In the case of a series like Netflix’s Lilyhammer, the traditional television distribution model is largely absent: while still episodic, therefore taking the form we most commonly associated with television, the Norwegian co-production was released as a complete season on the streaming service, and streams without commercial interruption.

However, in the case of Hulu’s Battleground the similarities with television outweigh the differences. Debuting in February, a new episode of the show has been released each week, with each episode supported by ad breaks built into the program. The show is a half-hour comedy series, working with the mockumentary format commonly associated with series like The Office, and features an extended ensemble cast. In the buildup to the series premiere, Hulu held a panel at the annual Television Critics’ Association Press Tour in January, allowing creator JD Walsh and the cast to speak about the show to gathered panelists. It was also, unlike Lilyhammer, not a co-production, created exclusively to stream on Hulu.

Regardless of these factors, Battleground has languished in relative television obscurity despite delivering what I would categorize as a solid first season (which concludes with the finale, premiering tomorrow on Hulu). The show, which follows a fictional senate race in Wisconsin, has grown from its pilot based on a strong lead performance by Jay Hayden, some compelling work by the supporting cast (including a guest turn from Ray Wise), and a solid use of the emotional swings of political campaigns to drive its narrative. Additionally, the show has shown a willingness to experiment: its tenth episode told a flashback story from the perspective of an MTV Real Life-esque documentary, a bold aesthetic decision that proved inconsistent in its execution but suggested a formal complexity one might not expect from a half-hour comedy. Also, the decision to film on location in Madison is both incredibly entertaining as a resident of the city and intriguing as someone who is studying the strategic use of location shooting to highlight categories of place – the use of the local ABC affiliate (WKOW) for news coverage, in particular, demonstrates a level of verisimilitude someone outside of Madison might not recognize.

However, as Cory Barker, Wes Ambrecht, and Andrew Rabin pointed out in a recent roundtable discussion, no one is talking about any of this. While it’s unclear how many people are watching Battleground (although Hulu’s website shows it ranked in as 78^th most popular series on Hulu over the past month), the absence of any conversation within critical circles has proven particularly damning. Hulu might have held a panel at TCA, but the panel was reportedly poorly attended; while multiple outlets reviewed Battleground when it first premiered (including The New York Times and The A.V. Club), none of the critics or sites which focus on weekly episodic criticism chose to continue reviewing it week-to-week (despite at least The A.V. Club having precedent with their coverage of U.K. import Misfits based on its Hulu distribution cycle), and the New York Times review is focused more on the novelty of Hulu and Netflix creating original content than on the content itself. The show was so low on the radar that it doesn’t even have a Metacritic page, unlike Lilyhammer which at least garnered enough reviews to merit a page and a score.

The reasons for this are not something we could prove scientifically, as most outlets make subjective decisions on what they do and do not cover. On the one hand, the show’s low viewership would create less financial imperative for a site like The A.V. Club to hire a writer to cover the series week-to-week; however, in other instances where staff critics like HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall have greater editorial control, the decision may have simply come down to a lack of time (understandable during a busy midseason dominated by shows such as Justified, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, and cited by Sepinwall as his reason for skipping the premiere) or a lack of interest (which is, of course, a matter of opinion).

These are the same challenges that face any show classified as a sleeper hit – or the “best show you’re not watching” as the above roundtable refers to it – but in many ways one would expect it to be easier for Battleground to gain traction: with all back episodes available to stream for free, word of mouth should more easily translate into viewers (including critics) catching up. However, streaming also presents barriers: Sepinwall notes he prefers to avoid reviewing streaming material on a laptop, and I’ll admit that my own efforts to catch up would have been far more pleasant if I hadn’t been tied to my computer.

While Hulu has made no official statement about the show’s future, the show’s lack of traction raises a number of challenges for the network’s move into original programming. Does the network need to be more active in reaching out to critics by mailing them DVD screeners to review? Or do they perhaps need to be more bullish in promoting the series, buying airspace during network broadcasts of similar series (like The Office, for example, in the case of Battleground) or actually using their minimal social media presence more strategically? Or is this simply a lesson that shows featuring no stars and limited industrial pedigree are doomed to fail when airing in a marginalized streaming environment against a broad range of broadcast and cable competition, pushing Hulu towards more star-oriented programming like Netflix’s acquisition of new episodes of Arrested Development?

I’d hate to see this final lesson be the takeaway here, but original streaming programming, like love, appears to be a battlefield.

