JK Wedding Entrance Dance

Jill Patterson & Kevin Heinz had un-ordinary entrance for their wedding ceremony at church. Instead of piano, they had dance music. Instead of traditional walk down the aisle, they had their bridesmaids and grooms dancing. The couple wedding entrance video made 35.000.000 hits on YouTube. They later were invited for talk show and decided to use their sudden fame to support an anti violence movement.
I decided to post their video here not as the prove of a fairy tale romance the video might have been taken for but to illustrate the power of convergence culture, the power of internet and visual media marriage that we are known as YouTube.

Oprah Channel Network

The amazing Oprah Winfrey launched her own channel, here is the article from New Yorker:

Who is Oprah Winfrey and what does she want? What does she want that she doesn’t already have? And what does she want for us that we don’t already have? None of these questions are new, but, with Winfrey having embarked on an extraordinary venture—starting a cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), that is meant to be entirely in her own image—they are worth asking. Of course, questions about Oprah Winfrey have always been interesting, and, in a way, it’s our questions about her that make her interesting, because no answer to any of them has ever seemed sufficient. For everything that we can think of that’s true about Winfrey, its opposite also seems to be true. Winfrey is all about truth—“personal truth,” in particular, as distinguished from external, verifiable truth—and yet, despite her twenty-five years on national TV and her many disclosures, which began, in the first year of her broadcasting career, with the announcement that she had been sexually abused as a child, and continued in subsequent years with revelations about her tastes, her personality, her houses, what she looks like without makeup, and what she likes to eat and drink (if she comes over to your place, be sure to serve her a Moscow Mule), she remains unknowable.

Winfrey’s stock-in-trade is listening to people, embracing them, identifying with them. But there’s an aura of aloneness about her—and how could there not be? She’s the world’s—the world’s—first black female self-made billionaire. She’s been living with a man for nearly twenty years, but she doesn’t give off the vibe of someone who’s wrapped up with another human being, except for her best friend of more than thirty years, Gayle King, who also plays a key role in Winfrey’s business life. When Winfrey says “we,” she’s usually talking about herself and Gayle.

Winfrey is interested in the betterment of the species, and yet she has featured people on her show who offer little in the way of progress, such as the celebrity Jenny McCarthy, who argued against childhood vaccines for years, claiming—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that they had caused her son to be autistic. Winfrey talks about spirituality and personal growth, but her attempts to connect with her audience often take the form of lavish material gifts—cars, refrigerators, and, earlier this season, the last season of her talk show, a trip to Australia. (The frenzy that took over the audience members when she told them about the trip was like what happens to a beehive when it’s batted.) Generous as Winfrey is, though, her network isn’t free to viewers, unless they’re already paying for a cable package. OWN is a joint venture with Discovery Communications and took the place of one of its existing channels, Discovery Health, which isn’t offered on basic cable.

According to Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Winfrey, “Oprah,” published last year, Winfrey was sure, from the time she was a young girl, that she would be a great actor. Her unsettlingly good performance in the 1985 movie “The Color Purple,” as it happened, was a one-time thing. Winfrey’s perfection of the art of acting sincere probably made the development of dramatic range impossible—and unnecessary. Debates about the sincerity of Winfrey’s sincerity are what often divide her fans from her detractors, but I’m more interested in the manifestations of her presumption and her ego. For someone in her business, there could hardly be a bigger stage on which to display these than an entire network. Although Winfrey will be less of a physical presence on OWN than she is now on her syndicated talk show—she’ll have a show, beginning in the fall, but it will air only a couple of times a week—she will be everywhere, all the time. She calls this move the “next chapter” in her life, but the book is ostensibly all about us; every show, she has said, has been created with viewers in mind. If you love TV and its possibilities, hearing this can only make your heart sink.

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What Winfrey has in mind for us is more of what we already have: an overabundance of highly directed, highly edited, highly scripted “unscripted” programming. The one exception to the slate of wall-to-wall canned reality is Oprah’s friend Gayle’s morning talk show (“The Gayle King Show”), which began on satellite radio in 2006 and is now also onscreen on OWN. The show is live, and is based on the news of the day, but there’s no sense of life on it. King has a radio voice, but her face is peculiarly expressionless; a performer she is not. On her first episode, last week, she started out talking about the shootings in Tucson, but moved all too easily to the topic of “work husbands.” The next day, she followed her Tucson update with a discussion of a Men’s Health survey about whether older women were more likely than younger women to have sex on the first date. (They are!)

