I've had three pieces of varying scope come out in the past few weeks. The eagle-eyed will have spotted some portion of each of my three main dissertation chapters!

• Sex detectives: Law & Order: SVU's fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire is the five-year-old "My Girlfriend Olivia" paper, finally ready for prime time in Transformative Works and Cultures.

• My essay "User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence" is part of the fabulous In Focus: Fandom and Feminism [right-click to download PDF] feature in the most recent Cinema Journal (it comes from my Battlestar Galactica chapter).

• You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor is an In Media Res post about fan-written scripts that teases the chapter to come. Check out more lively contributions to L Word week through Friday!

For an article that's completely unrelated to my dissertation, watch for "Show Me Yours: Cyber-Exhibitionism from Perversion to Politics" in Camera Obscura #73 (spring 2010).

I'm delighted to present slidecasts of the four talks that comprised the "Media Temporalities" panel at Media in Transition 6, held Saturday 25 April 5-6:30 at MIT. I hope that, now that we're a few months past the sometimes overwhelming MiT6 excitement, this virtual reconstruction will hold some interest for those who weren't able to attend the session. Click the play buttons to hear an audio recording of each talk synchronized with the slides.

- Julie Levin Russo (moderator)

Media Temporalities: Genre, Queer Space, and Digital Archives in Transition

While the term "cyberspace" has swiftly entered daily conversation, the notion of "cybertime" receives considerably less scrutiny. Perhaps this is because the Internet seems to both infinitely expand, growing richer by the minute with the addition of new content, and remain stable, preserved in a nebulous cloud between networked computers. Yet as media, online or otherwise, develop and grow so too do cultural understandings of temporal concepts like permanence, stability, the span of a generation, and (post)modernity. This panel thus seeks to analyze a few case studies in media temporality and the way that changes in media are marked by paradigms of time. By analyzing American time capsules, Sarah Toton discusses the changing roles of technology in cultural preservation, curation and audience participation. Examining practices of self-inscription within digital archives, Anne Kustitz considers Foucault's arts of existence as a model for users' negotiation of online information’s ephemerality and permanency. Melanie Kohnen scrutinizes the consequence of distancing viewers from queer filmic time. In investigating the transmediation of noir themes, Louisa Stein reflects on the nature of genre continuities throughout media eras, speculating on the influence of digitally-savvy "millenials" on a changing media genre. Through these examinations of archives, films, and other online materials, this panel considers the importance of addressing shifting temporalities and situating users and audiences within them.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen

Outside of Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain

As a medium of representation, the apparatus of cinema necessarily distances the depiction of space and time from the perceived reality of the spectator. Nevertheless, films have been credited with bringing audiences closer to social realities with which they might be unfamiliar. Recently, mainstream press and audiences have bestowed this credit on the films Boys Don't Cry (1999) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), designating them as breakthroughs in Hollywood's approach to representing queer desires and identities. I challenge this assessment and argue that increasing efforts of putting queerness on film and television screens always include a screening of queerness that limits or filters out unruly and undermining aspects. In particular, my paper analyzes how genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain that encapsulates the films' diegeses in a distant place and time. Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of American society. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to significantly impact neither Hollywood film-making nor everyday life.

Anne Kustritz

Surveillance and Self-Presentation: Foucault's Arts of Existence in the Digital Archive

The enormous expansion of digital archiving and unprecedented levels of access to information produce both incredible excitement and anxiety. For individuals, massive digital archives of personal information inspire concerns about privacy, identity theft, and the potential for government interference in citizens' private lives. Each of these anxieties construct the internet's digital archives as sites of multi-faceted, panoptic surveillance, very much in the tradition established by Michel Foucault's early work. Yet, despite constant reminders of the always present potential for surveillance and discipline, people continue to blog, chat, interact, podcast, and otherwise inscribe themselves into the digital archive. These practices of deliberate digital self-fashioning can be understood as arts of existence or arts of the self, an aesthetic theory of identity and ethics developed in Foucault's later works. Attempts to manage and cultivate the representation of the self housed within digital archives as an aesthetic project offer a glimpse of individuals functioning within surveillance with a critical self-reflexivity about the constructedness of identity and the pervasive reach of power.

