#KONY2012, Clicktivism, and Circuits of Knowledge

Posting a day early since I'll be traveling tomorrow. Because I know everyone would feel deprived otherwise

Plenty of ink has been spilled (or, I guess, pixels? Ones and zeroes? What is it we're spilling these days?) over #KONY2012 and its problematic premises. That critique extremely important, but it's been done and done far, far better than I could, so I'm not going to make that intervention. (I'm also not wading into Jason Russell's naked rampage, because that's what late night television hosts get paid for.)

What I'm interested in, instead, is the viral-ness of this campaign, the ways it has traveled. Because, though there's a long tradition of white liberals rushing in to a situation they don’t understand to save brown children half way around the world, this feels different.

#KONY2012, as Nick Dyer-Witheford pointed out recently when a seminar he gave on my campus turned to the subject, is about seeing social media as coextensive with reality.

Part of this is that, unlike, say, singing for famine relief, point-and-click activism (which I want to dub clicktivism but has apparently has been nominated as part of slacktivism) is light-speed. It requires no effort, which makes the self-congratulatory white-savior thing, old though it is, new by virtue of magnitude. (Confession: I make this critique as someone who "signs" almost every petition Moveon.org puts in my inbox but deletes the mailings that ask for money. In my defense, I do read them and decide if I agree first. I just happen to usually agree. I also sometimes show up at rallies and stuff.)

The very power of that frictionless travel is manifested in the graffiti that has sprung up in seemingly every women's bathroom on campus.

Now, 100% of the bathrooms in my (pun alert) convenience sample say "Stop Kony" and include the website. But this Sharpie scribble particularly caught my eye (and made me sorely tempted to retaliatory/corrective graffiti) because of the massive irony of the writer putting "Do some research on the LRA if you don't know this man's name" when clearly she had herself not done any research.

On the other hand, my Twitter feed has been inundated with critique of #KONY2012. Like, for real, it took over. In just the 24 hours before I began this post I got: Bosco 2012: While We Hunt Kony, Another Indicted War Criminal Lives a Life of Leisure published in the New York Times, Kony 2012 screening in Uganda results in anger, rocks thrown at screen published at boingboing, Kony Heads from Timothy Burke, and a rundown on Child Soldiers Worldwide published by Human Rights Watch, among others.

What's important here is that I don't follow any of the original sources. I got all of these announcements at the very least second hand and likely through a longer chain of retweets—there's no real way to tell how they traveled before they got to me (At least, I don't think so. And if I'm right about that, somebody should really write an algorithm that can parse that, because it's interesting. Call it the epidemiology of Twitter). They didn't even all come to me from the same source (though my colleague who knows a lot of politically active Africans contributed more than most).

There was, in fact, not a single person in favor of the campaign in anything that I've seen in the period since the video took off, which led me to temporarily forget that the people I follow are not representative of general public opinion. (Despite having just written a post in which I was surprised to realize I didn't have a good handle on public opinion of the NBC show Community. Slow learner, I guess.)

And thus it came to pass that I was startled to hear a student in my fitness class profess support for the campaign and state that she'd ordered some of the merchandise.

Let's parse that moment: Because of who I'd been listening to, I assumed "everyone knows it's stupid." Because of who she'd been listening to, she assumed "everyone knows this is the right thing to do."

And, while I will continue to maintain that the people I'm listening to are working with better information and education than the ones my fitness classmate is, the fact is that I'm just as bad as the restroom writer whose handiwork is displayed above. I haven't done any research. I've just believed what people told me because I trusted those people. This isn't to now proclaim that those people aren't trustworthy. They are. But it's still a bad way to make a decision about world events and public policy.

And that recognition that the educated-person echo chamber is just as bad as the superficial-crisis one is sobering.

Reductionist Logics and Strange Bedfellows

Another outcome of Saskia Sassen's late-February visit to my campus was the realization that lefty internet-is-freedom types, including proponents of the "fans are liberated now" model, are actually using the same logic as righty small-government-is-freedom types.

Say what?

Bear with me—this requires some backing up, some reframing, a deployment of one of my favorite theorists, and a disclaimer that I'm taking Sassen out of context. It also requires some sympathy for the ways in which graduate school is a nonstop exercise in finding the links between disparate things while thinking on one's feet, and it's hard to shut that off.

Okay, so, I think it's relatively uncontroversial to say that the right-wing, Tea-Party-style position is that less state centralization is more freedom.

It is, I believe, also relatively uncontroversial to contend that lefty folks who identify the Internet as freedom point to its decentralization as the enabling feature.

What I'd like to contend is that this identification of less centralization as more freedom by both groups shows that they're operating by the same logic.

