Oh hi blog, no offense, but I do most of my internettery on twitter these days. One of the keys to twitter's wild success has been the capacity of its stripped-down interface to paradoxically inspire a cornucopia of practices driven by the swarming creativity of its users. Although the update box at the top is still captioned "What are you doing?" people type into it any and all information that can be meted out in 140 characters, including reviews, live commentary, poetry, jokes, links, meme responses, calls to action, and messages to friends. The site's open API and ecumenical attitude has facilitated innumerable hacks and mashups that offer workarounds for some of the features that twitter lacks, as well as illuminating and fanciful ways of interfacing with its worldwide cloud of presence.

( twitterfic.com )

Television on the internet offers alternative modes of distribution for professional productions that fall through the cracks of the broadcast system. a case in point: Nobody's Watching. first of all -- HOW am I only finding out about this NOW?! clearly somebody out there is falling down on the job. I'd been hearing about the pilot in passing because it stars Paul Campbell of Battlestar Galactica. and then galacticanews has been linking these seemingly amateur viral videos called Nobody's Watching -- I thought perhaps because they were about BSG, but no. so I decided to put the pieces together. the long and the short of it is that this phenomenon is BRILLIANT.

let's start with the pilot itself, the premise of which is dizzyingly self-reflexive: "two longtime friends send in a tape they filmed of them bashing today's sitcoms. A WB... executive challenges them to make a good sitcom. The thing is that this is really a ploy to create a reality TV show about the making of a sitcom. The two friends have to live on the sets in front of a live studio audience" etc. (wikipedia). but it doesn't stop there! continuing in the words of _plasticity_, who has agreed to let me reappropriate parts of his lecture (re: Richard Dienst’s chapter The Outbreak of Television):

The real pilot, however, was cancelled due to the fact that – really – no one was watching, and that was the end until the pilot was released onto YouTube where it became a smash success. After the success of the show online, NBC decided to pick up the rights to the show on the condition that it maintained its popularity until one of the characters, who began working on another show, was free to pursue this program. Now, there are online "webisodes" which feature the actors, playing characters who trying to entertain internet audiences with various antics in order to maintain the popularity of the show...


( so... )

we *heart* _plasticity_ :). in summary: watch Nobody's Watching and catch viral TV!

I happened to sit down next to someone's discarded Wall Street Journal on the train yesterday (as an aside, can it really be published by Dow Jones & Company, as it states boldly at the top??). When I got bored with watching House on my iPod, I picked it up to thumb through. Which is how I happened to spot an article about fan fiction on the cover of the Pursuits section -- to which I could only respond, "SRSLY?!?" "Rewriting the Rules of Fiction" features Cassandra Claire, shoebox_project, high profile Austen and L Word projects, and several other dubiously random selections in House, Lost, 24, Grey's and Batman. I got it all underlined, so here is your review, in list format.

stupid and/or offensive things about the article
- It suggests that the vast diversity of fanfic can be reduced to "several entrenched tropes" such as "prequels" and "crossovers" -- not that what we do doesn't have its specificity, but this is hardly the most nuanced discussion of it.
- It suggests that shippers "often invent -- relationships between characters" -- as if there is a bright line around canonical sexuality, which is precisely the notion that fanfic challenges.
- Continuing in this troubling vein, it defines slash as fic that "creates gay relationships," and goes on to state that "slash fiction is often sexually graphic" -- as if het fic isn't! omg dirty gay sex oh noes!!! there is apparently a "stigma of slash" that "has made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of... looking for ways to capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience." I would say that I'm almost happy about the homophobia if it indeed slows the capitalist reincorporation of our labor -- except that I think there's plenty of evidence, at this point, that homosexuality is just as commodifiable as every other sexuality.
- Because, of course, the first project of FanLib was a "fanisode" contest for The L Word. The article then chooses to focus on the only male among the seven winners (probably because he most neatly fits their hook of parlaying fanfic into pro writing, but still).
- See further the blurb about House fic on the chart: "Ms. Elliot's stories often explore the friendship between Dr. House and Dr. Wilson -- a departure from much of the 'House' fan-fiction on the Web, which frequently focus on imagined romantic combinations of characters." Translation: isn't it refreshing to see some nice clean gen fic, instead of the fabrication of all these perverse scenarios that force House and Wilson to have sex! (They are, for the record, one of the gayest couples on TV.)
- Overall the selections disproportionately highlight fanboyishness with such anomalous choices (e.g. their 24 story, whose "action-heavy plot differs from many other '24' fan-fiction stories, which often center on romance"), and generally make "shippers" of all stripes sound like a marginal faction ("ABC's medical series [Grey's Anatomy] is a popular category for 'shippers' -- fan-fiction writers who like to focus on relationships -- because of the TV show's soapy plotlines" -- as if all the other shows aren't shipped). And unsurprisingly, there's nary a slasher in the bunch (except, they make it out like Shoebox Project is James/Lily, whereas I think it's actually more about James/Remus?! and then slap on a disclaimer about how it "may not be appropriate for young children").

interesting and/or useful things about the article
- It explicitly connects fan production (which is, of course, the vanguard) to the more general explosion of interactive, distributed media: "The rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of amateur-created content online... on sites such as YouTube and MySpace" -- which totally validates me and the rest of us who are pegging the relevance of our work on this connection.
- "professional writers say their lawyers advise them not to read fan fiction to protect themselves against charges of plagiarism": I've heard this before, but never so authoritatively. Ironic, isn't it? I understand that there's a power differential here, and if copyright law protects our creative appropriations more than theirs, it's doing what it should. But I'm still not happy about the prospect of a chilling effect on the collective authorship of mass media texts, even one that operates in reverse.
- Harry Potter is *officially* the fandom of most epic proportions, apparently.

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I attempted to use bloglines to put together a convergence blogroll -- and discovered that somehow the one thing this service doesn't offer is a straight-up real-time aggregator (instead, this javascripted thingy). so I'm back to plan A, which is creating watch_tvhere for watching feeds and pointing to its flist -- can LJ really be the only site that generates a public aggregator page??