Admittedly, this is not quite a journalistic perspective: most of the pictures share my own experience, or the experience of those I know personally, rather than that of the thousands who have their own stories to tell. However, I feel as though the pictures were taken with an objective eye, offering a glimpse of the overall atmosphere more than any one particular point of view.

All photos were taken between Wednesday February 16th and Saturday February 19th in Madison, Wisconsin.

Inside the Rotunda: The Capitol

A third floor conference room has become headquarters for the TAA (Teaching Assistants Association), which works around the clock on data entry, communication (through both traditional and social media), and general support.

Capitol Square: Marching in Madison

An Alternate Voice: The Counter-Protest

Eye on Wisconsin: The Media in Madison

[For more photos from the week’s protests, feel free to peruse my “Wisconsin Protests – 2011” set on Flickr]

In the past six days, as I have joined in the vibrant, energetic, and peaceful demonstrations of tens of thousands of people united against the Budget Repair Bill at the Wisconsin State Capitol, I have been struck by how those demonstrating against the bill have constituted a collective identity for themselves as Wisconsinites. Rhetorical scholars, building on the work of Michael Calvin McGee and Maurice Charland, recognize that collective identities are not a given, but constituted through discourse. While rhetorical scholars often examine how individual speakers or texts create identities for their audiences, it seems the collective identity being forged in the Wisconsin protests has not come from a centralized leader or group, but has been generated through diverse and diffuse signs, chants, videos, Facebook groups, Tweets, and other rhetorical acts.

Demonstrators invoke Wisconsin’s progressive history in creative and powerful ways. Signs and t-shirts remind others that Wisconsin led the way in labor laws and organizing, with slogans such as “Like the weekend? Thank Wisconsin.”  This widely-circulated clip from the Rachel Maddow show summarizes Wisconsin’s history of labor leadership, and also features images and video of some of these signs. Demonstrators in LaCrosse, Wisconsin held a candlelight vigil for “the Death of the Labor Movement” on Thursday night that connected Wisconsin’s labor history to the dire future of the labor movement if the bill passes.  Invoking this shared history provides demonstrators with a larger purpose for their actions, calling demonstrators to act to prevent, as one sign declared, “50 years of labor history [from being] undone in one week.”

In the East Gallery of the Capitol, a make-shift shrine has sprung up around the bust of Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the Wisconsin Governor (1901-1906) and Senator (1906-1925) who ran for President in 1924 as the nominee of the Progressive Party, which was created as a vehicle for his nomination. Signs reading “What Would Bob Do?”, “The Spirit of Fighting Bob is Back,” and “Long Live La Follette” decorate the pedestal on which the bust sits. Invoking the spirit of “Fighting Bob” may have even more meaning for the protesters, since Governor Scott Walker broke the longstanding tradition of holding the inauguration ceremony in the East Gallery, and instead held his ceremony in the North Wing, where attendees had their backs to the legendary “Fighting Bob” bust. While Walker may have symbolically turned his back on the Wisconsin’s progressive history, the tens of thousands of protesters at the Capitol and throughout Wisconsin are using it to remind themselves that they are not only fighting for their own rights, but are also fighting to carry on the tradition of the generations of Wisconsinites who came before them.

Demonstrators also invoke a more recent event in Wisconsin history that brought them together two weeks ago around their televisions and brings them together again this week in front of the Capitol: the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl victory. Packers-themed signs permeate the demonstrations, declaring “Aaron Rogers is a Union Man,” “The Super Bowl was Won on Union Labor,” and “I Blame Favre.” Indeed, several current and former players for the only community-owned, non-profit professional sports team in the nation issued a statement opposing the bill and expressing solidarity with Wisconsin workers. Through the symbol of the Packers’ Super Bowl victory, demonstrators create an collective identity for themselves that not only draws them together around a common love for the Packers, but also forecasts a victory for unionized workers.

On her Facebook page on Friday, Sarah Palin offered an ominous warning, “As goes Wisconsin today, so goes the country tomorrow.” In response, tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents who oppose the Budget Repair Bill are declaring: we are Wisconsin. No matter what happens with the outcome of the Budget Repair Bill, there is a united movement of Wisconsin residents and their supporters nationwide forming around the the progressive values that have propelled the State of Wisconsin “Forward” since its founding in 1848.

