Derek Johnson

INVITING AUDIENCES IN

If content‐driven niche marketing gave rise to the industrial cultivation of fans, contemporary multiplatforming strategies accelerate encounters between audiences, television texts and spheres of production. Audiences are no longer merely cultivated as fans, but also invited in, asked to participate in both the world of the television text and the processes of its production. This paper first examines the economic exigencies served by these strategies. Why invite audiences in? Explored second are the means by which audiences are encouraged to enter both narrative space and the spaces of industrial production. How are audiences invited in? How do these strategies alter the spatial relationships of audiences, narrative and labor? Lastly, attention shifts toward the consequences of these new spatial arrangements between audiences, content and production. How does the proximity of audiences create new challenges for the industry? Ultimately, I argue that multiplatforming reconfigures and enables closer proximity between the spaces of consumption, narrative and labor, magnifying potential for intense audience investments that can potentially conflict with executive and corporate interests. Yet that same proximity often enables the industry to manage such challenges, contrary to claims about the newfound power of fans over producers.

Devaluing and revaluing seriality: The gendered discourses of media franchising

Gender anchors cultural negotiations over what media franchising is and how its serial production practices and narratives are valued. Cultural tensions between the economic viability and cultural legitimacy of seriality are both smoothed and exacerbated by the gendered discourses of media franchising. These discursive interventions are evidenced through examination of popular and trade talk about three television serials for which the term ‘franchise’ inflects, reworks, or disrupts the gendered values ascribed to them. First, although the CW’s Gossip Girl fits squarely into feminized models of serial narrative, franchise discourse claimed institutional and masculine legitimacy by stressing the economic rationality of its serial production. Second, in the case of ABC’s Lost, franchise discourse highlighted the serial repetition of industrialized culture production, challenging masculine valuation of the program based in perceptions of authenticity and singular artistic vision. Lastly, cultural backlash against Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica demonstrates how franchise discourse has directly linked critique of serialized industrial production to moral panic about the feminine. Although dynamic franchise discourses have been deployed across an eclectic, even contradictory range of industrial and narrative practices, in common across each is that the accrual of serial value depends in great part upon gendered meanings ascribed to and by franchising.

A Knight of the Realm vs. the Master of Magnetism: Sexuality, Stardom, and Character Branding

Since 2000, Sir Ian McKellen has transformed from Shakespearian thespian into a fixture of franchise film series like Lord of the Rings and X-Men. For the openly gay McKellen, participation in franchises – and particularly his portrayal of the oppressed minority and mutant radical Magneto in X-Men – presented a chance to position recognizable character brands within his star text and its ongoing engagement in gay politics. What results, however, was not perfect appropriation with the McKellen celebrity image but instead a more fraught tension between two competing forms of media marketing: stardom based in the management of personality and intellectual property networks based in content controlled directly by corporations. This article first contextualizes these tensions between intellectual property and stardom within a longer trajectory of filmic product differentiation and shifts between vertical and horizontal integration. Second, the article examines the branding of Magneto as an intellectual property, consistently constructed as a fascist villain across multiple media. Finally, the article explores how the management of Ian McKellens star text worked to alternatively mobilize that property as a potential site of queer activism – a project ultimately confounded by the changing conditions of star representation and labor in the franchise systems of contemporary transmedia economies. Neither the McKellen persona nor the Magneto property could fully contain the other as sites of contested image and meaning, but they simultaneously and unevenly inflected one another as a result of that intertextual struggle.

Figuring identity: Media licensing and the racialization of LEGO bodies

Bridging critical race studies with inquiries into media licensing and industrial cultures of production, this research examines the ubiquitous LEGO minifigure as a significant site of identity and power in the construction of both corporate brands and raced bodies. From analysis of the minifigures themselves, as well as press releases, interviews, and other managed corporate disclosures, media licensing can be understood as shaping racialized practices of representation while also acting discursively to imagine that racialization as the work of an industrial ‘other’. This affords LEGO a claim to a ‘pre-racial’ corporate identity that can disavow the politics of bodily representation.

StarCraft Fan Craft: Game Mods, Ownership, and Totally Incomplete Conversions

tarCraft—a real-time strategy game in which players command one of three space-faring races in a struggle to secure natural resources, develop technological infrastructure, build military units, and achieve martial victory over the competition—has proven to be one of the greatest video game success stories of all time. Though the game was released in March 1998, publisher Blizzard Entertainment continues to distribute this PC software, and despite the hardware and software advances of the last decade, hit-driven mass retailers in the United States like Best Buy still stock this relatively ancient game. According to Blizzard, StarCraft sold more than 1.5 million copies to become the best-selling PC game of 1998 and has since sold 8 million more worldwide, thanks largely to phenomenal success in South Korea (“10 Years”). In 2006 StarCraft remained the best-selling game in South Korea, having sold 3.5 million copies. Annually, between 600,000 and 700,000 South Koreans attend professional StarCraft tournaments where celebrity players are sponsored by corporate giants like Samsung (Cho). In addition to commercial success and cultural impact, the game won critical acclaim. In 2007 Edge Magazine declared StarCraft the thirty-seventh “greatest game of all time,” while Game Pro called it the nineteenth “most important,” and GameSpot UK deemed it in 2003 “The Standard by Which All RealTime Strategy Games Are Judged” (Edge Staff; Boba Fatt; GameSpot). This commercial, critical, and cultural success continued with the Brood War expansion pack in 1998 and is expected to extend to StarCraft 2 in 2009. In a market dependent on built-in obsolescence and newness, StarCraft perseveres. A contributing factor to that longevity has been a continual stream of user-generated content to keep the game fresh. The StarCraft software included a Campaign Editor that allowed players to design their own maps, tweak the StarCraft Fan Craft: Game Mods, Ownership, and

