For proof of the perceived importance of such a concept as digital social influence, one need look no further than Klout. The website/app uses analytics drawn from a user’s various social media profiles (like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to award the user a “Klout Score,” a numerical value between 1-100 that supposedly ranks one’s online social ‘influence.’ The Klout Score is based on multiple variables that can be summarized into three categories: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network. True Reach relates to the number of people your posts are reaching and how ‘engaged’ that audience is with your posts. Amplification is based on the type of engagement: how likely a post will be “Liked,” reposted, or replied to. Finally, the Network score looks at how influential your engaged audience is and boosts or lowers your score depending. In other words, you have to have influential friends if you want to be influential yourself!

Such metrics sound important to any business or company operating a social media account, and make no doubt that Klout offers business-appropriate analytic tools as well. But the concept of quantifying something as ephemeral and personal as ‘influence’ seems like more of digital media’s ‘softwarization’ of our everyday lives. Klout can be seen as yet another example of what David Berry refers to as lifestreaming, the growing use of self-monitoring technologies leading to a more “quantified self.” By quantifying something as fleeting (yet important) as online influence, several real-world behaviors are at stake.

If you’ve read this far and are wondering, “Who the hell would want or care about a Klout Score,” you aren’t the only one. Articles and online comics have already begun questioning the idea of a quantifiable metric for social influence and what purpose it serves other than to somehow feed a narcissistic ego. But the allure of big data might sway some companies, as being able to prove social influence could be seen as a big help in getting a job in any blogging, marketing, or online publishing field. And none of this yet looks at Klout’s own business model, which sees businesses like McDonald’s, Sony, Red Bull, Revlon, Chevy, and more offering Perks to users with high enough Klout scores in relevant social categories. The attainment of Perks doesn’t require the earner to promote the product, but the hope is that such corporate goodwill influences the user to spread the good word of the folks at (Insert Company Here).

In other words, now everyone can become a celebrity! Just as stars are given free clothes, cars, and more simply because they are frequently seen, now everyone can get that treatment if they have enough (‘important’) people following them and engaging with them on a frequent basis. By attempting to establish an ‘influence’ economy, Klout begins to blur the line between celebrity and the everyday, where celebrity isn’t a separated social class but a process one can work towards. Being ‘Internet Famous’ is no longer seen as a lower status to ‘real-life’ fame. The two are blurring together, making it less likely to be one without the other.

This all brings us back to all us academics following and contributing to #SCMS14. I returned home from Seattle expecting my engagement during the conference would drastically boost my Klout Score from my middling 50 (I swear it’s for research!), but alas, I was denied. Now I’m not blaming all of you folks for not being influential enough to make my engagements with you count for more. What I am proposing is that we spend more time reflecting on the purpose behind and impact of our online social engagements. We might not be interested in becoming ‘Internet Famous’ or growing our Klout Score to earn some great Perks from Samsung, but we ought to be concerned about how our actions are being perceived and the type of personas we are crafting. Relatedly, we also need to be mindful and cautious of quantifying ourselves when the prospect is becoming so easy. If there is anywhere we should be thinking qualitatively, it is in our social interactions. My fear is the more we spend time putting ourselves onto digital platforms, the more we seem interested in putting digital platforms onto ourselves.

Note: Talk about timing! The day this post was saved to go live, Klout was purchased by Lithium for $200 million. Make of this what you will, but this only adds support to the idea of quantifiable online influence.

Image: James Turrell, Dhatu, 2010

A year ago, Neil Verma and I assembled a panel for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference titled, “The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies,” aimed at mapping renewed engagement by radio scholars with concerns traditionally classified under the heading of “aesthetics”: among them, analysis of narrative structure and broadcast genres, methods of spatial and temporal representation, styles of vocal performance, and experiential qualities of radio listening. This turn to questions of aesthetics has also swept the field of television studies, with a proliferation of work on narrative complexity, TV genres, visual style and sound style, performance studies, and viewing experiences engendered by television’s changing technological interfaces. Yet, despite its prominence in contemporary media research, few efforts have been made to trace the origins of this aesthetic agenda or assess its current methods and goals. A genealogy of the aesthetic turn, I suggest, in fact reveals a return to and affirmation of core concerns extending back to the founding moments of American media studies. While recognizing this rich history, in assessing directions for future work on media aesthetics, I wish to argue the value of a specifically production-oriented approach, as an updated project of “historical poetics” that blends traditional tools of textual analysis with methods derived from current work in production studies.

