I'm delighted to announce that I have been selected as one of this year's HASTAC Scholars! I will be posting regular videoblog entries about web technologies and participatory learning here starting sometime this week. I encourage you to engage with the work of all the HASTAC Scholars, as well as the organization's other exciting projects.

Also, I will be attending the LA Queer Studies Conference on October 10-11. Allow me to call special attention to my panel, which falls bright and early at 9:00-10:30am on Saturday morning:

Mediated Queer Socialities and Identities
Moderator: Mary L. Gray, Indiana University, Communication and Culture

Julie Levin Russo [my correction], Brown University, Modern Culture and Media
Labors of Love: Economies of Identity in The L Word’s Fan-Driven Online Promotions

Alexis Lothian, University of Southern California, English
Doing Boys Like They’re Girls, and Other (Trans)Gendered Subjects: The Queer Subcultural Politics of “Genderfuck” Fan Fiction

Jill A. Bakehorn, UC Davis, Sociology
Bordering on Activism: Authenticity and Identity Politics in Women-Made Porn

Another conference! This time I'm following in my workshop-mate Sam Ford's footsteps. Friends still bolded. I may try to flit between panels when they're scheduled against each other. Edited to reflect the updated program.

( the breakdown )

• 10:23 @jeangenie you just got namechecked in "state of research"! #
• 11:20 Eric Garland with an interesting question: what IS user-generated or internet video content? BitTorrent doesn't discriminate.#
• 11:29 four white men on the opening panel? srsly? #
• 11:56 Alexandra Juhasz: DIY is not just user created + distributed; it implies (or should) a critical opposition to dominant culture. #
• 13:38 OMG HI I'M SURROUNDED BY FAMOUS VIDDERS! #
• 13:51 Juhasz's 6 binaries of pedagogy: public/private, cyber/real, oral/visual, entertainment/education, amateur/expert, control/chaos. #
• 14:17 awesome political critiques of YouTube's "consumption model" on this panel. we want to own the infrastructure! #
• 14:55 Sam Gregory: we need not just DIY, but DIWO (Doing It With Others). also: YouTube lacks community-building architecture. #
• 14:59 I'm cheering this, but wondering how "state of the art" is only dealing w/ live-action docus - where's the rest of internet video? #
• 15:35 Jenkins: YT does not exist in a vacuum. its strength is as a distribution architecture for content that is relocalized elsewhere. #
• 16:31 go watch the slate.com video 'hillary's inner tracy flick' on youtube. #
• 16:36 Fred von Lohmann of EFF is explaining strict liability (old media) and notice-and-takedown (DMCA) as velvet rope vs. bouncer. #
• 16:44 LOL! also sadkermit.com, an example of YT TOSsing as censorship of legal works. #
• 17:15 dear Yochai Benkler: the decentralized information economy is still a capitalist economy -- domination does not go away! #
• 21:14 drinking bud light at a hotel bar, baby. but with VIDDERS! #

[repost of February 9th tweets from 24/7 DIY, originally hashtagged #video247]

eta: OK OK, I put myself on the waitlist for vividcon! the vidders made me do it!

I could conceivably attend (at least) one panel in EVERY session, which is rather terrifying. I don't know if I will, but I'll certainly try. Friends are bolded.
eta: Sam Ford has a rundown of "convergence"-related presentations at SCMS here and here.
eta2: for the sake of full disclosure, I'm italicizing the panels that I ACTUALLY managed to attend, which as you can see is far less than the selection I would have liked to attend.

( Read more... )

Media in Transition 5 ~ TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica

audio files:

Melanie E. S. Kohnen, Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History
Sarah Toton, Reimagining Fan Culture: The Long Journey of Battlestar Galactica (check out what a splash she made!)
Anne Kustritz, Ownership and Desire: Fans' and Producers' Manipulation of Fictional Love Triangles
Julie Levin Russo, Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies (also in video, below)

eta: versions of our talks have been published in FlowTV's Battlestar Galactica issue

I have audio from the Q&A as well (though it's a short-range mic so questions/comments from the audience are not always terribly audible), but I'm not posting it publicly because I didn't ask permission from the participants. Drop me a line if you were there and would like the file.

reports on this panel (as far as I know): Axel Bruns, Jason Mittell, Laura Boylan, Karen Hellekson, Derek Kompare


[labors of love]

