Fiske, Hartley, 26 Jan 2010

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Contents

Housekeeping

  • Slides due Friday
  • Feedback coming soon

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1970

Comparing metaphors

  • Fiske, "Iceberg", beneath the surface
  • Marx, "Boiling kettle"

Practical challenges

Visibility

  • Who produces artifacts?
  • Challenges of measurement
  • How do you see the "iceberg" under the water?

Measurement

  • Where are the boundaries?
    • Numbers of YT videos? Comments?
    • Fan pages?
  • How do we ensure that constructs are culturally significant?
    • Rather than a "reduction", using measurement as theoretical raw materials
  • (Historical note: one reason complexity was less common in measurement was the lack of computing power to run the tests. Now we can rely on software to run much more complex tests.)

History

  • Communication lacks comprehensive discipline-specific history
  • Examine historical phenomena
    • Scope and scale
    • Artifactual details
    • Can we find information from previous events?
    • Is it possible to do work on 9/11 response, for example?
    • Paradox: despite the proliferation of digital artifacts, Internet is ... "ahistorical"?
      • Or is it a strange kind of history? Nostalgia? Collapsed history...?

How Historical?

  • Must we remain rooted in a particular time, socio-econo layers
  • Can we talk about the Bible? Lucha libre?
  • Can we do a case study via pre 20th historical artifacts?

Fiske as "meta theorist"

  • Broad synthesis of other people's case studies
  • This approach makes it difficult to ascertain the nuances, rich details of each case

Fiske, radical / progressive distinction

  • Responding to Frankfurt pressure, "Are you sufficiently Marxist? Are you radical enough?"
    • Pop culture as a "distraction"
    • Disengagement myth: more people vote in Idol than in the U.S. presidental election
    • Voting mechanisms, trust: same anxiety play out in Idol as in presidential politics
  • Thus, Fiske creates this distinction in order to address "progressive" political action though they might not be self-identified as "radical"
    • Connects to investigations of feminism in fandom
    • Fiske wants to value these activities before they are cleaved by a "revolutionary" critique/attitude
    • e.g. Radway reading romance novels: feminist in practice, if not name
  • How do we integrate more work re: Tea Party, 9/12 movements?

Raymond Williams, "Structure of feelings"

(Media Matters, 8-9)

  • What it "feels like" to live in a particular place, time
  • Separating the politics from the practices
    • Scott Brown / Barack Obama as part of the same phenomenon
    • What it feels like to be an "agent of change"?
    • Evidence of something larger
  • Many different, interrelated structures of feeling
    • Difficult to generalize
  • Building layers of complexity
    • Social "sensibility"

Connections:

  • Hartley's plebiscite industries
    • Re: the pleasurable feeling of voting
  • Hegel, zeitgeist
  • Habermas, public sphere

How are structures of feeling play out in voting scenarios?

  • Certain voices are louder, identified as experts
    • Idol panel, Fox/MSNBC discourses: evaluative judgement
    • Jenkins: MSM can marginalize, Participatory culture can negate
  • These evaluative voices provide data to use in the voting decision
  • MSM will attempt to marginalize popular negations
    • e.g. Sanjaya on Idol, the Colbert bridge naming, moot as sexiest man?
    • How do the participants talk about their feelings? Can we trust them?
    • If they affirm our hypothesis, Marxists call them "dupes"
    • If they do not, does that mean we are wrong?
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