A Savvy Romance

Jason Mittell, Middlebury College: One thing that fascinates me about the show is how it simultaneously dismantles the romantic fantasy peddled by The Bachelor, and offers its own savvy version. Framed by its presentation on Lifetime, the series is targeting female viewers who “know better” than to be duped by conventional reality TV (a savvy attitude that Allison Hearn has argued is core to reality TV fandom). The narrative constructs Rachel as the stand-in for such savvy viewers—and yet makes her the object of desire for both the hunky cameraman Jeremy, and the hunky “suitor” Adam. Despite the fact that her life (and hair) is a total mess, Jeremy finds her hotter than his perky blond fiance, and Adam seems ready to choose Rachel over the line-up of primped and perfected contestants.

If one of the appeals of The Bachelor is the vicarious desire for women to imagine that if only they were in the competition, they could beat out those other shallow boobs for his heart, then UnREAL dramatizes that by putting a viewer surrogate for women who might scoff at such desires behind-the-scenes, and then making her inadvertently beat out all of the shallow boobs. She is the savvy viewer incarnate, and she wins the hearts of the show’s only two attractive straight men by being smarter than the other women, without even showering!

So I’m curious if others found themselves motivated by these romances? Any shippers? Or were you with me, on the sidelines rooting for the show’s purest “romance,” Quinchel?

Melissa Lenos, Donnelly College: I know I’m in the minority with this opinion, but I find the romance elements to be the least interesting part of the show. While I get the structural intrigue of framing a sort of anti-romance within the staged romance of Everlasting, I like the show best when it’s focusing on Rachel’s (and Quinn’s!) character development and motivations and general messiness as a human.

Kathleen Battles, Oakland University: You are not in the minority, Melissa. I also found the romances to be the least interesting parts of the shows, especially Rachel’s. Quinn’s “romance” with Chet was far more interesting, particularly as it was mediated by Quinn’s especially non romantic idea of love.

I also find myself deeply uncomfortable with the idea of “shipping” Quinn and Rachel. I found their relationship to be, as I said on Twitter, the central “romance” of the show—but that is different than shipping. Theirs is a complex relationship of teacher/student, boss/worker, idol/worshipper, etc. I also find the poster above deeply, and hilariously, ironic.

I can’t say how much I enjoyed the last minutes of this show (minus Jeremy’s visit to Rachel’s mother—which I only saw later as my recording clipped the end). The scene of Anna taking her moment (I love how self-aware the contestants were) and claiming something better for herself in her white dress followed by Quinn and Rachel discussing the coming season of the show was wonderful on so many levels. Their spat out “I love yous” were a perfect end. The show is unrelentingly grim, as many have noted, but I find the constant tension between the allure of romance and the realization that it is unattainable utterly compelling.

Phillip Maciak, Louisiana State University: I totally agree with your take on the final minutes of the finale. UnREAL is a show built around this narcotic, corrosive relationship between Quinn and Rachel, their shared competence, its costs, etc. But it was fascinating to me that the season didn’t actually end there and, instead, cut to that seedy bit of business that your DVR mercifully edited out for you. (The cut to Jeremy was even aesthetically disappointing, given that we’d just had that crane shot as a nice visual punctuation mark.) This was a great finale, but I thought that final twist was both a move to the show’s weak side—Margaret Lyons referred to Jeremy as a “humanoid henley”—and an uncharacteristic hedge. That “I love you” exchange, preceded as it was by Quinn’s essential admission of her betrayal and some pointed references to murder, left plenty of questions open for us. We don’t have to be shipping Quinn and Rachel to know that their relationship is both more interesting and more important than any of the erotic relationships on the show. Dredging up an essentially abandoned subplot from earlier in the season—one that was excessive even by this melodrama’s standards—to amp up the stakes seemed both confusing and confused. And so did the shift of focus back (away) to Jeremy, especially in context of Kathleen’s earlier point that the heterosexual couplings mostly serve to shift our gaze to relationships between women. I had kind of hoped we were heading into a glorious season two without either Jeremy or Adam, but Fake Chris Pratt isn’t going away that easy, I guess.

Melissa: That moment in the finale when Rachel says, “I don’t think our audience is interested in girls with jobs” felt like a shout out to those of us watching for the Quinn/Rachel relationship—and watching these women work is so satisfying!—rather than the romance. To me, this was first and foremost a show about a woman who is very good at her job, and sometimes loves her job, but also knows that her job isn’t very good for her. Sound familiar, academics? (I’m 30% joking.)

Myles McNutt, Old Dominion University: I definitely felt the chemistry between Rachel and Adam, but the show has an uneasy relationship with romance—its takedown of Everlasting‘s forward-facing romantic framing is thorough and matter-of-fact, but at the same time it leaned on the love triangle, and although the finale shifts to more complex “romances” like Rachel and Quinn there’s still the reliance on a more conventional romantic thrust when it comes to promoting the show. The original key art for the show somewhat inexplicably featured Jeremy, for example—the key art eventually shifted to Adam (the romantic partner with a clearer link to the themes of the show), but in both cases you see the show leaning on a more traditional Lifetime framing even as the writers showed more interest in other areas.

I feel this is a space the show could evolve in future seasons—the depiction of Everlasting itself ended up very scattershot, and unfocused, and while this is not a show about the contestants, I do feel it’s a space to clarify and focus—and evolve—its position vis-a-vis “romance” as it continues to live and breathe in this world.

Melissa: That’s what I was wondering by the end, Myles—if future seasons will embrace the less obvious—but ultimately more interesting—tensions explored in season one.

Kristen Warner, University of Alabama: I know how y’all feel about the romance function of the series. But I’m here for it! I love the romance genre and all of the many ways that it finds itself deployed in series where it may or may not be warranted (looking at you Homeland and The Good Wife) or may or may not be considered ironic like UnReal. So, yeah—give me all the lingering stares and the angsty dialogue and the flirty banter and the hay rolls and the scorched earth manpain and the romantic jitters. Haters gonna hate.

While I vigilantly tried to remain “shipper agnostic” in my choice of suitor for Rachel for many reasons (my distrust of Marti Noxon one of the biggest with regard to triangles—best not to unpack that 15-year-old-suitcase), it was fun to watch Rachel enact different versions of herself with both men. To Jason’s earlier point, I’m most certain our identification is linked to Rachel (although I have seen a number of women stress how much they wish to be Quinn especially because of the messiness of her relationship with Chet) and that she is indeed the best at making us “normal” girls feel powerful in how she pulls these men folks’ strings. That IS the quintessential essence of good fantasy. I mean, at one point she and one of her men roll around in a bale of hay for Crissakes. They are clearly playing at well-known romance conventions: the “Rustic bodice ripper” versus the “Billionaire English Gent” types to be specific.

