Gestión de Mercadeo

While vids are made out of more than just television sources1, this review of literature is focused on the vid’s relationship with television and television studies because, as argued above, the vid was developed through the re-use of television material, and uses of home video technology in relation to broadcast television first enabled the practice of vidding. The vid is a supremely televisual form, and television studies offers a complex and hybrid set of ways to think about television technology, texts, and audiences, and subsequently those of the vid. Where fandom studies approaches to fan works such as the vid view these as the output of a productive subculture, relating the vid to television studies literature reveals: a) the technological developments which enable the creation of this form of fan work; b) theoretical perspectives on the structure and experience of television, articulated by Raymond Williams as 'flow' and developed by subsequent theorists to account for television's technological evolution, which can be explored to develop a critical account for the textuality of the vid; and c) the gendering of non-broadcast distribution, particularly online, relevant as the majority of vids examined in this thesis are digital texts. In this chapter, guided by ethnographic findings in the existing literature on the vid, I also make certain

generalised comments about the practices of vidding which see it as a non-mainstream form of television reception. Reference to this extant literature enables me to proceed with the textual analysis of vids with the contextual knowledge that vidding is

1 _{Several vids in this thesis include film sources; additionally, some vids incorporate still images}

(documentary photographs, comic book pages, illustrations, etc.) and others use video game material. Using VividCon’s screenings as a guide (as determined by convention programmes and online

database), VividCon 2002 was approximately 90% television source, in contrast to the 35% film/other source in the Nearly New and Premieres shows of VividCon 2014. Television remains the majority.

predominantly practiced by women, for a predominantly female audience, and presents textual evidence of these fans’ counter-readings of existing texts.

This Review of Literature begins with a review of existing literature on the vid, and an overview of certain historical concerns within fandom studies. This chapter then addresses the critical writing on the control of, access to, and uses of television to contextualise the perception of television form and content, in order to then explore the form and content of vids. A discussion of television programming’s inherent segmentation is followed by an overview of the devices and practices which allowed television audiences to intercept, store, and manipulate these segments. I conclude with a discussion of the gendering of television access and the recent masculinised valorisation of so-called ‘quality’ narrative fiction formats.

As ‘television is and always has been in transition’ (Shimpach 2010: 1), I adopt Elizabeth Evans’s definition of television as ‘ultimately some kind of combination of text, technology and industry’ (2011: 3); this definition is befitting of a discipline likewise characterised by its hybridity (Brunsdon 1998). I limit my survey to studies of Anglo-American television; commentary on national differences in approaching the study of television are similarly beyond the scope of this section. This chapter is concerned with the changing structure and shape of broadcast television, technological change, the increased opportunity for audiences to control their experience of television, and the issue of ‘quality’ television in the Anglo-American context. However, this chapter begins with the relatively understated place of the vid form in current television scholarship.

The Vid in Existing Literature

In this section, I discuss scholarship on vidding in order to contextualise the textual analysis which follows in this thesis. This analysis, such as the gendered gaze analysed in Chapter Four, is shaped by an understanding of vidding practices drawn from this critical literature. Television studies does acknowledge media fandom (see Meehan 2007, Brunsdon and Spigel 2008, Ross 2008, Gray 2010, Mittell 2010, Gray and Lotz 2013); however, the bulk of academic engagement with the vid form is in the loosely- defined field of fandom studies. Accordingly, the balance of this section will review the relevant literature on vids, along with foundational concepts in fandom studies to provide critical context for the vid form as presented in this thesis. Two areas of concern in scholarship on fans and media fandom relate to the fan as producer, and the turn away from characterising fan practices as resistance.

The awareness of media fandom in television studies is sometimes oblique, with hints of an ‘engaged viewer’ who then joins an ‘interpretive community’ and may produce ‘semi-professional videos’ (Meehan 2007: 167).2 The closest Sharon Marie Ross comes to discussing vids in Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (2008) is describing a feature on the website of an American teen network, TheN.com, ‘where users can engage in peer-to-peer sharing of video mash-ups’ made from clips provided to them (251). Instead, Ross focuses on fan discussions, rather than the ‘literal

productivity via creative artwork’ (2008: 44). Brunsdon and Spigel argue vidding is a form of feminist textual analysis in their Introduction to Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader (2008), though the form is absent from the collection beyond this paragraph. Paul McEwan’s discussion of Hard Core Logo (Bruce McDonald, 1996) adaptations