Louisa Stein

Transmedia Noir: Genre Continuity and Transformation Across Media

This talk investigates the continuities and transformations of generic discourse across media formats and over time. Contemporary genre theorists such as Rick Altman and Jason Mittell consider genres as complex circuits of meaning that bridge media formats and history/time. I focus here on film noir, a generic concept that seems especially bound up with questions of technology and with notions of temporality and nostalgia. Specifically, I look at new manifestations of film noir in television, new media extensions, and independent digital arenas. I consider the way in which these texts combine contemporary investments in nostalgia and pastness with questions of the moral (or immoral) import of technology. Currently, noir elements are especially central in television programs designed to reach the desirable young adult audience, a generation known in industrial terms as Millennials. A noir ethos characterizes much contemporary TV programming, including shows such as Gossip Girl, Heroes, Kyle XY, Lost, Supernatural, and The Wire. Such television programs frequently combine questions of contemporary moral ambiguity with nostalgic visuals, and invoke the threat of corporate technology draped in the mystique of noir. I trace these noir-inflected representations of technology from TV texts to their digital media extensions and to the noir-infused responses of viewers turned transmedia participants.

Sarah Toton

Bury the Archive: A Look into Analog and Digital Time Capsules

While historic examples of time capsules date back to Mesopotamia, the modern act of burying a sealed object containing products of material culture began in Atlanta, GA in 1936 when the Crypt of Civilization was sealed at Oglethorpe University. The Crypt became the first of a handful of "millennial time capsules": that is, capsules sealed for over 1000 years. Since the 1930s, time capsules have become a popular attempt to preserve a society through its technologies and products. This paper uncovers two time capsules--the Crypt of Civilization and Westinghouse's Capsule of Cupaloy--and suggests the ideological and commercial impulses behind these popular endeavors in collection and archiving.

Once upon a time, when I was but a wee proto-professional in the wide and wondrous field of media studies, I went on the academic job market. Between October and April, I sent out more than 60 applications, and no doubt expended far too much energy in the improbable pursuit of a gainful livelihood. Many times I rejoiced and many times I despaired, and although I learned lessons of patience and humility the uncertain outcome never became easier to bear. I am thus ecstatic to announce a happy ending to this saga:

For the next 2 years I will be serving as Acting Assistant Professor of new media in the Film & Media Studies program of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University!

I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting my colleagues in person because their search did not allow for campus visits. But all signs suggest a fantastic fit between my academic background and future and the program's composition and goals. I'm thrilled at the prospect of contributing to the evolution of the department's offerings in digital media, television, and contemporary visual culture.

Moreover, the position is absurdly accommodating of my continuing professional development. The appointment begins in January 2010 and comprises a 1-2 teaching load over winter and spring terms in 2010 and 4 courses over 3 quarters in the 2010-2011 academic year. I plan to move to the bay area in December, and until then I will be working to complete my PhD (don't expect to hear much from me over the next 6 months). I leave my permanent residence in Providence in mid-June and will return periodically while living at home in Michigan during the summer and fall.

Though I may be one princess who lives happily ever after, I have never been more aware than I was during this process of the centrality of class privilege to my achievements. In the context of a general economic crisis, the depressed academic job market has gotten more coverage than usual this year, much of it (in the New York Times, for example) portraying the plight of grad students as a temporary exception to the status quo. Speaking from my own experience, the problems with academic training and employment are not exceptional, they are structural (hat tip Dave Parry or someone contiguous). The notion that institutions of higher learning support the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake and that the most talented scholars will succeed in a meritocracy provides an ideological alibi for the precarious conditions of academic labor.