My point here is that I don’t think UnReal is necessarily subversive in the way it sells the romance to the consumerable “savvy” viewer; I can think of a host of “new era” romantic comedies that do similar work. However, I do think the show excels in identificatory suture in that it makes it super clear that the things that excite and arouse women aren’t just hard bodies—although say what you want about Jeremy, but between the henley, the clawfoot tub, the glass shower and the log cabin house, I’d find myself at peace, I’m just saying—but that the personas she performs with each of those men are all wonderfully fantastical and immaterial. For me the scene that sums up the moment of meta romantic fantasy is when Rachel discovers that watching the fantasy version of herself and Jeremy on that beach talking about love and their future and (cis, white, hetero) normalcy is what ultimately gets her off after all of her previously failed attempts. Meta because as a viewer watching her watch a fantastical version of herself be happy how different is that from reading the romance novel or watching a soap opera and suturing yourself into it? Not really much difference at all.

Dana Och, University of Pittsburgh: Yes, all of this. That moment of Rachel achieving orgasm finally with that video of her and Jeremy is the indelible moment of the show to me. It is easy to mock the various romance myths being overtly marketed in dating reality shows—though another great moment was the horse riding scene—but this moment cuts to the myths of romance that we spin in our real lives (and then post on Facebook). Smart.

Jason: I totally agree with Kristen that Rachel as savvy romantic heroine has a long lineage in various genres and media, but I’m particularly curious about its articulation to the reality dating show. The Bachelor and its ilk seems to be television’s most unreconstructed site of conventional romantic fantasy, or at least it seems to be to me as an outsider who rarely watches them. As y’all have said, things have gotten (or have been for a long time) darker and more complicated on soaps, Lifetime movies, romcoms, romance novels, and prestige prime time dramas—but not (ironically, I guess) “reality.” Does UnREAL throw down the gauntlet to dating reality shows to acknowledge and complicate the fantasy?

Kathleen: I think the show actually reveals how complex the fantasy already is. If anything, the show doesn’t so much throw down a gauntlet to reality TV as to show how complex the work of building even the most basic fantasy of romance really is. Let’s not forget one of the series writers came from the world of The Bachelor. Here is a show that yes, asks a lot of hard questions, is filled with cynicism, but also keeps reminding us just how damn good Quinn and Rachel are at creating this fantasy world. Sure the fantasy is trite, but this show reminds us over and over again just how much work it takes to make it actually happen.

I really appreciate Kristen and Dana’s points about the ways that the show also includes so many nods to romance beyond reality. The love triangle itself is a pretty well worn trope central to so much fiction aimed at women—as in the various “teams” women can join. This show also plays with the good boy/bad boy set up well (Jeremy/Adam, Dean/Jess, Angel/Spike). I think we see moments where both Rachel—in the wonderful scene discussed above—and Quinn—between getting her ring and catching Chet—submit to the fantasy, even though they are ostensibly savvy.

I also feel like this comment might refer to the above two threads, but in this whole discussion, I just keep wondering why a show needs to be “dark” or “complex” to pass some legitimation test. I think one thing the show perversely does is demonstrate the extreme complexity of managing and running a reality show where unlike a scripted show helmed by the auteur showrunner, producers are forced to make something out of a hodgepodge of events. And though it doesn’t focus on the contestants enough, I think it also demonstrates a range of complex reasoning among the them. Why must we consistently equate “darkness” or “anti-ness” with “complexity” as well?

Reality and Pedagogy

Jason: One of UnREAL‘s hooks, especially with savvy viewers, critics, and scholars, seems to be the speculation over what we’re seeing is “real” concerning how the reality TV industry works. Knowing that Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worked as a producer for The Bachelor before applying that experience to the fictional world of UnREAL fuels such matters, despite her (assuredly lawyer-mandated) insistence that all actual events and characters are fictional. Whether specific events are fictional or fictionalized versions of real “reality,” there is no doubt that the series captures the underlying realities of reality TV production, where drama is created both on-set and in the edit bays, where casting is as crucial as it is in a Hollywood film, and where savvy contestants are self-aware of their own performances, potential leverage over producers, and possibilities of post-reality notoriety. In other words, nobody involved in making reality TV has any illusions that there is anything “real” happening—and I would argue this extends to a great deal of the audience as well.

Thus the series serves a pedagogical function, teaching viewers how to watch reality TV with an expanded understanding of what might be happening behind the scenes. Although I’ve read enough about reality TV that I felt sufficiently savvy, I was surprised by the role of “reality fluffers” like Rachel, working off-screen to heighten drama and point characters in the “right” direction. This pedagogical impulse interests me in large part because I’ve decided to teach the first season as the semester-long case study for my Television and American Culture course next spring. It will replace Homeland‘s first season, which I’ve used three times before—while Homeland worked well to teach serial narrative, explore premium television’s industrial strategies, and raise issues around representations of nation, gender, race, and religion, it has grown a bit tired for me. UnREAL allows more conversations about the meta representation of television itself, foregrounds questions of genre, and most importantly, highlights how television can be “worth” teaching beyond the elite realm of HBO/Showtime (and I know some of my bro-ier students will squirm productively at watching Television For Women!).

So how do the rest of you view the series pedagogically? How might you teach it productively? And how would you deal with inevitable questions that students will ask about “how real is it?”

Dana: I would pair it with Big Brother (a show that actually does have a very short window between events happening and then being constructed into storylines and aired, as well as one live show a week), Big Brother After Dark (“You will not talk about production” bellows over the loudspeaker endlessly while we watch unedited live feeds of “houseguests” eating pudding and talking about stubbed toes), and the final episode of The Hills. These texts offer a range of reality show examples for how the construction of the “real” is already visible and open to interrogation, not to mention the ways that these discussions of manipulation are part and parcel of audience investment, discussion, and resistance (in particular with the racism scandal unveiled and mainstreamed by Twitter users during #bb15 but visible in banal ways daily on Big Brother live feed, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblrs, blogs, and message boards). A quick peek at the #bb17 hashtag on Twitter will reveal lots of fans talking not only about how CBS shapes narratives for the three hours per week of televised shows, but also the “houseguests” misconceptions about playing to the audience. If so much of the denigration of soap operas and reality television is wrapped up in the projection of a naive and unsavvy feminine audience, a consideration of online discussions and artifacts could complicate and—gasp—maybe even dispel some of the horror at being aligned to Television For Women.

