Vicki Mayer

Please Pass the Pan: Retheorizing the Map of Panlatinidad in Communication Research

A departure from the tendencies in past research, which tended to focus solely on majority populations within the Latino community, this article posits new diasporas within the U.S. Latino community as a fertile area for communication research into issues of identity, representation, and citizenship. An examination of the wave of Argentinean migration since 2001 provides one example of how research on new diasporas would complicate the notions of either an essentialistic or a pluralistic “panlatinidad” by contextualizing power relations both within and outside of Latino communities.

Soft-Core in TV Time: The Political Economy of a “Cultural Trend”

This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series’ creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.

When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography

Jerry Springer and La Mentira, Ricky Martin and Julia RobertsÐ these are programs and stars that a group of Mexican-American teenagers living in San Antonio might say that they watched in the late 1990s. Understanding why these teens like bilingual and bicultural media forms and what those contents mean to them is a research question complicated by the lack of MexicanAmerican youths as co-participants in academic research. By co-participation, I mean that in order to study Mexican-American youth culture, we must conduct research that does more than just ® ll gaps in reception literature. Rather, reception studies can create multicultural feminist openings for youths to contribute to the terms through which they are researched. In my own research, this meant balancing my desire to study Mexican-American teenagers’ media reception with their own desires to, among other things, have fun, be creative, and express their identities as gendered and raced teens in their community. The process of creating spaces for Mexican-American young people to participate in media studies on their own terms is fraught with tensions. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist television-audience scholars pioneered reception studies that used ethnographic methods to situate media in the context of women’s everyday lives and pleasures of media consumption (Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel 1997). However, this narrow focus tended to elide other factors that structure women’s lives, such as class and race. Even feminist audience researchers critiqued the lack of attention to women outside of speci® c racial and class boundaries, particularly those not shared with the researchers (Jacqueline Bobo and Ellen Seiter 1991). Hence, feminist media inquiry is at a dif® cult crossroads: how to become more multicultural and class-conscious when most media studies scholars are white and middle-class? I answer this question by presenting three feminist critiques of media ethnographies and young people. Each critique attempts to situate these previous ethnographies and advance the goals of my own investigation of MexicanAmerican youths and their media preferences. From there, I present an example drawn from ® eld notes that illustrates the tensions involved in embracing multicultural feminist perspectives on ethnographic methodologies. By exposing these tensions, my aim is to delve further into the potential contradictions when feminist media ethnographers try to build bridges from multicultural ® eld sites to the academy and from the academy to the creation of social change in the ® eld.

The Places Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet

Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.

Creative work is still work

When HBO producer David Simon heard that he had won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2010, he quipped that his wife, a noted author herself, told him the morning after: ‘Hey Genius, you forgot to take t...

Digitally Not Yours: Spatial Discourses and Discursive Spaces for Brazilian Digital Television Policy in Manaus 1

This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazils digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the manufacturing hub for the digital technology. Through an analysis of three physical spaces in Manaus implicated in the creation of digital television, the article exposes the political, economic, and social conditions that support, and ultimately contradict, national digital television rhetoric that focuses only on the uses of digital television.

Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans

Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably. “A scathing critique of the economic realities and broken promises of Hollywood South, told in rich ethnographic detail and passionately argued through Vicki Mayer’s deep connection to New Orleans. This is a vital book.” NITIN GOVIL, author of Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay “Mayer guides readers through the numbers and arguments behind Louisiana’s costly love affair with the film industry and raises important questions over whether the state’s citizens are getting their money’s worth.” STEPHANIE GRACE, columnist, The New Orleans Advocate “A visionary in the study of cultural labor, economy, and geography, Mayer is that rare writer who combines exquisite storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This is an essential contribution to film and media studies, and an urgent history lesson for policy makers.” MELISSA GREGG, author of Work’s Intimacy VICKI MAYER is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is coeditor of the journal Television & New Media and author or editor of several books and journal articles about media production, creative industries, and cultural work.

TRANSLATION: Civic Media, Meet Community Media; Community Communication and Education for Citizenship

This short introduction to Cicilia Maria Krohling Peruzzos 1998 article “Community Communication and Education for Citizenship” gives some context into the contributions of Brazilian communication scholarship to the study of community and participatory media.

The places where audience studies and production studies meet

Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010-2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.

Book Review: Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries

with different participants. Through these interviews Light traces an act he calls as disconnective practice: ‘Disconnective practice [...] involves potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs in relationship to a particular site, within a particular site, between and amongst different sites and in relation to the physical world’ (p. 17). Disconnective practice is a question of power; the user has the power to connect but also the power to not to connect. Light shows that the power in disconnecting exists equally in the domains of private and public. One of the illustrating examples is the coming-together of personal and work life in which social media plays a significant role. Users have to choose if they ‘friend’ their colleagues on Facebook, and if they do they enter the regime of self-censorship. As one of the interviewees mentioned ‘I’m not friends with anyone on Facebook that is senior to me at work [...] I do not want to be connected with them in a kind of social sense’ (p. 83). Furthermore, in the workplace the question of using social media is not only a personal choice but also a way for employers to use disconnective practices as means of power. By implementing either technical blocking or organizational policies, employers can prevent employees from spending time on social media. The examples where users have to negotiate whether they choose to connect or disconnect with these sites and the services they provide are important and shed light on our current culture of connectivity. Light shows in a compelling manner that our connections and disconnections with social networking sites mediate public life and shape ways we interact with each other. Looking at disconnection, or examining, mapping and using disconnective practices, will allow us not only to understand human relationships on social networking sites but will also give insights into how these platforms work technically, culturally and politically. I find it is easy to agree with Light’s concluding argument that in addition to connections we need to understand and develop scholarship around disconnection: ‘Connection is fundamental to the operation of SNSs [...] But connection cannot exist without disconnection and therefore I believe it is just as fundamental to our understandings of what SNSs can be and how we make sense of them’ (p. 159).