Production Studies Mayer, Vicki; Banks, Miranda J; Caldwell, John T
2009, 20090910, 2008-05-01, 2009-05-29
eBook
"Behind-the-scenes" stories of ranting directors, stingy producers, temperamental actors, and the like have fascinated us since the beginnings of film and television. Today, magazines, websites, ...television programs, and DVDs are devoted to telling tales of trade lore—from on-set antics to labor disputes. The production of media has become as storied and mythologized as the content of the films and TV shows themselves.
Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and political-economic methods to explore a wide range of topics, from contemporary industrial trends such as new media and niche markets to gender and workplace hierarchies. Together, the contributors seek to understand how the entire span of "media producers"—ranging from high-profile producers and directors to anonymous stagehands and costume designers—work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.
This landmark collection connects the cultural activities of media producers to our broader understanding of media practices and texts, establishing an innovative and agenda-setting approach to media industry scholarship for the twenty-first century.
Contributors: Miranda J. Banks, John T. Caldwell, Christine Cornea, Laura Grindstaff, Felicia D. Henderson, Erin Hill, Jane Landman, Elana Levine, Amanda D. Lotz, Paul Malcolm, Denise Mann, Vicki Mayer, Candace Moore, Oli Mould, Sherry B. Ortner, Matt Stahl, John L. Sullivan, Serra Tinic, Stephen Zafirau
" Production Studies 's collection of insightful essays by academics from a range of disciplines presents a superb example of precisely the kind of complex, collaborative work their essays elucidate. Incorporating material from interviews with a range of industry professionals, interrogating both industry practices and the scholarship that has explored them, this book speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the current media studies agenda."-- Michele Hilmes , author of NBC: America's Network
"Arriving at a time when the analysis of cultural and material production, in all its forms, has perhaps never been so critical, this rich and diverse collection of essays is a vital contribution to media production studies. The contributors offer a variety of insightful accounts of production culture, approaching it from perspectives including anthropology, cultural studies, feminism, and political economy, and highlighting many different production modes, levels, and locales. Production Studies is the new benchmark for this important and rapidly evolving field, and will influence media scholars and practitioners for years to come."-- Derek Kompare , author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television
Vicki Mayer is Assistant Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is author of Producing Dreams , Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media .
Miranda J. Banks is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
John Thornton Caldwell is Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. He has authored and edited several books, including Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television , Electronic Media and Technoculture , New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices , and Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television .
Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and Routes, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Part One: Histories of Media Production Studies. 1. Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory, Vicki Mayer . 2. Industry-Level Studies and the Contributions of Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time , Amanda Lotz 3. Leo C. Rosten's Hollywood: Power, Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Production, John L. Sullivan. 4. Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and Working Conditions in Media Making, Matt Stahl . Part Two: Producers: Selves and Others. 5. Self-Serve Celebrity: The Production of Ordinariess and the Ordinariness of Production in Reality Television, Laura Grindstaff. 6. Feminism Below-the-Line: Defining Feminist Production Studies, Miranda J. Banks. 7. It's Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise, Denise Mann. 8. Showrunning the Doctor Who Franchise: A Response to Denise Mann, Christine Cornea . Part Three: Production Spaces: Centers and Peripheries. 9. Liminal Places and Spaces: Public/Private Considerations, Candace Moore. 10. "Not in Kansas Anymore": Transnational Collaboration in Television Science Fiction Production, Jane Landman . 11. Crossing the Border: Studying Canadian Television Production, Elana Levine. 12. Borders of Production Research: A Response to Elana Levine, Serra Tinic . Part Four: Production as Lived Experience. 13. Studying Sideways: Ethnographic Access in Hollywood, Sherry Ortner. 14. Audience Knowledge and the Everyday Lives of Cultural Producers in Hollywood, Stephen Zafirau 15. Lights, Camera, but Where’s the Action? Actor-Network Theory and the Production of Robert Connolly's Three Dollars , Oli Mould . 16. Both Sides of the Fence: Blurred Distinctions in Scholarhip and Production (A Portfoloio of Interviews), John Caldwell . The Craft Association, Paul Malcolm . Hollywood Assistanting, Erin Hill . The Writer's Room, Felicia D. Henderson . Select Bibliography. List of Contributors. Index.
Os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção possuem trajetórias de pesquisa bastante distintas, apesar de suas compartilhadas preferências pela teoria baseada na realidade empírica e ...metodologias de pesquisa. A partir de uma ampla etnografia de mídia das audiências e produtores, esse artigo mostra como os sujeitos humanos dos estudos de audiência e estudos de produção podem ser estudados em conjunto, para revelar as relações de poder envolvidas nos processos da produção dos meios de comunicação de massa. Nesse estudo de caso específico, fãs e figurantes da série de televisão Treme (2010-2013) compartilharam um discurso sobre o lugar da espectatorialidade e o da produção que se esforça para articular uma cultura comum, apesar das barreiras concretas hierárquicas entre públicos e equipe de produção.
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data ...infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
Small Data Theorizing Mayer, Vicki
Communication theory,
11/2021, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
Small data theorizing encompasses the ways communities of collaborators deliberate over the status of data through a set of three mediational logics that pose alternatives to datafication. ...Small data theorizing is a way of generalizing a framework for understanding the role of the collaborators in digital archiving and database design processes, which often involve both communication researchers and ordinary institutions, such as universities and museums. This framework for mediational logics extends the critiques of big data theory, and its monolithic claims about autonomous technologies and power in society, by elaborating the ways people actively maintain their connectedness to data in archival design. At the same time, it joins critical communication theory’s central concerns about power with a praxis. This can help all communication researchers in seeing how communities are theorizing practical alternatives to archives that are designed for big data and their ecosystems.
This short introduction to Cicilia Maria Krohling Peruzzo's 1998 article "Community Communication and Education for Citizenship" gives some context into the contributions of Brazilian communication ...scholarship to the study of community and participatory media.
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures ...of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions. This article is based on a paper presented at the Media in Transition symposium (Utrecht, June 28, 2018), in the Industries and Infrastructures panel organised by Judith Keilbach. Also published in this issue of ECS are Amanda D. Lotz, ‘Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: new questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts’ and Jennifer Holt & Michael Palm, ‘More than a number: the telephone and the history of digital identification’.
A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered "essential workers" during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be ...considered essential at this time.
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the ...information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the "black box" - the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today's data-driven economy in general.
The MAAFiA Mystique Mayer, Vicki
Television & new media,
09/2020, Letnik:
21, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and ...data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
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