Phil: I’m with Dana. For me, I think the pedagogical value lies, not necessarily in its journalistic expose of how the sausage gets made, but rather in its up-front visualization of the constructedness of the “reality” space. I teach a course called “Multimedia Realisms,” for instance, and I think the pilot at least will be able to serve as a zippy introduction to the labor of manufacturing a documentary aesthetic during the weeks when we discuss Reality TV and its single-camera comedy offspring. The thing I like about it, though, is less in the way it explicitly teaches us about the genre (here’s how we do the talking heads, here’s how the narrative comes together, etc.) than in the way that it frames that mediation visually. For example, I love how many screens this show has constantly zipping in and out of frame—the dailies, the surveillance cameras, even the iPhones—and I look forward to having students literally name and peel away the layers as we move into discussions of texts for which those layers are not so readily visible.

Melissa: There was a moment early on—it’s after Adam cuts Britney—when Quinn walks down a wall tearing down a timeline with pieces like, “Britney hogs Adam at the Ballroom Dance, Britney ruins Pepper’s first kiss with Adam”—she’s making the point that they’ve already structured the entire season (before the second episode!) around the “character” Adam has just cut. Quinn is adamant that—above all other “types”—they must have a villain for the program to work. The wall has other things written on it—scheduled catfights and skinny dipping sessions—and when I first saw this scene, all I could think of was how I can’t wait to use it when I talk about narrative structure in any of my classes—media studies, film or literature-based. In the past, with first-year students, I’ve used the basic structure of Cinderella (and the old Classroom Jedi trick of having them try to name a story that isn’t basically some version of Cinderella)—I think a few screenshots of Quinn’s timeline could do a lot of that same work … while also fulfilling all of the same Cinderella narrative arc-points.

From episode 1.2, Quinn shows how “we built a whole season around Britney,” not accounting for her getting voted off in the first episode.

Next time on the finale of AnTENNA UnREAL: Branding and Race!

Post by Neil Verma, Northwestern University

In her 2013 book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey points out a contradiction in listening habits arising out of the proliferation of podcasts and other programs born in the digital space. On the one hand, listeners experience radio in perhaps more personalized ways than they did in the past, listening to what they want and when they want, often in the micro-airspace of a personal device. On the other hand, these same listeners represent their acts of listening to others through social media much more readily and broadly than did listeners in the past (p. 154).

Our listening acts are thus simultaneously both less “in public” and more so, while becoming far more available to monitoring by a variety of entities clamoring for every crumb of data on audience preferences and behaviors.

The good news is that this contradiction suggests that despite the insularity of their sonic lives, there remains a persistent desire within many people to listen together, if only virtually. Lacey points to the rise of curated listening events, which have expanded quite a bit in the years since her book was published. Note the upcoming Cast Party bringing podcast shows to film theaters, recent RadioLoveFest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the ongoing events of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Although it’s not really new, listening together without visual stimulus still feels unusual, like an experiment in experience. By liberating publics and concentrating them, providing a paradoxical collectivity and anti-sociality at once, group podcast listening is full of possibilities, although it is unclear what they are and how to harness them.

Poster for the RadioLoveFest live radio series at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In this post, I’d like to think about the classroom as a space in which to find out more about that. While we have opportunities to use public and virtual spaces to promote collective listening (this was the premise of my #WOTW75 project in 2013), and some of the most experimental thinking about podcasting is taking place online (see Sounding Out!’s Everything Sounds piece, Cynthia Meyers’s study of podcast business, and Jason Mittell’s coverage of Serial), it’s in classrooms where we can really “do” collective listening in a unique way. Unlike listeners in online groups, movie theaters, museums, and festivals, those in classrooms host critique without seeming to undermine community. Moreover, they benefit from a tremendous power that even educators themselves often undervalue: by meeting again and again, classroom listening enables conversations to grow, as the listening we do alone becomes the listening we do together.

According to this reasoning, teaching classes on podcasting isn’t just a new idea to attract students – although it does – but also a way of knowing the form of the podcast anew. In other words, podagogy (a word I didn’t make up, swear) is just as necessary to the current task of inventing podcast studies as it is to the task of applying it.

I recently had a chance to experiment with this in a course I taught on “Podcasting and New Audio,” which focused on narrative-driven podcasts in historical context. Broken into three sections – “What is a Podcast?,” “Possible Histories the Podcast,” and “Formal Problems / Critical Strategies” – the course gave opportunities for complicating student understanding of shows that many already knew well. By teaching Radiolab’s “Space” alongside a week on the history of sound art, for instance, we could rethink this show on discovery along lines suggested by conceptual art. Combining Serial with Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the history of conjecture, we dug into the show’s hermeneutics, considering the way the narration approaches “evidence” with boundless suspicion while also providing listeners with sonic details that work as “clues,” offering seemingly privileged windows into meaning, like tracks in the snow.

I found the historical classes – highlighting the hidden legacy of radio drama, documentary, and the radio “feature” on podcast formulas – especially gratifying. Even the most ardent podcast fans know few masterpieces of the past. Want to blow the mind of a lifelong devotee of This American Life? Assign The Ballad of John Axon. Trust me.

Cover for a 1965 LP edition of The Ballad of John Axon by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker.

I added two podagogical (there it is again) features to the architecture of the class, both of which involved listening to our materials as a collective, in the room.

In the first, I asked students to work in groups to produce recordings as responses to the reading, creating a quasi-podcast of their own. Prompts included: after reading Nancy Updike’s manifesto for radio, create a 1 minute “manifesto” using only sound (I got a great one based on Russolo); provide the shortest possible piece of audio that tells a “story” whose structure responds to how podcasters like Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass understand that term (the snap of a mousetrap, two seconds flat). Listening to these in class gave each group a chance to talk about their thinking, emphasizing sound as not just a vehicle of response but also as a way of knowing. Indeed, the very anticipation of being asked to create audio made them listen differently, tuning their receptors and making them as detail-oriented in the study of podcasts as many already are when it comes to TV and film.