In a recent online chat with Susan Casey, the editor of O, The Oprah Magazine (having both Winfrey’s nickname and her first name in the title is practically Monty Pythonesque—O, The Oprah Magazine, It Is Mine, and It Belongs to Me, and I Own It), Winfrey said that David Zaslav, the head of Discovery Communications, had approached her several years ago about creating a channel based on “living your best life” (one of her catchphrases), a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day version of the magazine. Having taken on the challenge, she said, going into Oprahspeak, “I feel responsible for the energy that I bring into the rooms of every single person who turns on this channel.” It being important to reflect your boss’s wonderfulness back at her, Casey replied, “That is such a big statement.” Winfrey said, “Yeah, but that’s where I am.” She added later, “It feels like the most creative I’ve ever been. It feels like the most open I’ve ever been.” Self-congratulation is nothing new for Winfrey, but in this case it isn’t based on much. I don’t know what’s creative about giving a talk show to Rosie O’Donnell (it’s been done before), having couples with sexual problems talk to Dr. Laura Berman (it’s been done before), or filming women in prison (see above). There’s also a show about hoarding (there are already two such shows on other networks), but, being a hoarder myself, I think you can’t have too many of those.

When I started watching OWN, a couple of days after it began, on January 1st, I truly thought I was watching reruns from other cable channels. There are a couple of food shows, one a straightforward cooking show with an inoffensive host (“Cristina Ferrare’s Big Bowl of Love”) and the other based on a clever idea: testing the recipes in cookbooks and evaluating their utility. The hosts of that show, “Anna and Kristina’s Grocery Bag,” are Canadians with a long history of similar service shows on Canadian TV. I’ve seen only one episode, but I felt that they were being a little cute, almost trying to screw up, as if competence would intimidate viewers, but their evaluation of the book in question seemed sound, and now I know which Japanese cookbook not to buy.

I’m not proud to say that there are two family-dysfunction reality shows that I’m expecting to be sucked into—“The O’Neals” and “The Judds”—and one duchess-dysfunction show, “Finding Sarah,” starring the hapless Sarah Ferguson. I don’t actually think that Winfrey is being her best self by giving Ferguson a show; the kind of attention that she needs isn’t what cameras can offer her. And I’m not sure that Ryan and Tatum O’Neal should be working out their problems (problems like being estranged for a couple of decades) in public. The fighting Judds, mother Naomi and daughter Wynonna, who will be filmed going on tour again after a long hiatus, can take the heat of the cameras; I’ve seen them interviewed several times, and it seems that their troubles over the years—personal and medical—have forced the growth of insulating layers of psychobabble, covered by a hard steel shell. Funnily enough, the most fascinating show so far is also the most conventional: a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the last season of Winfrey’s talk show. Winfrey says that it’s uncensored; clearly, it’s not. But it’s riveting to watch her employees, all of whom must reportedly sign confidentiality agreements as a condition of working with her, talk about their boss, and if you want to know how Winfrey feels about pooping in public bathrooms this is the show for you.

More programming will be rolling out on OWN, but I haven’t seen any indication that real dramas or real comedies, written by real writers, will be among them. OWN isn’t about experimentation or risk-taking; it’s about empire-building and image-inflating. (Please, hold your “Duh”s.) From what I’ve seen so far, it’s numbingly unimaginative and middle of the road. What that road is, and where it’s going, and why we need to be on it remains to be seen. Promoting the channel, Winfrey likes to say that it will air nothing that will keep you from sleeping at night. “The intention of this channel is to bring good energy,” she said at a press event a few days after OWN launched. Winfrey knows about energy. “I am very much aware of the energy that the television is transmitting all of the time,” she said. “That’s why I don’t allow—up until now, I have never allowed it on in my house, unless there was something specific that I wanted to see, because I don’t want all that energy coming into my space.” I know what she means. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2011/01/24/110124crte_television_franklin#ixzz1BwYC5UxL

Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly: One Final Conclusion

Having reach the end of the thesis, I would like to refresh what the paper were concerned; whether Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly can be considered a communication failure, and why?

