Film Midterm

Hegemony- Authors/Texts

Stuart Hall (Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse)

Kellner (Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture)

Milner and Browitt

Hegemony - Stuart Hall (uses/definitions)

• applies to popular culture, where popular culture = where a struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged, where hegemony arises/is secured

• definition of hegemonic viewpoint= it defines within its terms the mental horizon, the universe of possible meanings of a whole society/culture, carries with it the stamp of legitimacy regarding the social order.

Hegemony - Kellner (uses/definitions)

• with the internet, one must be aware of global networks that produce and distribute culture in the interests of profit and corporate hegemony. giant media conglomerates/institutions (like the state) that can exert censorship remain major forces of cultural hegemony.

Hegemony - Milner and Browitt (uses/definitions)

• the permeation throughout the whole of society of a system of values and beliefs supportive of the existing ruling class. values are often embodied in common sense, but are constructed in the interests of the ruling class.

Critical, Multicultural, Multiperspectival approach - Readings/Authors

• Kellner (Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture)

Critical approach - Kellner (uses/definitions)

• critical culture studies: approaches specifics on how people can resist the dominant encoded meanings and produce their own critical readings/artifacts. also subverts distinctions between high/low culture, allowing us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices.

• encompasses textual analysis, culture studies (questions workings of power and dominant ideology, considers the text and its context), industry studies (interviewing tv executives/creatives/laborers, the political economy of TV, media ownership, regulation, and governance), and reception studies (how fans make meaning and interact with screen media)

Multicultural approach - Kellner (uses/definitions)

• multicultural: affirms the worth of different types of culture/cultural groups, eg black, latino, asian, LGBTQ, and other oppressed/marginalized voices have their own validity and importance.

• insurgent multiculturalism: attempts to show how various people’s voices and experiences are silenced/omitted from mainstream culture and struggles to aid in the articulation of these views/experiences

Multiperspectival - Kellner (uses/definitions)

• multiperspectival: an approach that discusses production and political economy (studies how formulas/conventions shape production, limits/ranges of political/ideological discourses, etc), engages in textual analysis (interpreting forms/meanings of elements in media as one might read and interpret a book), and studies the reception and use of cultural texts (how media affects specific audiences and shapes their beliefs and behavior)

Dominant/negotiated/oppositional reading positions - Readings/Authors

• Kellner

• Hall

Dominant/oppositional reading positions - Kellner (uses/definitions)

• dominant readings: audiences appropriate texts in line with the interests of the dominant culture. serves to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination. eg, audiences feel pleasure at restoration of male power, law, order, and social stability

• oppositional readings: audiences celebrate resistance to this reading in audience appropriation of a text, eg when individuals in a shelter cheered the violent destruction of police and authority figures in viewings of Die Hard

Dominant codes - Hall (uses/definitions)

• dominant: when an audience takes connotated meaning and decodes it with the reference code in which the message has been coded.

• professional: code which professional broadcasters employ when transmitting a message that’s already been signified in a hegemonic manner (operates inside the dominant code) (professionals may unconsciously reproduce hegemony not by openly submitting to it, but simply by operating in the professional bracket.)

• negotiated: acknowledges hegemonic definitions to make grand significations, and on a more restricted level, makes its own ground rules and operates with exceptions to the rules, but reserves the right to make a more negotiated application to local conditions. eg, a striking worker agrees everyone must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation, but has little/no relation to his willingness to go on strike for better pay/conditions

• oppositional code: the audience decodes the message in the preferred code in order to recode the message within some alternative framework of reference. rejects the intended reading.

professional codes - Hall (uses/definitions)

• professional: code which professional broadcasters employ when transmitting a message that’s already been signified in a hegemonic manner (operates inside the dominant code) (professionals may unconsciously reproduce hegemony not by openly submitting to it, but simply by operating in the professional bracket.)

negotiated codes - Hall (uses/definitions)

• negotiated: acknowledges hegemonic definitions to make grand significations, and on a more restricted level, makes its own ground rules and operates with exceptions to the rules, but reserves the right to make a more negotiated application to local conditions. eg, a striking worker agrees everyone must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation, but has little/no relation to his willingness to go on strike for better pay/conditions

oppositional codes - Hall (uses/definitions)

• oppositional code: the audience decodes the message in the preferred code in order to recode the message within some alternative framework of reference. rejects the intended reading.

Technological determinism - Readings/Authors

Williams - Technology and The Society

Technological determinism - Williams (uses/definitions)

• a class of opinion which is immensely powerful and now largely orthodox view of social change.

