digital TV studies
“User-Generated Content/Producer-Generated Consumption: How Outsourcing, Crowd-sourcing, and Industrial Identity Theory Fuel Digital TV”
John T. Caldwell, UCLA
Many media theorists have over-sold viewer-centrism as a defining characteristic of new media consumption. This paper offers a series of correctives to user-driven formulations of digital television: first, that producer-generated consumption (PGC) is as important as user-generated content (UGC) in media interactions; second, that production outsourcing is as determining as consumer crowd-sourcing in developing effective and resilient brands; third, that viral content production on the industrial side is as fundamental to contemporary digital television aesthetics as viral video marketing is on the consumer side; and finally, that decades-old strategies and conventions of broadcast “programming,” far from being displaced by new digital technologies, actually become more crucial in effective transmedia industrial practice.
Digital TV is now being posed as a “war between uploading and downloading” (Lunenfeld), between data/software “importing and exporting” (Manovich), and between “fan poaching and producer spoiling” (Jenkins).
While these important formulations richly mine the complexities of content and usage, re-mixability, and discursive interactions between media fans and producers, they are less effective in describing higher-order industrial interactions with viewers. I hope to underscore the complex, and resilient ways that the new media conglomerates immediately engage and manage user volatility. Rather than simply talking about an unruly culture of deep “remixability,” for example, scholars would do well to examine the pre-conditions stimulating these practices, including the economic and technological characteristics involved in deep corporate “mixability.” Shifting research on digital TV in this way shows that production itself can now be understood as a viral process that helps industry rationalize consumer mobility, mitigate cultural instabilities, and minimize economic risk. Viral content production, furthermore, tends to work now for companies who have mastered not just the “imagined worlds” of complicated blockbuster television narratives (of, say Lost, or 24), but who have mastered “brand management” across multimedia platforms and technologies as well. Digital TV, that is, is not just about new kinds of technology-based narrative-user interactions or technological extensions of content.
It is about the industrial construction and maintenance of responsive brand identities; something that can be profitably understood, first, as outgrowths and self-representations of “production’s imagined communities”; and second, as industrial performances authored in “corporate identity theory.”
http://www.digitaltvstudies.org.uk/abstracts.htm
