FOE2 – Day 2 Opening Remarks

Day 2 of the Futures of Entertainment.  After the openign remarks, we only have 2 panels, the first on Advertising and Convergence and the second on Cult Media.

The panelists for the first session are: Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Jonathan Gray, Fordham University; Lee Harrington, Miami University. Moderated by Sam Ford

• Jason Mittell, teaches media studies.   Looking to answer the question about what do media scholars have to say on these issues.  Looking at industries, texts and audiences – the 3 main areas. The industry is not one singular thing, it is not the father of the Holy Trinity, but is a pantheon of gods.   There is a key lesson that scholars needs to learn is that it is not a singular beast.  The industry is not all powerful.   There are multiple entities in play, we have to think of the industry as a much more varied than than scholars often think about.  Scholars can be sceptical of industry power; many media scholars could see an event like this as heresy as you are not supposed to ‘talk to the man’.  Another notion that is studied is the ‘death of the author’ that the writer does not fix the text; today there if often no centralised author and text can be emergent, with UGC etc.
• Jonathan Gray, I use the word ‘text’ to mean more than just the words, something my students often confuse.  The work is what you produce and the text is what happens when it has meaning.  A work becomes a text when it has meaning, when someone engages with it.  The text is not something the industry can necessarily produce, the audience has to give something to it.  The text has to be created with the audience.  People engage with text. The challenge is to work towards fostering the better creation of texts, the industry to see themselves as contributing to this.  They only contribute part of the text; look at Star Wars, watching the movies only gets you so far.  In between the first 2 films I did a lot of playing with the toys.  What Star Wars means to me is in the toys, the toys created a lot of the popular constructions of what SW was.  The Simpsons, we have to look away from the show to things that are outside.  Looking forward the texts that are going to matter the most are the ones that can capture the oscilation, that can create on multiple points.  
• Lee harrington: Proifessor of Sociology. Listening to yesterday, we are asking the same questions we did 50 years ago.  Most of discussion of what people want came from the audience,  UGC, entertainment value, privacy.  One of the key questions is what are we measuring; there seemed to be a lot more scepticism in audience.   A second question was about gender and class, we talk about affordability.  Media literacy is a question, can they access, who wants to access.  Who does the industry assume wants to access the content.  The answers are in age, gender, class etc.  Looking at age, it seems that if you are over 34 you are over the abyss, they don’t want to talk to you.  We seem to talk about the baby boomer power in every aspect except the entertainment ones.  What are the long term economic consequences of ignoring the aging populations.
• SF: what kind of qualitative methods can find passion points, how can we do qual research at mass
• LH: the pace of market research vs academic research are different.  Academic is a slower way.  
• JG: the industry could read more academic study, see that they are on the same page.   Researchers have had the experience of working on a book and trying to publish things and being warned away from research by legal teams.  A lot of the research is already there but is not been looked at.
• JM: qual is not generalisable in the same way that quan is.   Academic research questions don’t always converge with what the industry wants to here, we can be bad at making links where industry and academia fit together.
• JG: with good audience, you have to be prepared to be surprised.  If you go in just wanting an answer to a question, than not doing good research.  In the industry there’s a problem with that model.
• SF: online discussion groups, blogs etc, measuring buzz – is that possible. In the industry, you say qual and they reply ‘focus groups’.  Online buzz can add to the discussion.  What are your takes on how this could be of value.
• LH: it is of value but you have to take into account that that is a skewed sample as well.  I study soaps and focus groups were huge in the 90’s.  And the genre reeled.  All have their place, and so does the slow stuff.
• JM: good qual research has that media consumption is contextual.  Some good qual research look at the community, the intepretive comms, looks at how it is consumed communally.  
• JG: in addition to focus groups we need lack of focus groups and that is what the online study can do, let you see where the ocnversation goes.
• LH: it is not helpful to pitch qual vs quan, it is about the question and the best way to answer it.  it always starts with what question.
• SF: when a programme becomes a text you can find that what it was targeted for may not be the ones getting involved.   Look at soaps and older viewers, not target but get involved.  Also others, look at Veronica mars the audience they were reaching was not the one they were markeitng for.
• JM: The Wire is another example.  The 2 main audiences are the typical HBO, higher income great for advertisers AND urban drug dealers, where it has a cult status.   The latter is a totally surplus audience that is not monetised by HBO.
• JG: ho do you create broad audiences?  The Simpsons has a broad audience and has a high end audience for the advertisers.
• SF: if you move to engagement, how does that change the indicators of who the audience is outside of age and gender?  Are the demographics bringing people together or the viewers? Is there a disconnect between ad view and audience view.
• JM: when I teach at V I differentiate between audience and viewer.  Audience is an industry term.  The metrics are designed to create audience categories. I would love to see a bottom up way of measuring, an open way of opening up the black boxes.    But it won’t happen economically in the media.
• LH: industry leaders and academics often agree on what the problems are, there is an awareness of the older viewers etc.  But not acknowledged as having economic power.
• JG:  one of the things we need to get away from is the idea that Neilson is gone.  Nielson is not really good science, it is not reflective of the larger audience.   The ones that are best are the ones that are engaged.  When we are talking about impressions and stuff and where the advertisers are, it won’t come from what happened yesterday but it will come from a longer term approach.
• SF: How can we foster conversations between academia and industry, that happen more than once a year like this.
• JM: I tend to talk to creative personal; if you can get to them then they are very receptive. (although often legal depts cut the connections). Things like this can be crucial.   On the academic side there is real scepticism as well.
• SF: I’ve seen some academic blogs call us some pretty nasty things.  And I’ve talked to people in industry and they have had a hard time getting funding as what is the benefit talking to academics
• LH: in the soap opera area, they often welcome the input, but a lot of time challenge.  One thing we have to do is produce research that is readable
• SF: language is a problem, there is jargon that add confusion.   
• JM: someone is commenting that no one thinks Nielson is God…from the outside Nielson does appear to be God, everything is based on that.
• JG: in the absence of others, we have to fall back on Nielson.
• SF: So what now?  what can we do to keep this going.
• JM: I’m optimistic about new models of publishing and commenting and research.  I hope on the industry side people start reading these.  As more scholars start to do that, then hopefully more industry participates.
• JG: the academics need to look more as well, I had to tell some colleagues about the Writers Strike the other day.