Based simply on the numbers, the majority of new professors will not land secure tenure-track jobs in the early stages of their careers, no matter how promising their skills. Because the limited array of post-doctoral and temporary full-time positions isn't adequate to absorb this workforce, most young scholars expect to toil as adjuncts for low pay until their research and teaching profile is more established. In many cases, work that could support emerging PhDs is is piled onto grad students (hat tip Amanda French), and tenured jobs that could support professionals are parceled out into part-time positions without benefits. The university is an industry and we are workers; the more that advanced grad students and new PhDs have to concentrate on paid employment, the harder it is for us to progress in our research and move onto firmer vocational ground. The result is that academics typically spend a decade or more of their lives, through grad school and several years afterwards, not earning a living wage. I am lucky to have financial resources that mitigate this burden, and certainly many with less advantages than I navigate these circumstances with aplomb and go on to distinguished careers. But I can't help remarking that these conditions perpetuate an institutional culture that makes access difficult for those without a commensurate level of economic privilege (and the other dimensions of privilege with which class intersects).

If you'd like to celebrate my accomplishments, I urge you to support organizations and initiatives that advocate for academia as a profession that is equitable and open to all. Marc Bousquet and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor offer some illuminating resources, including (USA):
• The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions
• The Coalition on the Academic Workforce
• The American Federation of Teachers
• The American Association of University Professors (currently seeking donations for their capital campaign)

I write all this because I feel a certain responsibility to head off the impression that, since I got a desirable job in the end, the system works. It doesn't, to which my brilliant friends who will be left un(der)employed this year attest. However, I think it's fair to say that a tremendous dose of my own tenacious work and careful strategy went into my success. I hope that we can continue to nurture ABDs and new PhDs by sharing knowledge and experience as a collective resource. For starters, I'll point you to the Media Studies Job Search group on Facebook, where I'd be happy to field discussion, and the advice section of the infamous wiki.

Finally, I'd like to convey my deepest thanks to the friends, family, mentors, and peers who have supported me in so many ways through this process.

This entry is crossposted at cyborganize, but I am relocating my future blogging back to this web site. Please update any blogrolls to the Indiscrete Media category feed, which is my workaround for organizing new posts. I believe I've managed to rejigger the site to allow you to comment using OpenID or without logging in.

Oh hi blog, no offense, but I do most of my internettery on twitter these days. One of the keys to twitters wild success has been the capacity of its stripped-down interface to paradoxically inspire a cornucopia of practices driven by the swarming creativity of its users. Although the update box at the top is still captioned What are you doing? people type into it any and all information that can be meted out in 140 characters, including reviews, live commentary, poetry, jokes, links, meme responses, calls to action, and messages to friends. The sites open API and ecumenical attitude has facilitated innumerable hacks and mashups that offer workarounds for some of the features that twitter lacks, as well as illuminating and fanciful ways of interfacing with its worldwide could of presence. read more »

Academic Publishing in the Digital Age
HASTAC Forum, running NOW through November 16

Following from October's discussion of the importance of Fair Use, this forum will offer an opportunity to extend the dialogue about new challenges and opportunities in academic publishing today. As established print journals tend toward expensive and restricted subscriptions in response to current technological and financial conditions, a counter-movement is growing in support of online access to scholarship as a public good, led by open electronic journals and databases. Are traditional journals a relic of a pre-internet era, or does their publication model still have value in academia? How can either system be economically viable? Given that strict liability copyright standards are a hurdle for print journals, do electronic journals provide a necessary haven for the citation and transformation of proprietary artifacts and work? In a context where everyone can have a blog or home page, what do students and scholars need to know about the benefits and risks of self-publishing? And perhaps most importantly, what new possibilities for intellectual and creative work are capacitated by the web as a platform?

This goal of this forum is to explore the shifting definition of academic publishing in the digital age, as well as to consider the intellectual, creative and technical challenges which digital platforms pose for scholarly publication. The conversation will be co-hosted by HASTAC Scholars Chris Hanson of USC, who has worked for the online journal Vectors, and Julie Levin Russo of Brown, who works for the online journal Transformative Works and Cultures. They will be joined by other members of these publications' editorial and creative teams, including Kristina Busse, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer. Vectors is an international electronic journal that brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, publishing works realized in multimedia that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Transformative Works and Cultures is an Open Access international electronic journal on popular media and fan communities published by the Organization for Transformative Works, and invites authors to embrace the technical possibilities of the web and test the limits of academic writing. Both publications are copyrighted under Creative Commons licenses.

We hope to facilitate a venue in which we may all ask and answer questions about the present and future of digital scholarship. Please come join the discussion at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age