• the notion that new tech is discovered, by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions for social change and progress.

• the effects of the technologies have made the modern man and the modern condition

• to restore intention to the process of research and development, tech would be seen as being looked for and developed with certain purposes already in mind, purposes and practices to which the tech is not marginal but central.

symptomatic technology - Williams (use/definitions)

• the notion that tech becomes available as an element/medium in a process of change that is in any case occurring/about to occur. considers tech as symptoms of change of some other kind. only aqcuires an effective status when it is used for purposed which are already contained in this known social process.

Flow - Readings/Authors

Jeremy G Butler - An Introduction to Television Structures and Systems

Feuer - The Concept of Live Television

Flow - Butler(uses/definitions)

• flow: TV blends disparate units of narrative, information, and advertising into a never ending flow of television.

• Determines how stories will be told, how ads will be constructed, and how TV’s visuals will be designed.

• multiple meanings (polysemy) and segments within one portion of TV flow = TV contradicts itself frequently and haphazardly

• flow serves an industry need by keeping the audience tuned in to a specific network’s programming.

• ramifications of flow = polysemy (all texts have multiple meanings), interruption (experience of watching is constantly interrupted), and segmentation (tv’s flow governed by random association and sequence)

Flow - Feuer (uses/definitions)

• flow is related to the TV viewing situation. the tv is in the home, always available, part of daily life, and a person can intercept the flow at any point.

• argues that what Williams means by flow is that TV possesses segmentation without closure, and that segmentation is already a property of the text (unlike in narrative cinema)

• in live TV, the ideological connotations of live tv are exploited in order to overcome the contradiction between flow and fragmentation in TV practice.

• the flow of good morning america (and the host’s control of the flow) allow for the liveness of the host’s interview to seem real, to prevent viewers from turning the show off, and to obscure the manipulation of the show implied by its mode of address.

Liveness - Readings/Authors

• Feuer- The Concept of Live Television

Liveness - Feuer(uses/definitions)

• the word “live” brings suggestions of being there, seeing an event as it really is, seeing the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, the real.

• using Good Morning America as an example, the use of an internal monitor for live interviews and cuts back and forth between the host (plus a bit of editing) creates the temporary illusion of the host and interviewee in the same “live” space together.'

• liveness lends a sense of flow which overcomes extreme fragmentation of space/television

• film as still frames vs live broadcasting where the image is continuously moving

Melodrama - Readings/Authors

Mittell - Serial Melodrama

Melodrama - Mittell (uses/definitions)

• melodramas are a mode rather than a genre, an approach to emotion, storytelling, and morality seen across various genres and media forms

• proposes that melodramas are a narrative mode that uses suspense to portray moral legibility, offering emotional response to feel difference between 2 competing moral sides,, manifested through forward moving storytelling

• focuses on soap opera vs prime time TV

• soap operas’ audience is guided to focus on characters’ emotional lives rather than events, whereas primetime tv focuses less so on emotional lives and character relationships.

Intimate publics - Readings/Authors

Warner_They gon think you loud regardless

Intimate publics - Warner(uses/definitions)

• a space where people with like-minded worldviews and experiences come together to participate in a communal consumption of materials that elicit pleasure.

• if the lack of nuanced representation generates a make-do culture, then the next phase of that process is finding facets of characterization that no only can be recognized by individuals but also can be discussed among a group.

• the intimate public provides anchors for realistic, critical assessment of the way things are and provides material that forments enduring, resisting, overcoming, and enjoying being an x.

Chrononormativity - Readings/Authors

San Filippo_Doing Time Queer Temporalities OITNB

Chrononormativity - San Fillippo(uses/definitions)

• the institutionally and ideologically enforced temporal manipulations by which social subjects are regulated for maximum productivity and conformity.

Jeremy G. Butler, “An Introduction to Television Structures and Systems: Ebb and Flow in the Postnetwork Era”

Main Arguments + Examples

• Addressing the idea that TV has “died,” Butler’s text seeks to understand what has changed with the medium of TV since 2012 by studying its structure and the fundamental changes within those structures.

• Network Era TV was characterized by a widespread acceptance of cable TV, with dozens of network channels.

• TV is the first art form to produce a never ending flow of content, and people are content to watch rather than seek certain programs.

• Butler uses the term polysemy, which means many meanings, to describe how network TV contradicts itself. (Eg. Gilmore Girls vs. The Cosby Show)

• While there may be polysemy within the programs shown on Network Era TV, hegemonic values within the media are given greater weight than non-hegemonic values.