2 _{The word ‘fandom’ is not used. She mentions ‘media artifacts’ such as ‘semi-professional videos’}

briefly addresses ‘fan fiction and Internet videos’ (2011: 44) as legitimate cultural forms (ibid: 41-45). However, Jonathan Gray’s monograph on paratexts includes a small section on vidding (2010: 153-161) that positions vids as fans’ readings of film and television texts; this discussion is then summarised in Gray and Lotz’s textbook

Television Studies (2012). Gray suggests that vids are like marginalia in books, arguing that ‘all viewer-created paratexts can work as highlighters and underliners, plotting a course through a narrative and leaving tracks for others to follow’ (2010: 154). This equation of vids to margin notes has a pleasant resonance with Chapter Three’s focus on collections and archives;3 however, my argument is about both the metaphorical tracks through fan readings of a text left by a vid’s editing, as well as the material traces left by the degradation of its videotape source material. In vids, the textual traces in the image itself are the visible marks on Gray’s metaphorical page.

Even within fandom, vidding is a minority practice. Historically, this was due to ‘the greater difficulty of access to video equipment, than to desktop publishing and photocopying technologies [used for print fan works], which are often available in the fan's own workplace and can be used even while on the job’ (Penley 1991: 145). To Bacon-Smith, while few fans were ‘able or willing to devote the financial resources necessary’ to buying the necessary equipment, its commercial availability meant there were few significant barriers to participation (Bacon-Smith 1992: 176). However, Coppa (2008) counters that the technology was expensive and cumbersome.4

3 _{And to a chapter title in Textual Poaching, ‘Scribbling in the Margins’ (Jenkins 1992: 152-184), itself a}

reference to Michel de Certeau’s description that official cultural products ‘leave no room where the consumers can mark their activity’ and therefore find ways to annotate their experience (1984: 31). Incidentally, Coppa refers to Nathanial Hawthorne’s ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ in writing her ‘history of vidding women’ (2008: 1.5, author’s emphasis).

4

So much so that a trio of vidders created the vid Pressure (Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990), a meta-vid nominally about Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993) that comically details their process of ‘planning, measuring, and mathematics to compensate for the imprecision of the technology’ (2008:

Vids are generally understood to be works which are symptomatic of fandom’s subcultural approaches to television and film. Bacon-Smith (1992) sees vids as a textual expression of the spectatorship taught by fandom, arguing the full meaning of a vid is often comprehensible only to other fans (1992: 179). However, as shown by the multifandom vids analysed in Chapter Four, clips may be chosen for erotic or iconic signification as well as narrative references; therefore vids are also a textual expression of spectatorship which is concerned as much with, for example, a

fascination with bodies or genre tropes as with narratives. Jenkins describes vids as ‘a unique form, ideally suited to [the] demands of fan culture, depending for its

significance upon the careful welding of words and images to comment on the series narrative’ (1992: 225).5 He concludes that ‘the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings. The pleasure comes in putting words in the character's [sic] mouths and making the series represent subtexts it normally represses’ (Jenkins 1992: 227-8). In relation to this idea, I argue in Chapter Five that the use of music in the vid follows certain conventions of film and television scoring, where songs contribute to our understanding of a character's internal reflection and emotional expression.

Jenkins (1992) explains vids as the manifestation of fandom's core attributes: textual poaching and material appropriation. Relying (as does Penley) on Michel de Certeau's discussion of ‘the tactical nature of consumption and the nomadic character

4.5). Unusually, this vid contains footage of the vidders themselves and their tools – for example, close-ups of their stacked videotapes, cables and devices – making this work ‘unique record not only of the specific technological difficulties of VCR vidding but of the female fannish subculture within which vids were (and are) made’ (Coppa 2008: 4.4).

5

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2006) reprints some of Jenkins’s early writing on fans. In ‘Interactive Audiences? The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans’, he briefly refers to his earlier description of vid production without devoting more than two sentences to the form (2006 [2002]: 143-144).

of the consumer's culture’, he uses what he calls ‘fan music videos’ to build upon his earlier argument about slash fiction, that: ‘fan-generated texts cannot simply be interpreted as the material traces of interpretive acts but need to be understood within their own terms as cultural artifacts’ (Jenkins 1992: 223). Vidding for Jenkins forms the basis for theorising the aesthetic basis of ‘poached’ culture, where

‘borrowing and recombination’ are just as important as ‘original creation and artistic innovation’ (1992: 224).

