I'd like to congratulate my students (and myself!) on a triumphant end to the semester. Their acumen, enthusiasm, and commitment were a delight and an inspiration. You can read much of their work at tvhere (I especially recommend the midterm projects!).

as for THIS week's kerfuffle -- I haven't gotten a chance to read any of the FanLib posts yet, mea culpa, but I am saving them in del.icio.us for future diss research. The L Word fan-written script was of course the company's first major project, so doubtless I'll have plenty to say about such issues when I come to chapter 4.

meanwhile, look for me on Henry Jenkins' blog later this summer (in the aftermath of another recent kerfuffle).

My SYLLABUS is up at tvhere!

Moreover, I've uploaded a more final draft of my field lists. No doubt there's going to be continued tinkering, but it looks more or less like:

Public and Private Spheres: Critical Theories of Politics and Subjectivity
• Marxism and Hegemony
• Late Capitalism and Global Networks
• Democracy and Public Spheres
• Psychoanalysis and Post-Structuralism
• Queer Theory and Politics

Cyberpublics: Digital Media and Internet Studies
• Film and Visual Culture
• Media Archaeology
• Surveillance, Privacy, and Private Property
• Cyberspace, Cyborgs, and Cybersex
• Online Identity, Community, and Politics

the Public Eye: Television and Audience Studies
• Television Ontology, History, and Futures
• Reality and/of the Televisual
• Television, Gender and Sexuality
• Spectatorship and Reception
• Online Fandom

You can also SEARCH the database or DOWNLOAD the complete file as a PDF.

Please let me know if there are problems with the system or with individual records -- I haven't fully tested it. For the record, there are summaries on a lot of the entries that are pasted from Amazon.

Also there's a nifty new CV.

I'm annoyed that livejournal won't let you add feeds as friends of communities. I created the community for my course in the spring, tvhere, and I wanted to use the comm's flist as our news aggregator. no such luck. so for now it's on my friends page -- I don't know if I'll keep it that way (which means continuing not to friend anyone back) or start a separate account on lj or bloglines or something. so far I've got these LJ feeds (let me know if I missed anything on media, particularly TV/Internet, convergence):

blackfoxblog, convergence_jnl, crossmedia_blog, crossmediacomm, csmedia_blog, csmedia_rss, dkompare_blog, fedmedia_tech, gnews_mediacon, gnews_nettv, henry_jenkins, mitconvergence, nancybaym, thelongtail_rss, vectortv_blog

this was procrastination from the second draft of my field lists -- I keep getting distracted by shiny stuff for the course. syllabus coming soon(ish).

phil told me to think of my exams as a sorority hazing. I love that guy.

much of this copied from the outsides of notebooks:

the Big D
it seems inevitable, at this point, that my diss is going to be structured around online fandom. a little backstory: when I was writing my undergrad thesis I felt like it wanted to be a book, but afterwards (2001) I also said I was DONE with fandom. hahaha. I plan to use the topic so near and dear to my heart as a springboard to a set of broader issues. the question is how exactly to do this coherently. the political angle is especially thorny, because I don't want to go anywhere near asserting that fandom is a radical or even progressive practice. so, by what tangent can I get to sex radical politics? I don't think it's as much of a longshot as it might sound -- but definitely tricky.

• public sex -- fan communities >> LJ; lesbian subcultures; sex/identity as ground for political awareness action; question of visibility (http://afterellen.com)
• "real" people -- Oliska Hargeson, RPF, "privacy"; virtual identity/virtual sexuality of fans; instability of sexual "knowledge" (as queer project?)
• private property + ownership -- legal issues of derivative writing; legal issues of TV downloading/P2P; theoretical issues of the boundaries (or lack thereof) of texts; tensions of mass media vs. distributed media consumption

I have this fantasy of launching each chaper from a single fanfic story -- it would be hard to find the ones, though, that are exactly perfect. maybe. harder still to write them.

it occurs to me that if I want to tie in radical sexual subcultures via LJ, I should really start following some related communities. oy, I tried that once, and it was tiresome. where oh where is my one really fantastic dyke/trans/queer sex community that I can write about?

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probably I'm also going with my original idea for a course: TV on the Internet. it has the advantages of being concrete and timely; I just have to figure out how to highlight the theoretical issues above (plus public/private spheres).

potential topics:
• what is a "medium"?
• other theoretical background, like liveness and "window on the world"
• bittorent vs. video iPod rumble! legal issues, intellectual property
• TV News vs. political bloggers rumble! who makes the news?
• TV shows/networks with web tie-ins:
- mega-media corporations like MSNBC.com
- interactive TV: shows with online voting or other components (Big Brother)
• independent web-based TV (existing and/or possible)
• online TV fan communities (TWoP, TV blogs, LJ)
• fan production (fiction, vids)

any further suggestions?

---

my fields:
• politics of sexuality [theory area] (a hybrid of political theory and queer theory, focusing on public/private sphere)
• TV something-or-other [history area] (emphasis on reception/fandom)
• internet studies something-or-other (the media archaeology side is now covered, but I have to get up to speed on online communities/social software stuff)

The Plan for the Rest of My Life:

( xposted )