In order to answer the question, I will draw lines from the thesis analysis;

Firstly, from technique analysis, Blind Pig inherits what the term ‘imperfect’ cinema is. The film is characterized by experimental style that is made under strict production budget. As can be seen from the images, Blind Pig’s artistic background is good but it is far from complicated and expensive. The camera angles are chosen carefully and the director is efficient with each scene he had taken. There were no single frame where Blind Pig presenting unnecessary information.

Secondly, Blind Pig presented the world of people living in diaspora, of being miss placed and not belongs. Being born and raised as a part of Chinese ethnic in the middle of racist environment, the filmmaker foremost object is to make peace with himself, to answer his past; his childhood memories and identity question that never been answered. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly inherits the characteristic of intercultural cinema, which is a medium of expression that aims to heal one’s wound.

The spectator of Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly might struggle to make narrative sense from montage of images, along with the qrotesque elements from the film. Further, it needs amount of reference on Indonesia and on film theory to be able to understand the signs behind the film. Although, in one’s view, from the beginning viewers shall have figure what Blind Pig tries to say; an ambiguity feeling on identity.

Concerning one of the thesis sub question whether Blind Pig’s acceptance in Indonesia is caused by the country’s cultural spectacle, from second chapter reviews I get into conclusion that it is more about the audience maturity to see their bad face in the mirror that will determine the success of another critical film in Indonesia.

Furthermore, to answer the second sub question, based from the thesis analysis, the film is intended to be the filmmaker personal work. Which main concern is for a medium of expression. This made the research question whether Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly can be considered a communication failure not relevant anymore. However, from the perspective on why Blind Pig was made in the first place, the film is successful enough in signifies the filmmaker’s personal style. It comes from facts that the film is well made. Although the film’s spectators may not understand the entire symbolic elements from the film, it is clear to what message Blind Pig is conveyed.

By finishing the thesis, I learned that to measure whether a film is a communication failure, I must first look to the main purpose from where the filmmaking is based.

An experimental and non-conformist film is, in my personal view Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly has using correct grammar for the chosen language the film is speaking. If Blind Pig were a novel, the film can be characterized for literature one. Which may not easy to follow. Yet, enriched diversity and encouraged personal vision.

In the present, Indonesia film industry that has long been dominated by commercial films need more alternative works that would make the film culture healthier, film which has the spirit of a pig who wants to fly.

The Study of Media/Social Science

Your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell (Adorno 1938/1980: 129).

My Current Media Project

It's been a year since I posted something in this blog. I currently working on my thesis which is not far from television; film. Actuality, film is not my most passionate subject to study. But having written my undergraduate thesis, I fall in love with semiotics and representation. In such cryptic's Da Vince Code kind-of-way, that is the best part of moving image I think; images deconstruction and analysis on spectator's reception.

The film that I have chosen for my research subject is Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly. Reason? Daring surrealist film which was first produced in independent way. Then again, the issue this film brings is sensitive and is personal which I admired.

Below is my research proposal:
Before studying in Master of Media Culture, film was always my second interest after television. There is nothing interesting about the industry which for me is very predictable, dividing their typicality between the mainstream and the art house production. The mainstream one always-become commercial success, and the art house production only find its small number of audience in alternative spaces.

The condition of art house films in Indonesia is no different than the typicality of global film industry itself. Other than the awards they won, the alternative art house films mostly failed reaching audience due to the failure to communicate with audience.

However, the release of Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly in 2008 was a different story. The film that first was financed independently from 2006 has long been anticipated by Indonesia’s cultural workers-and online community forum members. It is the feature debut from Indonesia’s respected short film director that won his reputation after his film; Kara Daughter of a Tree was admitted to Cannes Film Festival in 2005.

Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is not only the Indonesia’s famous short film director first feature film. In many occasions he also admitted that the film is his most personal film. It is the film that tells the conflict of being Chinese minority in Indonesia. Some scenes in the film were the director’s childhood experience and draw the very sensitive question to Indonesia’s racist community; how it feels if you are being hated for things that you cannot change about yourself? The shape of your eyes and the red-dish skin that make you look so similar with pig?

In order to introduce his film, the director, Edwin without last name, used many spaces that the world of computer mediated communication has offers. He opened MySpace account for Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, he used YouTube to feature his trailer of Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, and Indonesia’s most popular online community forum, Kaskus.com, to spread the news on his film.