That’s the same idea behind the second experiment in the course. In each meeting, one group would take the task of devising and leading a “Guided Exercise in Collective Listening.” To explain, I gave an example. On the first day, I broke the group into thirds and assigned them each one of Michel Chion’s “Three Listening Modes” (semantic listening for language, causal listening for sources of emanation, “pure listening” for sound objects) to shape how they listen to The Truth’s “The Extractor.” Then we listened to the whole piece and had a discussion about how it was different depending on our mode, and what points in the piece cued us to shift from one mode to another. In another case, I instructed them to make a four frame “storyboard” for Sean Borodale’s A Mighty Beast while we listened to it together, later asking what choices we have to make in “translating” from sound to a constrained number of visuals, as a way of troubling our lazy notions of the relationship between sounds and mental images.

Soon the students took over directing our listening activities. That became the richest part of the course, particularly for difficult episodes. Listening to Love + Radio’s brilliant but disturbing story “Jack and Ellen” encouraged us to look at how editing constructed the complex reliability – and the complex gender identity – of a blackmailer. A group that undertook Radiolab’s controversial “Yellow Rain” segment instructed us to listen for moments of shifting allegiance, an idea that sharpened our appreciation of the rhetorical use of silence in that piece, along with its bearing on questions of race and power.

Art from the “Jack and Ellen” episode of Love + Radio. Image: Cal Tabuena-Frolli.

Another value of listening together in class was more ineffable. Getting podagogy out of the pod, it became clear that these pieces simply hang in the air differently among other people than they do in the ear and alone, carrying discomfort, mortification and identity more heavily when they fill a room. By having both experiences, class listening introduces sequence to Lacey’s contradiction. Students begin with private listening on their own, have a second experience informed by peers as a group, and then explain their experiences and their discrepancies to one another. The rhythm moved from the public to the private and back again, something that a one-time collective listening event alone does not accomplish.

Curated listening in public is a laudable and exciting development, I hope we see more of it. I hope it gets even weirder. But in the classroom, collective listening can be a way of teaching the ear to be more critical, more aware of its own comportment and aesthetic responses, as well as of the habits of attention and social dynamics that underlie those responses, the very matters that podcast scholarship ought to be after.

Map of NBC’s combined red, blue, orange, and gold networks in 1928.

Post by Bruce Lenthall, University of Pennsylvania

Teaching a media history course nearly 15 years ago, one day I found myself stumbling in search of a metaphor to help explain to undergraduates the network radio system that arose in the late 1920s.

“Think about network stations on television,” I suggested.

“What are network stations on TV?” the students asked. “How are they different than any other stations? How do you find them?”

“Do you remember those two knobs on a television?” I asked, trying to make this as simple and concrete as possible. Succeeding, instead, in showing my age. “Essentially, one knob let you change between the national channels, the network channels. When you turned the other knob, you changed channels among the local, non-network ones.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, with the air of one who has figured out something that has long confused her, a student spoke up. “This is really helpful,” she said. “My grandmother had a television with dials on it and I never could figure out what you used them for.”

The point here is not the futility of trying to explain television knobs and dials to a generation in the age of the remote control. The point is not even my own occasional cluelessness about current cultural experiences. No, the real point here is about some of the challenges of teaching radio history.

When I teach the history of radio – as I have done in a variety of course contexts from a media in history course to a history of American culture in the 1930s – I am routinely reminded that for undergraduate students, the basics of the early radio systems have long since been lost from cultural memory. Notions of national networks, of limitations on the number of stations – and with that, limitations on what audiences might hear and who might speak on the air – are unfamiliar. Even the metaphors a later generation might use to recall some of the early days of radio no longer have currency.

At the same time, though, other elements of the American system of broadcasting as it rose to prominence remain so entrenched in our deeply held assumptions that it can be hard for students to question them at all. For many of my undergraduates, commercially funded, for-profit broadcasting seems such a natural and positive way to organize media that it can be difficult for them to step out of such a system and examine it.

Such challenges are, of course, common ones for instructors: how to make the unfamiliar understandable and to understand the familiar by reexamining it through new eyes. And such challenges are why, in part, studying media history in general, and radio history in particular, is so powerful. Comprehending the unfamiliar media of the past can help us to see the familiar ones all around us anew. Digging into the history of broadcasting provides a comparative perspective – a comparison that enables us to see the system of our own time as distinct. Examining the historical comparison and the decisions that shaped past radio allows us to take what seems natural to us and to see it as something that has been constructed by choices – choices that could have been made differently. In turn, that perspective enables students to consider the benefits and costs of those choices.

As my classes explore the history of radio, we peer through three sets of lenses: the messages and content on the air, what radio meant to its listeners, and the structure of the industry. I ask my students, which frame of reference provides the most valuable insights into radio’s past? Invariably, my students say we need all three perspectives to really understand radio. That’s true, of course. But it also reveals how hard it is for novice scholars to take a stand. All of us who research radio know there are many valuable approaches to our work that we could take; but we also know that we have to pick one because we cannot do everything at once. My students are less comfortable choosing the approach that offers them the greatest insight.

There is no question, though, which is the easiest area for them to discuss. The early radio programs may be foreign to students, but discussing those programs is not. When we talk about Amos ‘n’ Andy in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, my students quickly understand the importance of talking about the program’s construction of race. They may not see the differences between the works we read by Melvin Ely and Michele Hilmes on this question at first, but they get there. This becomes an opportunity to consider factors that made radio so popular and the role racial othering played in the creation of a mass audience. Similarly, students are comfortable considering Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” as a potential critique of the media itself (OK, for that one, they also see Citizen Kane to help them unpack Welles’s views).

My students have a more difficult time considering what radio meant for its listeners. Here I have raised for them some of the issues I address in my own book. What did it mean to connect with far-flung and often-imagined others? To be part of a mass audience? Where did listeners find a sense of control and where did they lack it? Maybe I am too close to some of these questions or maybe others need to come first, but I’ve never fully gotten students to engage with them. Instead, I have repeatedly found my classes tacking to questions of what was on the air and, even more, the early structure of the industry.

That last one, the structure of radio, is particularly hard for students to understand. It is not just, as I have said, that the comparisons we might offer are both too unfamiliar and familiar for them. More than that, such structures themselves were – and are – often invisible and inaudible. I also wonder if, in the United States, we are not always comfortable thinking about economic motives and structures as something open for questioning. The idea that a radio system that prized commercial success and the pursuit of profit could be something we created, rather than the natural state of a society that values freedom, can be a jarring one. Exchange students from France and Germany in my classes have been quicker than many of their peers to envision means of funding media other than through advertising.

