Kevin Sanson

Corresponding Geographies Remapping Work and Workplace in the Age of Digital Media

This essay makes three related claims about digital media creative clusters through a case study of the Hub in Glasgow, Scotland. First, online social networking platforms are an increasingly “common sense” feature that property developers include to attract media workers to purpose-built properties. Second, integrating and managing professional identities through the construction of place are considered necessary to promote that place to a larger audience. Finally, reorganizing place in this way refashions creative work as a more nebulous concept, a process that integrates formerly distinct aspects of our work and nonwork lives into the common pursuit of innovation for economic gain.

Location and labor: critical crossroads in global film and television

I approached the editorial prompt as an opportunity to work through some of the concerns driving my current research on creative labor in emergent or ‘peripheral’ media hubs, centers of production activity outside established media capitals that are nevertheless increasingly integrated into a global production apparatus. It builds from my research on the role that film, television and digital media production have played in the economic and cultural strategies of Glasgow, Scotland, and extends the focus on media work to other locations, including Prague and Budapest. I am particularly drawn to the spatial dynamics at play in these locations and how local producers, writers, directors and crew negotiate a sense of place and creative identity against the flows and counter-flows of capital and culture. This means not only asking questions about the growing ensemble of people, places, firms and policies that make international productions possible, but also studying the more quotidian relationships between media workers and the locations (both near and far) where they now find work. I do not see these tasks as unrelated. On the one hand, such queries underscore how international production depends on a growing constellation of interchangeable parts and is facilitated by various actors whose agendas may or may not converge. On the other hand, these questions also betray an even more complicated dynamic, a process that is shifting the spatial orientation of both location and labor around uneven and contested scales. As local industries reimagine themselves as global players, media practitioners are caught up in a new geography of creative labor: not only are personnel finding it increasingly necessary to hop from place to place to follow the work, but also place itself is changing, as locations morph into nebulous amalgamations of tax rebates, subsidized facilities, production services and (when it still matters) natural beauty.

We Don't Want Your Must-See TV: Transatlantic Television and the Failed “Coupling” Format

NBCs failed attempt to remake the BBCs Coupling generated a significant amount of press coverage in summer 2003. At the core of the debate was a struggle to reconcile an increasingly integrated transatlantic television market with traditional assumptions about culture and its authentic connection to space and place. The interest in the remake not only created a space where certain national differences were played out and performed but also facilitated an equally compelling transatlantic dialogue about creative ownership, appropriation, and a networks responsibility to its audiences. In doing so, the media attention highlighted how television formats are best understood not as innocuous commodities of international trade but as potential sites of articulation, contestation, and community in an increasingly transnational television environment.

Global Television: Co-Producing Culture (review)

ntil very recently, broadcasting and nationhood have existed across a range of scholarship in a tightly woven, inextricable dance in which one—either one— ultimately gives way to the other. Indeed, broadcasting’s ability to bring the scattered peoples of the nation into symbolic accord as a single national family, constituting the “we-ness” and “us-ness” so central to the imagining of the national community, has made the relationship between radio or television and national culture a commonsense starting point from which to assess the medium’s success or shortcomings. Of course, this discursive link is becoming more and more difficult to maintain at a time when capital, culture, and technology are transgressing our symbolic and material boundaries with ever-greater speed and efficiency. Television content increasingly is available across national borders, and the production deals that make our programs possible involve a growing number of global partners. Accordingly, in recent years television studies has seen a renewed interest in displacing the medium’s national referent with a more transnational geography. Barbara J. Selznick’s Global Television: Co-Producing Culture continues this momentum with a welcomed and intensely detailed account of what too often remains a side note in these larger discussions: international coproductions. Selznick’s objective here is to unravel the particular culture—forms of knowledge, ideas about the world, and identities—international coproductions create as a global commodity. In short, she argues, the desire for “universal” appeal results in programs with a form and strucGlobal Television: Co-Producing Culture