Nevertheless, despite the various ways Edwin used to promote his independent feature film, he has stated in various occasions that Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is his personal project. He did not expect the movie to be shown in major theater network and watched by million viewers. He realized that he put many sensitive subjects that most Indonesians avoid to discuss.

Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is Edwin much anticipated debut, yet despite that it might have been the first Indonesian indie film which previewed in a theater full of audience, most of the audiences including Edwin’s circuit of friends; the Indonesia’s filmmakers, cultural workers and activists, claimed that the film is slow paced and difficult to understand.

Despite the not so impressive feedbacks, Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly continued to write his story; the film won the Critics Award at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival in January, and in the falls 2009, Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly was shown in the Museum of Modern Arts, New York. No less than New York Time’s film critic, Mike Hale, praised the movie for its courage telling the minority side of story.

I would first approach the narrative of the film through Saussurian-structuralist framework. Reflecting from the semiotics analysis, I will draw the lines to get to the conclusion on Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly miscommunication. Is the poor acceptance coming from the film’s content on minority issue or simply because the screenwriter/director’s lack of narrative skill?

If semiotics is the language of representation for visual communication (Barthes, 1957), I am hopeful from the anlysis I will able to answer on; why the film that won international attention could not won praises from its own people? Does the film can be considered a communication failure, and why?

An Interview, Sharon Marie Ross

Television is not only MTV (or in the case of we, Indonesians, sinetrons and reality shows). More scholars like Henry Jenkins and Sharon Marie Ross have admitted the complex medium is deserving serious assessment.


October 8, 2008
Inviting Our Participation: An Interview with Sharon Marie Ross

Increasingly, television invites our participation. Some shows, like American Idol, do so through explicit calls to share our thoughts and reactions. Some shows, such as Lost, do so through their deployment of serial structures which demand a particular kind of attention that we associate with cult media. In Convergence Culture, I talk about building entertainment properties to be cultural attractors (drawing like minded people together) and cultural activators (giving these networked audiences something to do). In the recent book, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, media scholar Sharon Marie Ross identifies as range of "invitational strategies" in contemporary television which encourage our participation as fans.

Beyond the Box is an important contribution to our understanding of convergence culture, an exciting example of what happens when scholars effectively blend research methods including political economy, fan studies, and close textual analysis, which have historically been set in opposition to each other. Ross is able to understand not only what draws fans to such programs but also to explain what fans mean economically to television producers at the current moment of media in transition. I read this book with great gusto, delighted to find a kindred spirit, and pleased to see this further elaboration of the affective economy surrounding contemporary broadcasting.

I am pleased to be able to share with you this interview with an up and coming media scholar. Here, she not only lays out some of the book's core ideas but she also applies them to some very contemporary developments in Broadcasting, such as the Writer's Strike, the Gossip Girl phenomenon, and the release of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible.


Throughout the book, you write about what you call "invitational strategies" surrounding cult television series. Explain what you mean by this term.


The term "invitational strategies" actually emerged from a conversation among me, Janet Staiger, Amanda Lotz, and Matt Hills. I had started with "interpellation" but that didn't quite work for what I was trying to capture in terms of what I see emerging in TV and the Internet. What I've seen, across several genres, is a mode of address (sometimes explicit and sometimes less obvious) where producers/writers, and marketers also at times, create stories (which can encompass the show plot itself, and also how a show is marketed and how a show works with Internet addendums) that reach out to viewers/readers and "prod" them to become a part of the storytelling process. The goal is to have the reader become actively engaged and also to elicit among readers a feeling (and I mean "feeling" emotionally) that the story belongs to them in a significant way. This can run from overt invitations (asking viewers to vote or chat online or buy something) to organic (where a viewer is already likely to be engaged and the invitation is embedded more deeply in the plots) to obscured (where the invitation seems "hidden" and those outside the experience might not see any behind-the-scenes constructing of an invitation at work). I think organic is becoming dominant. The key element is that the reader feels as if those creating the story want their input and involvement in some way--and the reader has the power to refuse the invitation, accept it, bring along a guest, drop by or stay and really party (etc.) A definite two-way event (though as we know, the host ultimately decides what is available for consumption and what the hours of the party might be...I find myself slipping into more metaphors, but hope this explains it!:)



As a fan, I kept asking myself whether we really needed any kind of an invitation or whether fan culture might emerge around any program. You seem to suggest that
some texts are more "inviting" than others and more open to exploring alternative forms of audience participation. How important is that solicitation, whether implicit or explicit, to sparking such responses?