Because the centralized and commercial system of broadcasting is so hard to make plain to students, it is doubly difficult to present alternatives that existed. Alexander Russo has a detailed account of the structures that bolstered radio beyond the networks – an account I have never taught. How to showcase for students the limits of a structure, when the students do not know the structure itself?

Ultimately, understanding that structure requires students exercise imagination as much as analysis: visually representing radio’s complex reach, for instance, and, critically, imagining alternatives to a commercial network system.

In the end, though, the difficulties in teaching this material help make it so compelling. When students successfully come to terms with radio’s messages, meanings and structures, they take something opaque and make it their own, and they take something that is very much their own and find the distance to shine a light into it. Considering a host of historical media systems and critiques – hopefully – sets them up to decide what they value in, and to consider alternatives to, contemporary media as well.

And if, in the process, they learn that once upon a time, people changed channels by walking across the room and twisting a dial, well, so much the better.

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, Jack Newsinger, completed his PhD in the department in 2010.

One of the key features of cultural and creative labor is the supposed emotional and psychic investments workers make into their careers.  It’s commonplace in the academic literature on the subject to discuss the oversubscription of cultural labor markets as a response to the intense appeal of fulfilling kinds of creative work, particularly to young people.  The desire for exciting, autonomous, non-alienated labor, in turn, makes people accept, and even welcome, the challenges and barriers of unpaid internships, precarity, low pay, and so on.  In this way the creative industries would seem to offer the antithesis of what David Graeber memorably calls “bullshit jobs”—the peculiarly modern sectors of the economy made up largely of meaningless activities with virtually no social value.  But is this really the case?  In this post, I want to reflect on the idea of bullshit jobs in the creative industries and what this might mean for pedagogy.

The Creative Industries

The story of the creative industries as a concept is well known.  Its origin is usually identified as the British New Labour government’s attempt to redefine itself as the party of post-industrial economic modernization, in which high technology, highly-skilled workers, and information would play the key roles.  Of particular importance to the development of government interventions in the form of policy was the perceived “spill-over” relationship between core creative activities (the creation of cultural expression in books, paintings, films, plays and so on), the industries of commercialization and reproduction (publishing, galleries and museums, DVD distribution, etc.), and the wider economy.  This allowed the values and practices of commercial sectors increasingly to determine the organization and management of the cultural sector, with the market assuming a much greater proportion of the role of cultural commissioning and authority than had been the case previously, and a much greater role in the management and regulation of productive capital in the form of ideas and labor (“creativity”), which fit well with New Labour’s political investment in neoliberal capitalism.

One of the features of Graeber’s argument is that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by a peculiarly unnecessary administrative bureaucracy.  Graeber singles out professional, managerial, clerical, sales and service workers as examples.  In the UK, the growth of the creative-industries policy concept has gone hand in hand with a massive increase in these bullshit jobs—the kinds of work perceived as essential to making money in creative sectors but that don’t contribute directly to cultural practice or human creativity.

Copyright is a prime example.  Copyright law and copyright protection have been at the forefront of the growth and integration of global distribution systems of the content industries.  In the UK, a review of copyright protection was the first major policy announcement from the Liberal Democrat–Conservative Coalition government in 2010.  And this, arguably, is concerned primarily with the capitalization of culture through its restriction.

In my own research into artworkers in the subsidized cultural sector, one of the key defining characteristics of small arts organizations over the last 20 or so years is the rise of the full-time fundraiser.  This is the person—probably at one time or maybe even still an artist, now an administrator—who spends his or her time looking for the next grant, developing partnerships, reading criteria, filling in grant applications, writing bids and so on.  This activity fulfills the demands of a funding ecology in which organizations must compete with one another for subsidy—an artificially created “market for support” that tries to ape commercial markets to instill the values and practices of the private sector in artists and art.  And the full-time fundraiser is absolutely essential to the survival of organizations, while adding nothing to cultural resources or creative practice.  There is something inherently bullshit about the thousands upon thousands of hours wasted in this way.

And that’s not to mention all the bullshit tasks that increasingly characterize work in the creative sectors.  Again, in my research, the near-obsessive demands of evaluation and monitoring that go hand in hand with subsidy—upon which the creative economy still depends—are a feature of all kinds of creative labor.

We might add to this list all the bullshit that surrounds employability in the creative industries, from informal dress codes to the obligatory Linkedin profile—the total governmental absorption implied in the construction of the “creative self.”  As Mark Banks puts it, “cultural workers today are being induced to offer employers the full, productive capacities of their unconscious bodies.” There is a clear moral dimension to the levels of self-exploitation required to “make it” in creative sectors, which ties in well with Graeber’s discussion of the moral elements of bullshit work: “the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing.”

Teaching Creatives

I teach a class at the University of Leicester in the UK called “Working in the Creative Industries.”  It aims to equip students interested in these sorts of careers with a more informed understanding of the history and conditions of creative work, and ultimately to help them get where they want to be.  As such, we focus on things such as precarity, internship culture, institutional sexism and inequality, and the contradictory evidence in the research literature around the qualities, pleasures and pitfalls of careers in the creative and media industries.

I say to the students at the outset, “if you want to work in the creative industries now, you won’t by the time we’ve finished.”  But of course they do—their enthusiasm is not diminished one bit by all the talk of exploitation.  This is, perhaps, either a measure of the success of bullshit as ideology in creative sectors, or a measure of the strength of the human desire for autonomy and creative expression.  However, while it is no longer possible to talk of creative labor in wholly positive terms—there is too much evidence to the contrary—in my view the more negative, repressive and exploitative aspects of creative work and the creative industries should be much further towards the forefront of research and pedagogy than is now the case.

One recommendation: re-imagine the function of TV texts in the cultural studies project and in doing so revise our role as scholars/teachers and the foundation of our expertise. Approaches to the politics of TV representation (a central lynch pin in cultural studies models) have remained relatively stagnant. In many ways, they still reflect the ideological approaches central to the field at its birth in the 1970s. Despite evolving interest in contexts of production and the conceptualization of reception as a process of negotiation, a key function of the teacher/scholar has remained the same: to open readers’/students’ eyes to the unnoticed ideological assumptions in texts by offering sophisticated readings that marshal representational theories, close textual analysis, and historical perspective.  Because such work is usually invested in a political project (e.g., feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, queer theory), the process of understanding the ideological implications of representations are a matter of opening students’ eyes to the politically problematic nature of those representations.