Certainly Madison isn’t the only political action occurring on the public screen, and I have no doubt that it is by virtue of watching actions on our screens take place in Tunisia and Egypt over the past several weeks that activists in Madison have felt so empowered. But what I think makes Madison very special is that, at least so far, events have remained completely peaceful. In the DeLuca and Peeples essay I mention above, they argue that, while not advocating violence, violence can be very useful during political movements because it makes it onto the screen. Then messages that may not have gotten through otherwise also get air time. Certainly their example of the WTO protests in Seattle in 2000 evidence this point, but I think Madison evidences a different point. Importantly, the government and law enforcement in Madison, unlike in these other locations, has not turned violent. Even as I have heard rumblings that Fox News reported that the National Guard was present in riot gear on Thursday, which I think was false, and they later suggested that the protests were sure to turn violent, violence hasn’t yet happened. And the message of the protesters has, for the most part, received fairly accurate representation and wide coverage in many media outlets. Certainly the fact that many of the protestors are white and representative of “middle America” has a lot to do with the way these protests have been covered, but there’s also more going on.

I think that the young people who have headed up so much of these actions have moved forward with clarity of purpose and message and they’ve been extremely proactive in disseminating it. The UW-Madison Teaching Assistants’ Association, who organized the first action on the Capitol on Monday, February 14 hasn’t strayed from its message, and it has been incredibly diligent for over a week now. Moreover, hundreds of youth descended upon the capitol Thursday to defend their teachers, their parents, and their futures. You can take a look at a group here: “This is What Democracy Looks Like”:

As I sat in the Assembly hearing for two hours today waiting to offer my testimony, I listened to angry, articulate, intelligent high schoolers explaining that unlike what Fox News had apparently said about the youth being uninformed, they were very clear about why they were protesting. Of course youth have always been important to social movement. In 2010, undocumented immigrant youth, for example, completed shifted the nature of the immigration debates and mainstream activism through their public actions and publicly naming themselves undocumented in order to advocate for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act and comprehensive immigration reform. The young people involved in Madison are cut from this same cloth, so to speak, and I think it is from both their clarity in message, and their mastery of social media technologies that they have so effectively and peacefully used the public screen. It’s hard to say what will happen as more national public figures and organizations continue to descend upon Madison, but for now, this first week presents some positive hope about democratic social movement possibilities in the age of the public screen.

The protests in Madison have demonstrated forcefully the power of an alternative to the opinion poll, an embodied voice of the people.  During the past week, policymakers, news commentators, and citizens alike have looked to the protests as a sign of public sentiment.  And the protests are having a positive effect!  I remember first hearing about the planned protests this past Monday.  I was depressed about Walker’s proposals, and had resigned myself to the bill’s passage.  I had planned on attending the protests out of a sense of moral obligation, but I didn’t expect any change in the outcome.

Five days later, the bill still may pass, but the possibility of its defeat has gone from non-existent to a chance—a chance that tens of thousands of Wisconsinites are fighting for.  And they’re fighting by showing up at the Capitol to march, carry signs, chant, and register their dissent.

The people’s voice, resonating loudly from the halls of the Capitol and the streets outside, is inspiring their representatives to act.  As readers of this blog may know, the fourteen Democratic senators who left the state Thursday to deny the Senate a quorum did so spontaneously as they gathered on the lawn of the Capitol that morning.  One senator was quoted as saying that seeing so many Wisconsinites out in protests for several days convinced him that he could not abide by business as usual.  In subsequent interviews, other members of the fourteen have called the protesters heroes, and they clearly seem to draw considerable energy from the people.  What if no one was outside the Capitol?  Or just a few hundred?  What if the senators had commissioned an overnight poll showing that state workers opposed Walker’s plan, but state workers and others didn’t show up to make their dissent known?  Would the senators have been inspired to such dramatic action?  I don’t think so.

In my view, the reason that the bill wasn’t passed on Friday as originally expected is because tens of thousands of Wisconsinites embodied their dissent in the capital city.  And their representatives followed their lead (hat tip to Sue Robinson for calling this point to my attention).  By leaving the state, the Democratic senators spoke with an embodied voice that would not have been possible in their chamber.  I’m a scholar of deliberation and true-believer in its transformative power.  But, on this occasion, no matter what arguments the Democrats would have put forward, they likely would have been defeated on a party-line vote.  Physically relocating their bodies enabled the Senators to express their opinions and to prevent a vote.  And they did so, as several of them have suggested, so that their colleagues could hear the voice of the people.

To be sure, the situation bringing about these protests in Madison is depressing, since Walker’s bill seems to be designed more to inflict pain than save money.  But the protests are inspiring, heartening, motivating.  They are a tremendously eloquent statement about the power of democracy.  Behold the voice of the people!

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.