These aforementioned accounts appear to be the only scholarly works that mention vidding in a meaningful way before 2008. While vidding has undergone a technological shift, early descriptions of form and content are recognisable when applied to more recent vids. With these exceptions, scholarship on fans and fandom focused ‘on the written texts of fan fiction, as well as viewer commentary and criticism’ (Ng 2008: 103, author's emphasis). Since 2008, the literature on vids has increased, thanks to an In Focus section in Cinema Journal (issue 48 no.4, 2009) and the efforts of the online peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures6.

For example, Eve Ng (2008) uses vids of a lesbian couple from the American soap opera All My Children (ABC, 1970-2011) to discuss media representations of queerness. Ng acknowledges that vidding may signal ‘significant challenges to traditional models of media political economy’ and leaves fandom aside to examine ‘the broader political stakes of queer representation’ (2008: 104). Coppa (2008) addresses vidding prior to 1990 to demonstrate the evolution of the form as a tool for critical engagement, and argues that vidding represents ‘a form of collaborative critical thinking’ that guides both clip choice and sequencing (2008: 5.1). Coppa uses Kandy

6

Fong's slideshow Both Sides Now (ca. 1980, taped 1986) as an example of the

significance of the character of Spock as a point of identification (2008: 3.7). This work, which inspired the vid form, was therefore ‘a visual essay in which music is used as an analytical tool and not a soundtrack’ (Coppa 2008: 3.12). A later Spock-centred vid by Kandy Fong (It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, 1997) is analysed in relation to other Star Trek vids in Chapter Three.

Coppa's essay is a response to Jake Coyle’s widely-circulated Associated Press article ‘The Best Fan-Made Music Videos on YouTube’ that misunderstands the form due to the author’s ‘underlying – and unquestioned – assumption that the fans who make “fan-made music video” are fans of the audio source, that these fans edit footage to music because they like the bands’ (2008: 1.2).7 Indeed, Coppa argues that the primary purpose of vidding is not to share a favourite song, but to construct an argument about the video source using the song as part of this commentary (2008: 1.1). Writing in Cinema Journal, Julie Levin Russo expresses similar concerns about the visibility of vidding outside media fandom and the potential for misinterpretation and caricature (2009). Gray (2010), Sarah Fiona Winters (2012), and others accept this critical purpose in vidding as a basic tenet; indeed, as I argue throughout this thesis, the analytical and critical work of the vid is demonstrated through the meanings made in juxtaposing re-used moving images with the song soundtrack.

New scholarship on vids tends to single out exemplar works to analyse these works’ specific context in a particular fandom, or of a tendency in reading. For

example, Coppa writes that A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005) is ‘a

7

Coppa also objects to Coyle’s historiography, arguing vids ‘come from a tradition of vid making significantly older than "the dawn of YouTube." In 2005, the year that YouTube was founded, media fans celebrated the 30th anniversary of vidding at VividCon, an ongoing convention dedicated to vids’ (Coppa 2008: 1.5).

veritable orgy of scopophilia’ to discuss visual pleasure in vidding (2009: 107); Chapter Four elaborates on this work, in relation to further examples, exploring the erotic pleasures of putting bodies on display, as well as the pleasures of special effects spectacles in science fiction film and television. Alexis Lothian uses the vid Us (Lim, 2007) in her analysis of copyright issues and vidding fandom, in which she explores ‘the implications of everyday digital thefts at the capital-saturated scene of online media production and consumption’ (2009: 131). Louisa Ellen Stein (2010) analyses

religiously-themed vids of Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-present) to discuss theology of

Supernatural’s millennial audience, while Katharina Freund (2010) uses counteragent’s vid Still Alive (2008) to discuss conflicts within Supernatural fandom. Sarah Fiona Winters (2012) analyses Closer (T. Jonesy and Killa, 2003) and On the Prowl (sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010) to discuss fannish approaches to pleasures and perversity; Chapters Three and Four respectively offer alternative analyses of these vids. Larsen and Zubernisalso mention On the Prowl in a discussion of internalised shame and its reduction through validation (2012: 73-4). However, Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson (2012) have sought to broaden this tendency, and call for an increase of scholarly attention on the systems (‘ecology’) of fan production to discover how the specific fannish contexts of a vid become shared knowledge within fandom.