I apologize for falling into the pitfall of making sweeping, unsupported characterizations.  However, I do so in order to identify the most taken-for-granted ways we operate as teacher/scholars and to historicize the utility of certain kinds of expertise.  We work hard to know more about how texts operate than students and assume that our job is to impart more sophisticated ways of understanding texts, power, and politics. That approach made sense at a time when television constructed a mythic mainstream through images and narratives shared by large percentages of the population.  But I don’t believe it is as productive for intervening in a society as profoundly marked by the fragmentation of cultural consumption as ours.  Texts are still ideologically complex and politically invested, of course, but they don’t function the way they used to sociologically which should lead us to change how we use them pedagogically. TV texts don’t seem to be well suited any more for the kind of cultural studies interventions we have traditionally used them for (i.e., to make students understand culture as a site where systems of power get reproduced and contested with the ultimate goal of producing a more just social world) because both TV and society have changed.

In response to such changes, I would like to suggest that we shift our role and the basis of our expertise.  What could cultural studies work on TV look like if we saw our function as facilitating conversations among our students (and ourselves) about social identity, privilege, and power centered on their and our differing engagements with and feelings about television programming? To many of us, that may sound like we already do, but I believe we can do that differently—more explicitly and wholeheartedly. Executing such an approach fully would require different skills (and different modes of scholarship) than the ones we are socialized in during graduate school; our expertise would not be based (at least solely) on providing the smart, theoretically sophisticated reading of a text, but rather on helping students talk to each other about their experiences with media. It might require us to be sociologists, mediators, or even therapists as much as or more than cultural theorists and textual and industry analysts.  Such an approach might offer benefits better suited to our current context in which cultural segregation and political polarization seem to be as much of a problem for social progress as the homogenizing dynamics of network television were in the 1970s.

The approach we’ve followed up to now develops students’ capacity for critical thinking; it is predicated upon the assumption that demystifying how media texts operate or how the media industries are structured are practical ways to give students the skills needed to become responsible, liberally educated citizens. Giving students more information about the dynamics of cultural production and developing their ability to think critically is vital. But I also believe that there are limits to the benefits of that approach; just because people know more, doesn’t mean they will do better (to paraphrase and challenge Maya Angelou).  The new approach I suggest here could develop students’ capacity for empathy.  As various academic traditions have long pointed out, empathy is a socio-political competency needed to translate knowing better into doing better. TV studies could serve as a tremendously valuable arena where students can develop those abilities; in doing so, Television Studies could once again become a valuable part of the cultural studies project.

 
Matthew J. Smith, Wittenberg University:

Curatorial. It’s a curious word that I must admit I don’t recall having used myself to describe anything that I do as a teacher of media, but it’s one a number of the presenters involved in the Faculty Seminar used to describe their roles in selecting and presenting materials for and about television. I had never thought of the work of television producers as likened to the informed discretion of museum and art gallery directors, but the usage makes perfect sense now. Each selection in terms of what goes into a finished television production is borne of that curatorial sensibility, as producers make paradigmatic choices among a host of alternatives and exercise their insight to achieve a product that—when at its best—proves to help storytelling reach its ideal impact.

As I thought more about our week, curatorial also seems to be a perfect term to describe the avocations of many elements of the experience. When we arrived at the Academy headquarters at the start of the seminar, our first stop was the “Hall of Fame Plaza” where statues, busts, and reliefs of some of the most potent figures in television history were thoughtfully laid out over an acre of North Hollywood real estate. We also met employees of the Academy whose job it was to preserve the history of the medium. Karen Herman heads the Archive of American Television, a phenomenal oral history project whose fruits are online and available at the click of a mouse. There was John Leverence, Vice President of Awards, who has coordinated the primetime Emmys since the early 1980s. He introduced us to the history of the statuette and the awards program. And then there was our trip to Warner Bros. Studios, where our guide, production designer John Shaffner, gave us a tour of the historic studio. Outside each sound stage hangs a plaque commemorating the individual television series produced therein, including one where Shaffner had designed the sets for Friends.

Although much of our week was focused on how television is produced and where it might go next, I was gratified to encounter a good deal of the history of how we got to this point. I’m happy to curate such experiences into my own teaching of the medium and its history henceforth.

Todd Sodano, St. John Fisher College:

Over the last decade, storytellers have flocked to HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax, not merely because of premium cable networks’ inherent freedom to use strong language, sexual content, and brutal violence. Rather, their freedom to tell a compelling story on those platforms is paramount. Jenni Sherwood, senior vice president of development and production at HBO, said on a panel focusing on HBO’s Game Change that decisions at her network are made based on a script: “Where is the intelligence in this? [Where is] the creativity? How is it going to be received?” Neither she nor anybody else who works in cable and who spoke at the Faculty Seminar yearns to offer nudity, language, or violence simply because they can. Greg Yaitanes, showrunner of the forthcoming Cinemax series Banshee, said these elements “come from a place of character or story.” HBO painfully learned more than a decade ago (see The Mind of the Married Men – actually, don’t see it) that having four men speak candidly about sex and relationships wasn’t a recipe for instant success just because it mirrored the spirit of Sex and the City.

Variety’s Brian Lowry, who moderated the showrunner panel discussion with Yaitanes, Cynthia Cidre (TNT’s Dallas) and DeAnn Heline (ABC’s The Middle), acknowledged that writers boast how the best part of working in pay cable is not having act breaks. In advertiser-supported television, the tail (commercials) wags the dog (programming); conforming to this traditional structure can challenge and frustrate the writer. Yaitanes, who used to run Fox’s House, said that, as a writer, eventually “you start thinking you’re there to fill in the spaces between the ad breaks.” The ability to pursue narratives that avoid the six-act structure is strong incentive for storytellers. Starz CEO Chris Albrecht (formerly of HBO) told Lowry that the absence of the ad breaks was the most important freedom on his old network. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to pass along to our students who are pursuing careers in film and television is to understand storytelling and structures. Cidre declared, “Structure is key. Who wants what, and who’s keeping them from getting it? This is the basic structure of everything.”