MIT's Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

( Creative Transformation )

~~~

( Mediating Sexuality )

based on the preliminary program.

my panel
Saturday, March 10, 2007 2:15-4:00 pm (Session L)
L19: Pornography Studies II

Savas Arslan (Bahcesehir Universitesi), "Head-On, Head-Off: How Media Covered a Former Porn Actress’s Rise to Stardom"
Julie Russo (Brown University), "Show Me Yours: The Perversion and Politics of Cyber-exhibitionism"
Tamao Nakahara (University of California, Santa Cruz), "Haxor Chixx: Hacker Porn and the Limits of Virtual Representation"
Jennifer Moorman (University of California, Los Angeles), "The Softer Side of Hardcore? Women as Producers and Consumers of Adult Video"

( and my colleagues )

(it's sort of a live-from-tape blog, because I typed it up offline during the session and am posting it at the end)

MIT: Futures of Entertainment
Fan Cultures panel

Diane Nelson
Molly Chase
danah boyd
(NB: three women. all other panels at this conference were composed of either three men + one woman or three men.)

"when the product is transformed from commodity to culture you have to cede control" -Josh Green

( Read more... )

I'm inexpressibly lucky to have found a way to turn my obsessions into my work. What follows are my drafts of panel and paper abstracts about Battlestar Galactica for MiT @ MIT (feedback welcome -- I hope they take them).

TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica (panel with _mesk, alistern, and theorynut)
The SciFi Channel’s critically acclaimed hit series Battlestar Galactica has been heralded as the rebirth of TV’s science fiction genre. As a reimagination of the short-lived late 70’s show of the same name, it has one foot in the historical tradition of cult television, but as an innovator in media convergence and diffusion through its extensive web and behind-the-scenes content, it is also at the vanguard of television’s futures. This panel takes the program as a case study for how television is evolving by remixing its texts, technological forms, and social contexts, and by opening these opportunities for collaborative engagement to its viewers as well. Topics include: how TV narrative reworks sociopolitical themes, and how this relationship changes with the times; how TV negotiates and mobilizes its own history and the longstanding investments of its fans; how TV increasingly recycles its material for transmedia channels, rendering its properties ever more promiscuous and communicable; and how TV solicits and relies on the libidinal labor of its fans, inciting dynamic and sometimes uneasy networks of participation.

Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies
Television reproduces itself by yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry. The debate about whether this ability to generate desire for knowledge, contact, and participation is a progressive ground for subcultural expression or an ideological engine of consumer capitalism is particularly vital today. In our contemporary climate of accelerated media change, it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with extra-broadcast content, offering television new opportunities to intensify its intercourse with fans and the proliferation of its texts. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor in an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition. Taking Battlestar Galactica as a case study, this paper explores the interrelationship between collaboration and reappropriation in TV production – as the show is recycled and diffused in a smorgasbord of official tie-ins like blogs, podcasts, webisodes, deleted scenes, interviews and trailers – and collaboration and reappropriation in fan production, which (further) explodes reliable boundaries and hierarchies. Overall, I will argue that attempts to harness and contain fans’ passion within the circuit of capitalism remain riven with productive pitfalls and contradictions.

ljconscript and I wrote an awesome BSG workshop proposal too, on the theme of reproduction (informal version :P) -- but I haven't gotten her permission to post it.

I have indeed been accepted to SCMS. actually this makes me kind of cranky because it's not at all a time of year when I should be traveling. oh, however did I get talked into sumbitting, against my better judgement? -- peer pressure, I think.

*

plus, not unrelatedly, a slight update of last year's very schematic outline of the Big D:

I. The Exploding Text (Grey's Anatomy?? or whatever else catches my fancy)
queer readings: instability of sexual/textual knowledge; RPF, celebrity and "privacy"

II. Labors of Love (Battlestar Galactica) [or some other clever name, if I take Labors of Love as the title of the whole project]
negotiations and disintegrations of of the consumer/producer opposition; economic and legal questions of private property + ownership; tensions of mass media vs. distributed media consumption, viral marketing; cylons: reproduction, archives

III. Desiring Justice (L&O:SVU)
lesbian subcultures; sex/identity as ground for political awareness action; question of visibility (http://afterellen.com); "real" people -- Oliska Hargeson; virtual identity/virtual sexuality of fans

that's three case studies, and I'm thinking of dividing each of them into three parallel sub-chapters: textual themes; politics of production; fan economies. plus there will be an intro and conclusion. (and if I decide to be sassy, metafic interludes.)

* attributed to leavethesky