Generally, however, fandom studies scholarship does not address the vid. The form’s near-absence from Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's edited collection Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) is typical.8 Busse and Hellekson briefly acknowledge that, in the age of the internet, vidders have abandoned VCRs in favour of ‘more sophisticated’ vids, where ‘complex authoring software’ is

8 _{Coppa’s contribution to this volume, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom’ (2006: 41-59), describes}

used ‘to manipulate electronic files’ (2006: 12), but go no further. In scholarship on media fandom more generally, vids tend to be mentioned without further explanation. For example, Abigail Derecho’s essay arguing for fan fiction as an art form includes vids in a list without definitions, examples, or analysis (2006: 77n). Sandvoss’s Jenkins-citing list of fan works includes ‘self-produced videotapes’ (2005: 29), but his broader

discussion focuses on written texts (zines, fan fiction), and not the audio-visual (vids). This brevity is also the case of vids’ three mentions in Paul Booth’s Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (2010: 2, 12, 167), which is a monograph on Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) that suggests fan works are ‘allegorical’ to ARGs. In The Cult TV Book

(ed. Abbott 2010), vidding is mentioned in lists of ‘creative acts’ (Richards 2010: 180), ‘“poaching” activities’ (Robinson 2010: 216), and ‘other fannish modes of expression’ (Kaveney 2010: 2449). Abigail De Kosnik, in Digital Labor (ed. Scholz 2013), cites Jenkins to note that media fans ‘make art and music and videos’ in a similarly brief list (2013: 102). My thesis therefore provides a deeper engagement with the vid form,

particularly through close textual analysis of the vids themselves.

Production and Resistance

Early scholarship on media fandom (Fiske 1987, Jenkins 1988, Penley 1991, Bacon- Smith 1992, Fiske 1992, Jenkins 1992) was concerned with fan practices, and defined these practices as resistance to capitalism. This focused largely on what John Fiske termed fans' ‘textual productivity’ (1992: 39) for examples of this resistance; however, this approach is based on the assumption that fan ‘productivity’ elevates those fans from the lesser status of mere ‘consumer’ (Hills 2002, Sandvoss 2005). Though this

9

Kaveney’s brief description is: ‘clips from shows recut as the visual for appropriate music’ (2010: 244). However, to refer to vids (however briefly) as ‘acts’, ‘activity’, and ‘modes of expression’ preferences the practice over the form, which is a tendency I am refuting with my focus on the vid form itself.

framework has been significant in defining how fan works are perceived in academic literature, in this thesis I propose an engagement with vids as texts in their own right, rather than what a political economy approach may reveal. What is relevant to my analysis is a sustained understanding of fan works as evidence of counter-readings of existing media.

In Fiske’s analysis, fans are ‘semiotically’, ‘enunciatively’ or ‘textually productive’ (1992: 36-39). Semiotic productivity, ‘the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural

commodity’ (Fiske 1992: 37) is an internal process which may be shared with others in person (‘enunciated’). Fiske’s ‘typical10’ examples of textual productivity are works created by fans who are engaged in ‘filling in the syntagmatic gaps in the original narrative’ and for circulation ‘through an extensive network’ of fellow fans (1992: 39). A fan work such as a vid is therefore made to be shared within a community. The movement of this ‘popular cultural capital’ (Fiske 1987: 314) within fandom

‘reproduce[s] equivalents of the formal institutions of official culture’ and is ‘a sort of “moonlighting” in the cultural rather than the economic sphere’ (Fiske 1992: 33). Vids’ distribution and exhibition is addressed in Chapter Three, drawing on Penley’s

discussion of fans’ ‘enthusiastic’ mimicry of ‘the technologies of mass-market cultural production' (1991: 140). However, as Hills argues, Fiske’s approach reduces all fan activity to ‘productivity’, while constructing a scenario whereby ‘short of not watching a programme at all, there appears to be no way of not being “productive” in relation to it’ (2002: 30).11 Additionally, Sandvoss notes that ‘only a minority of fans participate in

10

That is, fan fiction and vids. Fiske refers to these as ‘novels’ and ‘music videos’ (1992: 39).

11 _{However, Vincent Mosco suggests that ‘simply not watching [television] at all’ is a decision made in ‘a}