Randy Caspersen, Northern Illinois University:

Each of my visits to Los Angeles becomes more bittersweet than the last. I lived there for nine years where I worked in television production. My best friends still live there. While I was making new friends and learning a ton about television biz at the Academy of Television Art & Sciences Foundations Faculty Seminar by day, I moonlit with friends at night. One, a big producer on the biggest new competition show on television, launched me into the audience of a live taping. Another friend, a make-up artist for the highest-rated show in syndication, recounted her recent staph infection from breast expanders after her double mastectomy. My oldest friend, a beloved roommate from college undergraduate days, told me about how he has been unemployed on and off and just borrowed $300 from his parents while standing in front of his bookcase which uses two of his three Emmys as bookends.

When I returned to Northern Illinois University, I prepared my lecture for my Introduction to Studio Production students with two slides. The first is a “Greetings from Los Angeles” postcard circa 1940’s which shows the city name in block letters with the city’s famous buildings illustrated inside each letter. The second slide, a modern re-imagining of the same, filled the letters in with cartoony portraits of a drug bust, police chase, an overdone plastic surgery victim, an overcrowded freeway and a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard. I launched into my lecture about the great things I saw during the Academy’s seminar—the showrunners, the above- and below-the-line job panels, the tours of studios and special effects houses, the fever surrounding emerging technologies—along with the caveat that there is a dark side to this land of dreams.

We got a lot of advice to bring home to our students from the very talented industry professionals. Internships are a great start. You must start at the bottom, work your way up through the ranks and hold out for a decent job for at least a ten-year period. The key thread to everything—whether you are the production designer for The Big Bang Theory or the showrunner for Dallas or the DP for American Horror Story—was that everyone is storyteller at heart and that television is no longer cinema’s simpler, uglier sister.

My students still wonder: what is that “dark side of LA” and “how am I going to make it?” I wonder that question, too. I left the city because I never saw myself “making it” even though I was a producer on a hit show. Maybe the greatest lesson of the seminar came from Nashville executive producer R.J. Cutler who said, crude paraphrasing here, that the people who make it aren’t the geniuses but those who are willing to stick it out over time and work the connections they made when they first came to town. He said genuine curiosity into how human beings behave continues to drive him toward creating non-fiction and narrative media. Oh, yeah, and if you make it, there is big money in that creation. I guess the dark truth of LA is that it will always be looking for how it can monetize all creative media pursuits. And so it is nice to visit Los Angeles and also nice to leave.

The assignment’s goals were to have students present historical research into a specific genre and analyze how contemporary iterations of their genre interact with one another. Ideally, it would also link learning with social technologies students are already using, and spur students to consume social media more critically. As with all experiments there was some success and some failure.

In the success column, the most invested students have demonstrated that not only have they researched their genre’s history, current status including critical reception and ratings, and identified common themes or preoccupations in the genre, but also that they are capable of applying and synthesizing their research into cogent, creative output. Additionally, students who are scornful of the word “fan” readily admit to seeking out transmedia content from games to webisodes, fan videos, and general web-based snarkery, so this assignment has lead them to reevaluate their ideas of fans and fannish practices as well.

In the failure column, the interaction among students works best when I plant questions or suggest areas of overlap they might discuss with their fellow genres. Because the assignment is cumulative for the semester, it’s also easy for less eager students to check out when there is no threat of imminent grading. And much like Miranda Banks warned me when, based on her own experience, she counseled me not to do this assignment, it is enormously time consuming to read, participate in, and grade—and I only have 17 students.

In the end, the question is, would I assign this project again? Yes, absolutely. Despite the hours it takes, grading Google+ is enjoyable. The students report enjoying it too. In addition to research and analysis, it requires creativity, humor, collaboration, and peer response. When it works, students return to it throughout the semester, building their profiles and interactions based on new information from class materials and discussions.  It does not sacrifice the all-important practice of writing, but allows for practice in less formal modes of writing and in distinguishing between platforms and audiences, which is a skill many of my students struggle with.

In response to this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece decrying the possibility of new, non-monograph formats for scholarly work in the humanities, Mark Sample blogged about the idea of serial concentration. Both of these pieces are about scholarly rather than student work, but Sample’s argument applies here as well. He describes series of shorter pieces working as a process to build ideas and receive continuous peer feedback (very unlike the monograph or traditional research essay mode), which is exactly what happens when a social media assignment works well. All research and writing assignments would ideally involve drafting and feedback from peers and instructors before arriving at a final product. But most courses have content to get through, so writing by necessity becomes a method of evaluation rather than a pedagogical process. This kind of serialized thinking, writing, and creating builds that process into the assignment itself, ideally making this a learning project in addition to a reporting project.

This is the first in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the goals, challenges, successes, failures, and student responses to a social media based assignment. While I am by no means the first to assign students to create social media personae or tweet about media theory, I hope that sharing my experiences will garner some brilliant tips and suggestions, spur a conversation about the values and pitfalls of this kind of digital pedagogy, and perhaps even inspire someone to try out something similar. In light of last weekend’s New York Times piece “Blogs vs. Term Papers” and the response from Cathy Davidson, a Duke University English professor and co-founder of the Digital Humanities community HASTAC, the concept of the Google+ assignment seems especially timely.

The class is Contemporary TV Genres, and at our first meeting, each student selected a genre for which they would create a Google+ profile. During the semester, they must write an About page defining their genre and its history. They must post pictures and links illustrating past and present iterations of the genre, complete with comments and captions analyzing their significance to the genre’s evolution over time. They must shoot or edit at least one video, and they must interact with each other via wall posts, relationship statuses, +1s (Likes in Facebook parlance), sub-circles (Google+’s organizing principle is the Circle, rather than Facebook’s List), and comments on classmates’ posts. The tasks cover all levels of thinking from recall to evaluation and application, and require students to practice writing, research, and analysis skills. In short, it encompasses all of the course’s learning goals, and if it works, we’ll create a community of characters/genres that is fully interactive and has the bonuses of being fun and of linking classroom content to lived social experience.

In speaking to others who have experimented with similar assignments, the number one problem cited was assessment. How do you assign a grade for a student impersonating the procedural genre changing their relationship status to “Married to Melodrama?” We all know grading is subjective, but how to create a rubric for something like this? I’ve scheduled four checkpoints during the semester, at which time each student will receive a letter grade and written feedback. Each item on the Google+ page is assigned a point value. 1 point possible for including a hometown, 25 possible points for writing the historical About page, for example. One advantage of this type of assignment is the ease with which students can revise, change, rewrite, etc. in response to feedback. The four checkpoint grades will be averaged for a final grade at the end of the semester.