I do think invitations aren't necessary for people we think of as fans ( a category that is murky in and of itself). Those who become a fan on their own are ready to jump in and especially use the Internet to create their own forms of involvement. However, I do think fans respond to invitations when offered in the right way--not too confining, being key. This is especially true of more cult like shows like Lost or Dr. Who or even soaps. An invitation is appreciated as it shows deference to fans--but that invite better not preclude already established ways on interacting. For those for whom "fan" still connotes "horrors" of geekdom and over-investment, an invitation might provide the legitimacy needed to allow them to overcome the stigma of fandom and become involved in similar ways with a show. So many people still think of TV and the Internet as "guilty pleasures" that can slip into unhealthy involvement, and an invitation suggests that any involvement they then engage in is distanced from those societal fears of falling in too deeply...



Throughout the book, you draw heavily on research on soap operas to try to explain the kinds of responses surrounding reality television and cult dramas. What do you think television critics miss by trying to discuss the complexity of contemporary television without dealing with soaps?


Oh--sooo very much! As far as I'm concerned, soap operas (with their roots in also comics and Dickens' serials of yore) are the fundamental form of storytelling. Think about it: a story that keeps going--that will always be there for you no matter what stage of life you're in or what kind of mood--and even persists if you leave; a story that responds to the times and milieu of its viewers; a story that reacts to viewers' desires to some degree...and that requires careful attention without holding you too much to account. When critics dismiss this genre (often via its lower production values and its association with women) they overlook its core pleasures, which aren't about missing out on excitement in one's own life, or having little to do with one's day. The pleasures are about storytelling in its most basic sense: someone tells you a little bit about this person and their life, and you consider it in relation to your own; then you can consider further in relation to those around you--especially those who have also been told the story. And then you can spin the story outwards--what might happen next and why. I believe that humans inherently need stories to empathize with others, plan their futures (individually and as cultures), dream dreams, etc. Soaps tap into this need--and I think it's a healthy need. Contemporary TV that doesn't seem like a soap can often replicate this appeal using soap-like strategies of narration (interruption, open-endedness, current events and mores at work, sprawling plots to follow sprawling casts). If we as critics try to explain the appeal of modern shows without acknowledging their roots in this form and its seriality, we not only do a disservice to history (of the medium), we also are ignoring an understanding of what stories offer human beings. And at an academic level, how can we teach why a show has appeal or how a show needs to be written to have appeal without understanding a genre that has existed since pre-TV? I think scholars have often ignored the soap connection because academia shies away from things emotional in favor of the rational and formulaic...yet stories are all about emotion and psychology because humans are all about emotion and psychology. There are things in life and the world we don't always understand; seeking the answers is what makes us human. Stories (when done well) tap into this--and soaps especially have gloried in basic human questioning. (Why do people stop loving us? why do relatives die? what am I here for?)



You describe your own experiences in viewer activism around Buffy as paving the way for some of your intellectual interest around this topic. What did you learn through your fan involvement and how did it inform your work on this book?


Oh, very very much is indebted to Buffy!! I became a fan "on my own" and this show spoke to me as a woman, a scholar, a feminist, a lover of TV...It tapped into so many of those human questions mentioned above...I had loved TV before, but this was my first real experience as a fan beyond soap operas proper. I found myself fascinated BY myself (ha ha--narcissism reigns always among scholars!). How could a TV show--especially one so initially disparaged--allow me to grow as a person and as a teacher and scholar? How could such a show appeal to so many different kinds of people (as I eventually discovered)? After focusing on this and Xena initially, I began to see other shows that did the same for other groups of viewers--from wrestling to sports to reality TV. Was there something connecting such disparate groups and such disparate styles of TV programs? And given the role of the Internet with Buffy fandom and the role of Joss Whedon in becoming involved with fans online (and off), was there something about this new medium that was bringing together these areas of culturally "disconnected" forms of storytelling? As I started working on this book, Buffy always served as a barometer of sorts. How was Buffy fandom different and how the same from say American Idol or The O.C.? How did the structure of the show differ and not from other shows? How the content/themes? How the role of the producers and critics? I began to see the storytelling connection as fundamental to linking different things that seemed so very different...In the end, does a show call out to people in such a way that they feel a personal connection AND ultimately a social connection to other people? Last, via my involvement with Buffy fandom both personally and as a scholar, I began to see at work the real role and impact of cultural biases against genres and fandoms and to become fascinated by what can get in the way--and also aid and abet--people's willingness to embrace a story as having true value and meaning in life--to embrace "entertainment" as something that serves a purpose.