May the Force be with Katie

Responding to the 2010 media discourse around Katie Goldman—a ten-year-old Star Wars fan bullied for her interest in something perceived to be “for boys”—this essay investigates the relationship between industrial logics of media franchising, postfeminist culture, and the vernacular participation of social media users in regulatory ideologies of gender and sexuality. Reading mediated public performances of support for Katie against the hyper-feminized, industrially-produced “princess” media culture she seemingly rejected, as well as the sci-fi fashion shop HerUniverse that opened up a feminized space of fan subjectivity in the marketing of the Star Wars franchise, we can see how the transgression of normative consumer ideals by girls became re-inscribed within postfeminist and heteronormative gender roles. While celebrating unruly girl science fiction consumers as “different,” both industry and vernacular media cultures repositioned these figures in relation to beauty, princesses, heteronormative romance, and other postfeminist (but traditionally feminine) ideological frames.

Activating activism: Facebook trending topics, media franchises, and industry disruption

ABSTRACT This research considers the politics of the Facebook platform and the paratextual role of its Trending Topics module in opening the door to #FranchiseActivism: calls for intervention in the media industries’ management and exploitation of specific entertainment properties, organized and mobilized on social media, in which future representations, labor practices, and market priorities for ongoing media franchises often become articulated to the pursuit of social justice. Trending Topics goes beyond enabling activism by selecting, ordering, and organizing its expressions alongside the industrial forms of publicity and promotion also circulating in users’ news feeds. Facebook can alternately push activist conversations about media franchising to the forefront of social media discussion of major entertainment industry franchises or suppress it in favor of celebratory promotional narratives preferred by studio marketers. That Facebook opens doors to activist critique of franchising and puts media industries on the defensive (even as it simultaneously points to their preferred promotional gateways) speaks to the power Facebook algorithms have to shape the field of paratextual possibility. At the same time, human curatorial agency and corporate imperatives impose themselves upon algorithms to privilege the activation of activist perspectives within the hype of media franchising. Ultimately, this research identifies Facebook as a paratextual platform, considering the ways Trending algorithms enable and limit paratextual experiences, specific instances in which Trending Topics privilege activist intertexts alongside studio promotion of major media franchises, as well as the institutional priorities shaping Facebook’s management of this paratextual work. In activating activism in its Trending Topics, the Facebook platform opens the door to critical engagements with media franchising while demonstrating a paratextual framing power that can disrupt the patterns of hype constructed by entertainment media industries.

After the industry turn: can production studies make an audience turn?

The still-nascent field of production studies has been largely imagined as a means of understanding media industries. As the vanguard of the ‘“Industry Studies” turn’ (Caldwell 2013) and the call for ‘critical media industry studies’ approaches (Havens, Lotz, and Tinic 2009), recent media production research foregrounds the status of creative industries as culture, usefully putting questions of media labor and institutional context in dialogue with debates about identity, meaning and representation (Caldwell 2008; Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell 2009; Mayer 2011). One potential issue with this recognition of production cultures within industry, and wider embrace of production as a site of ongoing cultural inquiry, comes in the tendency to treat media industry insularly, artificially cordoning off its work cultures from the realm of consumption and the micro-politics of everyday life extending to that realm. We frequently become preoccupied with gaining access to the ‘inside’ world within media industries (Ortner 2009), failing to become sufficiently attuned to how production cultures interface, shape and are shaped by discourses and struggles manifesting outside of the strict bounds of studio lots and executive suites. What I wonder instead is whether studies of industry need to be so strictly defined by study of those who work within the bounds of industrial professionalism. To intervene in our understanding of the boundaries of industrial production cultures – particularly in relation to the politics of identity and consumption – I want to suggest that studies of production might match their ‘industry turn’ with a subsequent ‘audience turn’ that situates the consumer and the cultures and hierarchies of consumption as part and parcel of industry formations. In other venues, I have worked to develop the idea of an ‘audience function’, essentially trying to turn on its head Foucault’s (1980) notion of the author function. Just as the discursive construction of an author figure had the power to inform the meanings and values generated at the moment of reception, I increasingly think that the hierarchical positions that audiences occupy in consumption might be theorized as an important means of generating meaning and value out of media production work (Johnson 2013). If media professionals claim meaning and value for themselves and their work by reference to the cultural hierarchies in which their audiences might be situated, I suggest that we cannot fully understand the identities, claims to authority and struggles for agency or legitimacy in aboveor below-the-line production communities without accounting for the audiences in relation to whom that work is continually positioned. To most effectively grasp the cultural politics of media work, production studies of the media industries could reinvest in the idea of the audience, asking how the senseand identity-making practices