. Will Richmond sees video as key for the future of magazines, while Jeff John Roberts thinks BuzzFeed might point the way toward a viable business model, with BuzzFeed’s CEO touting the value of social advertising over banner ads and hoping that branded content experiments will work.

7. YouTube is aiming for professional standards in everything from its new production facilities to its interface redesign, which enhances the focus on channels, along with funding channel marketing efforts and expanding onto airplanes and into Japan. This is working well enough that big media companies are seeking ways to get on board. (And pardon the plug, but some of us wrote here on Antenna recently about the new YouTube production facility.)

8. MySpace is planning to relaunch (again) and take on Spotify; well, it has to do something, right? iTunes just continues to expand, now reaching into 56 new countries (a Coalition of the Willing?). And Google just bought access to a mother lode of European music to boost its international Google Play and better compete with Apple and Amazon.

9. Nielsen has released a big state of social media report, which offers more data showing that people love to hang out on Facebook, while Pinterest has quickly become one to keep an eye on. And while it’s fashionable to make fun of Google+, it’s actually growing just fine. What’s sad is how Google derailed Reader while building Google+.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Funding Gender Analysis, Freaks & Geeks Oral History, Netflix-Disney Deal, DVR That Watches You, Ownership Vote Delayed, TV is Exhausting, Twitter & TV Growth, TWC Threat, Walking Dead Ratings, CBS Research View, Spanish-Language Rebranding, Plot & Character in Homeland, Sports Costs,  Zucker Reaction, NBC Signs Fellowes, Local Time Shifting Soaring.