no shit
15.04.2011
Kinder, M ~ Playing with Power
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , ,

Kinder, Marsha
1991
Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Search for ‘transmedia’ on its Google Books page.

47
Definition transmedia intertextuality:
“What I found [from recording Saturday morning children's TV] was a fairly consistent form of transmedia intertextuality, which positions young spectators (1) to recognize, distinguish, and combine different popular genres and their respective iconography that cut across movies, television, comic books, commercials, video games, and toys; (2) to observe the formal differences between television and its prior discourse of cinema, which it absorbs, parodies, and ultimately replaces as the dominant mode of image production; (3) to respond to and distinguish between the two basic modes of subject positioning associated respectively with television and cinema, being hailed in direct address by fictional characters or by offscreen voices, and being sutured into imaginary identification with fictional character and fictional space, frequently through the structure of the gaze and through the classical editing conventions of shot/reverse shot; and (4) to perceive both the dangers of obsolescence (as a potential threat to individuals, programs, genres, and media) and the values of compatibility with a larger system of intertextuality, whithin which formerly conflicting categories can be absorbed and restrictive boundaries erased.”

11.03.2011
Lessig, L ~ Remix
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , ,

Lessig, Lawrence
2008
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

24f
“‘When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.’” He quotes somebody.

06.02.2011
Vaidhyanathan, S ~ Copyrights and Copywrongs
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , ,

Vaidhyanathan, Siva
2003
Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity

The 2001 version is identical with the 2003 version, even page numbers are the same, except for the additional afterword or something.

23.01.2011
Livingstone, S ~ Giving People a Voice
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , ,

Livingstone, Sonia
2010
Giving People a Voice: On the Critical Role of the Interview in the History of Audience Research

Following Lazarsfeld, interviews have been conducted as “powerful interviewer and obedient interviewee” (p. 566). Then audience research moved on to try and learn from the audience. But with the emergence of New Media researchers tend to forget this. They talk of ‘now people are active and they used to be passive,’ which of course is BS. And they tend to talk about ‘the user’ and listen less.

569f
“This reminds us that at the heart of the interview is not only speech but also listening. A poorly conducted interview may be marked both by an interviewee reluctant to speak and by an interviewer who fails to listen carefully. But ask we must, and listen we must, for it is vital to go out and meet the audiences we theorize about.”

21.01.2011
Jenkins, H ~ Convergence – I Diverge
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , ,

Jenkins, Henry
2001
Convergence? I Diverge.

First time he mentions transmedia storytelling, afaik.

93
Definition-transmedia storytelling:
“Media convergence also encourages transmedia storytelling, the development of content across multiple channels. As producers more fully exploit organic convergence, storytellers will use each channel to communicate different kinds and levels of narrative information, using each medium to do what it does best.”

18.01.2011
Gray, J ~ Television Entertainment
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , ,

Gray, Jonathan
2008
Television Entertainment

3
“Entertainment is a concept of great familiarity to anyone capable of smiling. While we may struggle to define it in the abstract, we know it when it happens.”

3f
“we can make a crude division between programming whose primary aim is to entertain, to inform and educate, or to sell, which subsequently divides the television world into: (a) entertainment programming (b) news, documentaries, and educational programming and (c) advertisements. Of course, ads frequently hope to sell precisely by entertaining, and a rare few – such as public service announcements – sell by informing and educating.The news, meanwhile, is increasingly becoming entertainment driven, with stories on Paris Hilton’s or Britney Spears’ meltdowns trumping news of diplomatic missions and policy debates. Some of the best educational programming, too, from Sesame Street to Blue Planet, is wonderfully entertaining, and, as I will argue, entertainment often informs and educates.” -> But really they are inseparable.

4
“Beyond quoting the OED or Zillmann and Bryant, I find it remarkably hard to offer a value-neutral definition of entertainment, since it is one of the most automatically moralized concepts. Entertainment can be a compliment or a profanity, and it can represent transcendence or corruption, salvation or sin, depending upon the speaker. Thus, for instance, even the OED’s first example for the word entertainment – “everyone just sits in front of the television for entertainment” (emphasis added) – offers an implicit evaluation and criticism of entertainment and of the act of watching it.”