• Structure: TV during the Network Era constantly interrupted itself, with different segments of programming interrupted by ads. TV’s segmental structure determines how stories are told, information is presented, and commodities are advertised.

• The Post Network Era: The potential for viewer agency, choice, and interactivity increases exponentially, especially with the remote control, DVDs, and later, video games and the internet.

• The distribution of media is made easier with sites like Youtube, Google, and Yahoo. As Butler puts it, the viewer is now able to “pull” the media they want to watch or read rather than remaining passive. So with the internet, we can search for things. But also, we still get things recommended to us, much like during Network Era TV.

• The potential for viewers becoming producers—and not just receivers—of television might become a reality. Youtube and other social media apps allow their users to post their original content for free with ways to monetize, which makes it easier to distribute ideas or media and earn money with that media than it used to be.

Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,”

Main Arguments + Examples

• difficult to define TV

• by postulating equivalence between the event, time of tv creation and transmission viewing time, TV appears to be “live”

• TV’s “live” is less than the time between event of capture and transmission, but rather the ideology of the live, the immediate, the real. “live” = suggestion of being there, showing true facts of an event, but it can be recorded and edited beforehand

• Good Morning America reminds the viewer what time it is (emphasizing the live nature of the broadcast). The show is obsessed with its own liveness. In interviews between the host (David) and interviewees on a TV monitor, the interview is always shot over david’s shoulder to make it seem as if the two were occupying the same live space together.

• This format prevents any address from the interviewee and the spectator. no matter the ideological positioning of the interviewee, it will be sifted through the “televisualizing” screen of David’s discourse to make it appealing to its audience. The show emphasizes the ideology of the nuclear family, and that TV brings and keeps families together, can create families where none exist.

Sasha Torres, “Television and Race”

Main Arguments + Examples

• early TV depictions of race rarely appeared without being linked to contexts of poverty, drug addiction, criminality, or racial oppression.

• race may not be a real scientific concept, but its affects are imbedded in social institutions and have real consequences for human social life.

• Later, race signified a new set of consumer choices rather than a set of social problems.

• American TV has tended historically to anchor its depiction of African Americans to social conditions it understands to be inextricably linked to racially marked communities.

• assimilation approach in the 1950s to a pluralist approach in the 1960s onward (during and after the civil rights movement), but in a liberal pluralism way (included representations of POC but in contained ways that didn’t alienate white viewers)

• in extreme home makeover, they downplay the accomplishments of Alice Harris, an African American activist whose house was destroyed in flooding, painting her and her family as victims of natural disaster rather than a series of political ones.

• exclusive attention to stereotypes tends to flatten textual objects to such an extent that it almost always under-reads their complexities and risks under describing other problematic representations which may be more subtle but just as insidious. (gets people locked in to the positive/negative only)

• shows like extreme home makeover promote the misplaced fantasy of and faith in the transformative power of the commodity. (commodification, turning something w/ social or cultural value into something that can be bought, marketed, and sold)

• racial formation: a tool that directs our attention to TV’s representation of race and making visible the ways in which constructions of race change over time/racial definitions are contested/struggled over. if race is one of the crucial ways in which we order the social, then we should analyze its work systematically across the cultural field, and not just where its appearance happens to offend us.

Chuck Tryon, “TV Got Better: Netflix’s Original Programming Strategies and the On-Demand Television Transition”

Main Arguments + Examples

• Netflix attempts to use television/streaming discourse to make its streaming seem novel and appealing, positioning it as the future of tv and reframing it as something healthy.

• by presenting streaming as a more engaged form of tv (feasting in place of binge watching) and releasing an entire season of a series simultaneously, Netflix promises prestige, plentitude, participation, and personalization. it promoted the idea of letting people watch on their own time.

• Netflix’s models changed from renting DVDs online to a subscription model for an unlimited amount of rentals to a tiered pricing system that affects the amount of rentals, transitioned into a streaming service, and when that got too expensive, transition into producing original content.

• releasing all episodes of a show at once = netflix promoted more attentive viewers (familiar with details of the previous episodes), and more innovative storytelling practices (as show creators can assume viewers are more likely to remember subtle details).

• Netflix even went as far as to pay for an article called “TV Got Better” which was promotion for their services but appeared to be objectively reporting on changes in TV viewing practices. (the article praises Netflix’s prestigious shows, but the service noticeably still caries the “junk tv” it has supposedly rendered irrelevant)

• Netflix’s shows often rely on online economics of attention in order to gain a few days of promotion/attention from cultural critics. furthermore, their prestigious shows are promoted through political/entertainment/tech industry publications.