One of the most talked about examples of "viral media content" this summer was the online distribution of Dr. Horrible. How might we see this experiment as an outgrowth of Joss Whedon's long-term engagement with his hardcore fans?


Definitely an outgrowth! (Loved it, by the way...) Dr. Horrible is a fascinating example of so many themes in my book coming together (after publication, of course! That's always the way...) People who had come to respect Joss Whedon as an auteur came to this text; along with those who loved Buffy or Firefly; and those who love Neil Patrick Harris and How I Met Your Mother; those who follow viral videos...and of course it was a by-product of the writers' strike that was immersed in the Internet's relationship with TV. Some heard of it through friends, some online, some via Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide...So on the one hand, while its success was rooted in Joss Whedon's awareness that his fans are out there and always looking for new work from him and that they will seek work in untraditional forums, on the other hand the success was also a product of the Internet becoming a more acceptable venue for storytelling in the ways in which I have been discussing it and the ability of the Internet to draw together "unheard of" combinations of fans. In short, when someone reaches out with a personal story (and it was pretty personal to pull this off when a strike was going on), people will respond in kind with personal attention.



You discuss teen television as one genre that reflects contemporary youth's expectations of participation. What have current teen shows, such as Gossip Girl, learned from the earlier experiments in "teleparticipation" you discuss in the book?


This is funny--I was watching Gossip Girl all summer while pregnant and began loving it as a junior Dynasty. Having interviewed Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage about The OC and hearing about their travails with the show and Internet fans and FOX, I definitely was looking for signs of the old (good use of soap strategies, attention to the role of new media communication) and signs of the new (how to attend to fans without cowtowing to them, how to not spill all of a story too soon). And there I am, watching a week ago, and I see a brief funny bit in which pre-teen girls accost Serena and Dan (the main couple) in the park, offering their totally contradictory two cents about whether or not the couple should stay together, etc. And Serena and Dan became Josh and Stephanie: we hear you, we admire your interest and your new media involvement (hearing about the couple's troubles via the Gossip Girl blog)--but back off! The story is still unraveling and if we listen to all of you, it'll all spiral into meaninglessness as a story. This reminded me so much of my interview with them, in which they discussed the many different groups of fans they were dealing with, and how trying to keep up with all of their demands ultimately robbed them of their power to deliver a story they were connected with. You can't please everyone--but you should listen at the very least.

Teen shows make it tricky--there are so many different social audiences invested, with differing needs and desires. But the teen demo is so very new media savvy, you need to be able to keep up with their interests--and their skills as readers. I see Gossip Girl skillfully negotiating this demo with its older demo (18-34) by weaving in new media more deftly to the plots, by heeding online talk--but ultimately by the producers laying claim to their role as storytellers. (vs. story-givers--where you totally hand the story off and abandon ship.) It will be interesting to see if 90210 follows suit and if Smallville can survive its core Lex/Clark fan base now that Lex is gone (too early to tell). But I think the teen demo is so key to success with many shows that producers are definitely working harder to listen to them, and reach out to them online and via script. The key thing is can they do this without sacrificing their own creativity and their own needs as storytellers? (I think we often forget that writers, even in L.A., are humans too--driven to tell stories for very personal reasons and not solely driven by profit. It's a mean business and no one sticks with it without really loving it.)

Sharon Ross is an assistant professor in the Television Department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches courses in the areas of TV history and critical theory and her research focuses on issues of television reception; this semester she is excited to be teaching a 5 week intensive seminar on a single script from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the associate editor of the journal for the International Digital Media Arts Association and co-editor with Dr. Louisa Stein of the anthology Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She has too many "must see" TV shows to mention but highly recommends Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother this season.

Source:http://henryjenkins.org/convergence_culture/

Why We Love Popular Culture

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."(Kurt Vonnecut)

taken from http://henryjenkins.org