6
“Summarizing, entertainment’s critics launch three major attacks. First, we see great fear of the incredible powers of television entertainment. Entertainment is posited either as a great ill in and of itself, as capable of masking comparably great ills, or as so completely devoid of content, meaning, and/or value that our culture’s love affair with it is seen as the ultimate waste of time and human potential. Second, entertainment is placed in stark and clear opposition to information and education. When writers talk of entertainment “creeping” into information, they employ the imagery of invasion, rival armies, and unlawful occupation. Finally, particularly when metaphors of narcosis are used, entertainment’s viewers or “users” are frequently seen as unreliable around such a stimulus, and as slaves to their/our addiction, hence meaning that entertainment plus humans equals a troublesome combination.”

13
“Introductory media textbooks are often divided into sections on the media studies’ holy trinity of texts (by which is meant programs/shows),industry (production), and audiences (viewers).”

15.01.2011
Sayre, S et al ~ Entertainment and Society
category: PhD sources
tags: , , ,

Sayre, Shay
King, Cynthia
2010
Entertainment and Society: Influences, Impacts, and Innovations

Some good quotes, but I don’t like the general lines and reasoning of the book.

Check out good Foreword by Jennings Bryant.

4f
Definition-entertainment:
“The word entertainment has a Latin root meaning “to hold the attention of,” or “agreeably diverting.” Over the years it has come to refer to a constructed product designed to stimulate a mass audience in an agreeable way in exchange for money. Entertainment can be a live or mediated experience that has been intentionally created, capitalized, promoted, maintained, and evolved. In other words, entertainment is created on purpose by someone for someone else. Entertainment is easily located, accessed, and consumed. And of course, entertainment is also attractive, stimulating, sensory, emotional, social, and moral to a mass audience.
And it is a business with specific components, as explained here. Entertainment may exist as a product, service, or experience. Entertainment products can be tickets to live performances and events; or they can be mediated programs and films that we receive in print or electronically. Television and movies are industries completely dedicated to creating entertainment as a product.
The travel and hospitality industries offer services to tourists and visitors; venues also offer services to audiences of sports, attractions, and activities. Services are designed to make entertainment pleasant for its consumers and audiences. What makes entertainment different than products and services is its experiential component. Unlike products and services, experiences are perishable—they last only as long as we are participating or watching—and intangible—they are of the moment and have ever-changing content.”
-> Even a book is an experience.

6
“As a capitalist product, entertainment is developed to make money—there is always a bottom line to consider.”

“Entertainment is not [...] art, although it may aspire to and attain the level of art at times”

“Entertainment’s four constituents are producers who understand the process of putting products together, creationists who are actively involved in creating a particular product, promoters who sell the products, and consumers who pay for entertainment’s many products, services, and experiences.”
-> Good intentions, but I don’t like this at all.

8
“Although the leisure triad [recreation, entertainment, amusement] is used in some industry categorization, a better way to view the entertainment industry is as being content-based. Entertainment content comes to audiences in three distinct ways: as live performance (theater, musical concerts), as media (movies and TV), and as interactive experiences (recreation, amusement parks, travel, and gaming). In this text, the term experience characterizes all forms of entertainment content.”

15
“We can experience entertainment in four ways—passively absorbing [passive entertainment], educational learning [educational entertainment], complete engagement [escapist entertainment], and esthetic appreciation [esthetic entertainment].”

16
“As a scarce resource, attention is the most sought-after commodity of entertainment marketers.”
-> There’s a logical problem here: economists see resources on the production side, not on the consumption side. Here, the producer would have to pay the consumer for his attention. Doesn’t make sense.