An aesthetic agenda has, to some degree, been a part of the media studies project from the start, even in the “effects” tradition to which subsequent humanities-oriented approaches are commonly contrasted. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport’s founding 1935 study, Psychology of Radio, for instance, pursued a detailed investigation of radio’s distinctive modes of affective engagement (its “psychological novelty”) and the presentational styles needed to “conform to the requirements of the medium” (182). In their 1955 Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld lauded this attention to the experiential qualities of different media, while reminding researchers that the “content analysis” on which effects research relied also required close attention to “form,” or the presentational techniques used to render content via particular delivery channels (22).  Lazarsfeld championed this same approach during his tenure at the Rockefeller-funded Office of Radio Research, warning against exclusive reliance on quantitative studies and courting figures such as Rudolf Arnheim to develop what Rockefeller staff described as a “positive aesthetics of mass communication” that employed humanistic methods to illuminate the communicative properties and possibilities of mass media.† A fully developed program of mass communication research, as Lazarsfeld understood it, would demand strategic forays into the field of aesthetics.

Fig. 1. In a move lauded by Katz and Lazarsfeld, Cantril and Allport’s Psychology of Radio (1935) delineates key differences between storytelling techniques for radio vs. stage and screen entertainment (228).

Despite this early dalliance with humanities-oriented research methods, concerted development in this area was delayed until the television era. Beyond the initial flowering of more literary modes of narrative and genre study in the 1960s-1970s (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s discussion of this period), few movements did more to advance the aesthetic agenda than the cultural turn that followed in the wake of work by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in elaborating the foundations of their own multimodal “television studies approach,” the cultural turn brought not only new methods for analyzing audience “decodings,” but also valuable tools for studying institutional contexts and the “encoding” strategies pursued by media producers. From John Fiske and John Hartley’s work on semiotics, to new models of genre study by Julie D’Acci, Robert Allen, and Jason Mittell, cultural studies scholars have encouraged close reading and critical interpretation of media texts, while working to situate these texts within their larger industrial and cultural contexts. Importantly, then, concerns with questions of aesthetics in contemporary media studies represent not a radical correction and repudiation of the cultural turn, but rather a strategic renewal and intensification of founding tendencies within this movement.

Fig. 2. Cultural Studies interventions: The “encoding” half of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) calls for combined attention to media texts and their underlying institutional contexts.

The rise of production studies in recent years has offered further opportunities for enriched modes of aesthetic analysis. From John Caldwell’s seminal work on production culture, to Havens, Lotz, and Tinic’s influential “mid-level” approach, production studies scholars have argued the need to supplement structural analyses of media ownership and regulation with detailed studies of craft practices – moving industry studies, in effect, from the corporate boardroom to the studio floor. When coupled with methods of close textual analysis, consideration of struggles on the set and the “self-theorizing talk” (Caldwell) of producers in interviews and trade journals offers valuable tools for understanding, as Havens et al put it, “in an aesthetic sense . . . how particular media texts arise” and achieve dominance (237) – illuminating, in other words, the processes through which particular sets of programming forms and production styles are consolidated, and connecting them to the larger modes of production of which they are a part.

Fig. 3. A production-oriented approach to media aesthetics: Applying new tools for industry analysis from contemporary production studies, while reintegrating close analysis of resulting textual forms.

While most production studies work has remained focused on contemporary media and has yet to fully cultivate the aesthetic component of its research agenda, a production-oriented approach to media aesthetics holds great promise and may be of particular value for historical work. As an updated project of historical poetics, this approach combines close analysis of surface-level textual phenomena (the “what” of media programming) with critical study of the production techniques and institutional logics behind them (their “how” and “why”), isolating privileged formal properties and possibilities of media while recognizing these as historically contingent products of industrial sense-making and consent-winning. However, such an approach remains every bit as much “aesthetics” as “industry studies.” In a field increasingly occupied with an aesthetic agenda, why not call this certain tendency by name and begin serious discussion of its nature and future?

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† John Marshall, “Postwar Work in Film and Radio,” Memo to David H. Stevens, December 16, 1943, and “Interview with Rudolf Arnheim, January 3, 1944, Series 200R, RG 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Thanks to Josh Shepperd for his assistance in procuring these documents.