Besides the practicalities of assessment, of course the biggest question is why. Why do this instead of response papers or individualized research or analysis essays. In fact students will also have to write 3 short analysis papers representing different aspects of or stakeholders in TV genres. But the Google+ assignment aims to link learning with social technologies students are already using, spurring students to use the tools and consume the social media more critically, and making the classroom material relevant to and even part of their daily activities…We’ll see how it goes!

I suspect it might be the same for all of us, as increasingly colleges—even the research 1s—are being “brought to accountability” for improving the overall student “experience” as economic forces beyond our control place pressure on every level of academia. How do we as maintain professional productivity while also committing fully to pedagogical aims (truly the latter being what drove most of us through graduate school)? I offer here a few tips, admittedly from someone at a teaching-oriented college, but one that has been emphasizing more traditional research goals as well. (I also speak as someone tenured, realizing that the pressures are significantly different pre- and post-.)

1) Find someone in your department with whom to build a trusting relationship…and be that person for someone else. Both before and after tenure, there will be times when you feel overwhelmed…Sometimes by the sheer amount of hours needed in a semester to plan classes and conference presentations and write papers and develop that book….Sometimes by the curveballs that life can throw you with health, family, and golden opportunities that you can’t pass up. You need one person you can spill your guts to, no questions asked and no judgment proffered, who can a) make you feel better and b) intercede on your behalf when necessary. I recently witnessed a stellar teacher killing herself to finish a documentary, teach a new multi-departmental class, write a report for a new administrator, and all while dealing with (no exaggeration) a brain tumor that needed to be removed. I stressed to her that one semester of a lackluster class wouldn’t kill her—but not removing a brain tumor might. Sounds logical, but you all know you’ve been paralyzed similarly (if not as extremely) by the pressures to actually teach meaningful classes, deliver professional productivity, and have a literal or symbolic “life.” Have a sounding board and a mediator—it will mean all the difference. By the same token, think of your department humanistically: be there for someone else when you are able and it will come back to you.

2) Know yourself as an academic, in the most glorious sense of this position—and then know your limits (and those of your institution). We know there are certain things we must do to achieve tenure and maintain our employment. But we often become so obsessed with this—or the next step up after—that we forget to consider our reasons for going into the field to begin with. What are your priorities in terms of your career? Are you more driven by research? More by teaching? Equally so? Do you aspire to periodic forays into administration?  Is it important to you to be connected with the local community in which you work? Figure this out—in short, figure out what makes you happy as an academic, and then foreground that in your choices. A caveat: your priorities might shift—as might those of your institution (the latter clearly more nerve-wracking). Allow this to happen; Freud be damned, we keep developing way past 4 years old. Changing with the times, your personality, your environment, and your life circumstances doesn’t make you fickle—it is what makes you better at what you do. Students know if you don’t care; your family and friends know if you don’t care…in the end, you need to know what matters at any given moment and choose your activities accordingly.

3) Lay claim to your rights and needs as a human being…but realize you’re not an island. This is admittedly easier after tenure, but see #1! There are only so many hours in a day. Your health matters, your relationships matter. And no matter what your priorities (see #2), your happiness as a scholar matters as well. We sacrifice a lot to go into academia—better pay elsewhere, deferment of other activities, buying a house instead of a student loan :D…And most of us do this with noble intentions. Take pride in this—and remind others to respect your choices. And quite frankly, minimize your exposure to those who don’t respect your choices. This means at times saying “no”—to the committee invitation, to the request to serve administratively, to the pleas to review a book or article, to the student demands for a new class…You get the drift. A second caveat, however: Your choices impact others—your colleagues, your students, your family. Take heed of the fact that you are in academia—in other words, you work in conjunction with a complex of people who are human beings trying to do the best they can. Respect them—but make sure they respect you, no mater where you are on that ladder.

So, much is vague here, yes? How do I survive wanting to teach—loving to teach—but also yenning for time to research and write (and yes, even administrate)? I don’t have all the answers yet…but what lets me breathe is accepting that not having all the answers and making the occasional mistake is ok. This fall I’ll figure out what to embrace letting go of; I may sleep a little less, but in the end I’ll also sleep better knowing that I’m not trying to do it all.

Part of humanities’ ludo-anemia, of course, can be attributed to resources: there are few available these days thanks to the sad state of states’ budgets. Most public institutions are in a period of sustained retrenchment, which is compounding the humanities’ decades-long plight of diminishing allocations and importance in the university hierarchy. Many humanities programs these days are fighting just to stay afloat, and as a result new initiatives are shelved or shot down in intensifying turf wars sparked by the mandate to reorganize in order to preserve departmental missions and core offerings.

That said, part of the humanities’ tentativeness is also probably epistemological. It has been a long time since the humanities were direct-to-market providers, if indeed they ever were. Humanities education is not typically job-specific training, but rather the enhancement of critical and perspectival faculties. The opening in computer games, at this point, is precisely in worker preparation; the industry is hungry for talent to press into service. As a result, there is something of a disconnect between what the humanities do and what games (or at least their commercial developers) require.

Likewise, computer games are an expressly computational medium. From the binary code that underpins them to the screen HUDs that display the quantification and recording of play, computer games are ineluctably about numbers and their calculation, extrapolation, and delimitation. For all their diversity and remarkable ability to explicate the human condition, the humanities are traditionally not so inclined toward calculation (a disinclination further intensified, in many cases, by a strategic and ideological push back against the increasing quantification and corporatization of university processes and assessment).

All this is to say that what came out of the round table was interesting and fun, if perhaps wildly impractical. What I liked most was the idea of computer games as a computationalizer, as a sly way to articulate numerology and humanism. It is a fraught and problematical articulation, to be sure, but a delightfully cheeky one in terms of expanding (rather than always defending) the humanities’ purview at a time when that ken is being so sorely pressed. The timing is also right: so much of human action, communication, expression, and understanding  today is shaped by the binaries and hexadecimals of computer hardware, software, and networks. Who better to understand the workings and implications of this phenomenon than humanists, the very folks who have been probing our species’ behavior for millennia?

So, Antenna community, what do you all make of this? Where does the study of computer games fit in the humanities? Or better yet, where could it fit?