17
“If something is boring, we don’t pay attention to it. Entertainment captures attention. As a result, an attention economy is also an entertainment economy.”
-> Logic again. There are also other ways to capture attention. If you’re hungry, food captures your attention. If you’re broke, money does. Etc. This is not the way to prove we’re living in an entertainment economy!

26
“Marketing is the means by which the whole culture is searched for potential meanings that can be changed by entertainment into paid-for experiences.”
-> WHAT?

80
“Interesting experiences or information are often designed to make us think but, with entertaining experiences, a more significant emphasis seems to be placed on making us feel. And, to make us feel, entertainers create drama.”

“Drama is the driving force of many forms of entertainment. Genres such as suspense, tragedy, comedy, and mystery are typically considered to be specialized forms of drama. Although dramatic genres are traditionally associated with books, films, TV programs, and live performances, elements of drama can be found in most forms of entertainment, from video games and sporting events to music and dancing. Thus, it might be argued that good entertainment hinges on good drama.”

82
“”To fully explore any issue, an author has to examine all possible solutions to that issue and make an argument to prove to an audience that the author’s way is best. If you leave out a part of that argument or diverge from the point, your story will have plot holes or inconsistencies. Once you have covered every angle in your argument, you’ve mapped all the ways an audience might look at that problem and, therefore, all the ways anyone might look at that problem. In short, you have created a map of the mind’s problem solving process.”
When a story fully develops this model of the mind, they call it a Grand Argument Story because it addresses the problem from all sides. Characters, plot, and theme are outlined as essential elements of the “story mind.”
He quotes from Melanie Phillips and Chris Huntley ~ Dramatica.

14.01.2011
Gabler, N ~ The movie magic is gone
category: PhD sources
tags: , , ,

Gabler, Neal
25.02.2007
The movie magic is gone (14.01.2011)

“Hollywood, which once captured the nerve center of American life, doesn’t matter much anymore.”

“More than any other form, they [movies] defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.”

“Before demographics became the marketing mantra, the movies were the art of the middle. They provided a common experience and language — a sense of unity. In the dark we were one.”

“Now, however, when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts — ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious — the movies can no longer be the art of the middle. The industry itself has been contributing to this process for years by targeting its films more narrowly, especially to younger viewers. In effect, the conservative impulse of our politics that has promoted the individual rather than the community has helped undermine movies’ communitarian appeal.”

“But it is much more difficult to survive a change in consciousness than a change in taste or technology, and that is what the movies face now — a challenge to the basic psychological satisfactions that the movies have traditionally provided.”

15.12.2010
Gray, J ~ Television pre-views and the meaning of hype
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , ,

Gray, Jonathan
2008
Television pre-views and the meaning of hype

34
“hype succeeds by creating meaning.”

25.11.2010
Cameron, A et al ~ Above the Bottom Line
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Cameron, Allan
Verhoeven, Deb
Court, David
2010
Above the Bottom Line: Understanding Australian Screen Content Producers

Results of survey of Australian screen content producers.
4000 producers identified, 2000 contacted, 12% completed survey.
First question: You a producer? If not, no survey.

91-94
Lit review: producer.

94-96
Lit review: Creative Industries.

95
“The important implication for our argument, however, is that what were formerly known as the ‘cultural industries’ (film, TV, music, and so on) have now been subsumed into a broader category that includes non-media-based creative outputs such as design, fashion, heritage activities, and so on.”
“In the push to get cultural production taken seriously by governments and government agencies, the very real distinctions among skill-sets and working cultures arguably have been glossed over.”

97
“A staggering 42 per cent of film producers have a postgraduate degree.”
75% hold Bachelors degree.

100
“[Producers'] optimism about their own outlook contrasts starkly with their outlook on the industry as a whole”.
“what the survey results describe is something other than the slightly romantic notion of the ‘creative class’ advocated by Richard Florida (2002), and perhaps a little closer to the unstable context of ‘media work’ outlined by Mark Deuze (2007).”

101
“And we need to be attentive to the fact that cross-media mobility is not simply a characteristic of media consumption, but is increasingly a fact of life in production as well.” Oh really?