N.B.: This post is going to be a little under-cited because, though I realized this while doing the reading for a seminar with Sassen, the key piece that inspired it seems to have been available only to seminar participants as an email attachment. Accordingly, I'm doing my best to respect that it isn't public by paraphrasing rather than direct quotation.

Sassen pointed out that, though digital media are technologically suited to being "distributive" (that being the point of the military research that ultimately produced the 'Net, after all), they still get used in cultural contexts, and this means that contextual social logics have bearing on how they get used.

Thus, to pay attention only to the properties of the technology is to fail to recognize those other factors, just as to say that only government control matters is to fail to recognize other factors. In both cases, institutions like capital are just as constraining.

Importantly, this isn't to engage in some grand Marxist reductionism of all power to capital, but to pay attention to the ways in which, as a result of the given-ness of capitalism, especially in the US, this type of control is perhaps worse because more insidious. That is, sheer lack of awareness makes this form of constraint far less transparent than even the relatively opaque world of legislation, because people aren't even looking.

Related to this, both the internet-is-freedom left and the small-government right are operating with a set of false opposites. As Sassen pointed out in her 2008 piece Neither Global nor National: Novel Assemblages of Territory, Authority and Rights, there's a tendency to think that as things de-nationalize they are inevitably global, which is a false dichotomy (p. 75); correspondingly, people are misidentifying de-restriction or the diminishment of certain kinds of restriction as freedom.

This, of course, is where I break out the Foucault and point out that just because an institution stops saying "no" to certain things doesn't mean that those things begin to operate freely. Both the pro-Internet left and the anti-government right, that is, are operating with a sense of power only as repressive, only as that which prevents you from doing certain things, which prevents recognition of the ways in which one might be equally constrained (and, again, more insidiously so) by being encouraged to do certain things.

Sassen's "critique of the notion of the common notion that if something good happens to the powerless it signals empowerment" in her 2011 piece, The Global Street: Making the Political (p. 574) is in line with this kind of calling out of false opposites. I also appreciate its snarky quippiness.

Thus, when we think about Internet-enabled freedom or political activism, we need a lot more subtlety and complexity, and a broader view. As Sassen points out in terms of the contemporary articulation of territory, authority, and rights, "proliferation does not represent the end of national states, but it does begin to disassemble the national" (2008, p. 62), and I find this really productive.

To understand state power, or Internet power, or, indeed, capital's power, that is, we have to think in terms of disassembly, fissure, and change rather than a binary determination of the continuing existence or end of certain forms of repression.

Getting Clicky With it: Fan Power and Online Polls

Hats off to fans; they get stuff done. The latest evidence of this is the ways in which shippers (Vocabulary lesson for the unfamiliar: Shipper, n.: short for relationship-er; people who advocate for particular couples in media objects)—and particularly shippers of non-canon (i.e. not officially existing in the text of the media object itself) couples completely took over E! Online's 2012 TV's Top Couple Tournament.

The site's "weeks-long bracket-style tournament" started with 64 couples, many of which were "real" on the show and therefore might be considered to be more legitimate than those existing only in the slash goggles of the beholder(s).

Slash Goggles, n.: A prosthesis enabling one to see desire where it might otherwise be invisible; though the "slash" part indicates specifically same-sex desire, there are surely heterogoggles as well, though less often required. For a great rundown—and the place where I first heard the term—see Julie Levin Russo's Hera Has Six Mommies (A Transmedia Love Story). Because apparently I can't blog without Julie.

Despite the potential for legitimacy deficit, as the voting went on, many of the goggle-authorized pairings advanced through round after round, handily defeating couples for which there was explicit textual evidence. By the final four, there was just one canon pairing, which was same-sex: Brittany and Santana from Glee. And there was just one heterosexual pairing, which was non-canon: Castle and Beckett from Castle.

When the voting came down to the final two, lo and behold, both couples were same-sex and non-canon: Faberry (Quinn and Rachel, played by Dianna Agron and Lea Michele from Glee) and Destiel (Castiel and Dean, played by Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles from Supernatural).

The surviving pairs weren't, however, incestuous, which was a real possibility given the popularity of Wincest in Supernatural fandom. See Catherine Tosenberger's 2008. piece “‘The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean’: ‘Supernatural,’ Queer Readings, and the Romance of Incestuous Fan Fiction.”

E! staffers seem to have been pretty surprised by how the tournament went. In round two's post:

Wow. Just when you think you know which couples have the biggest fan bases… Lots of shockers in the first round of our annual TV Couple's Tournament! A Glee favorite knocked out, unconventional pairings triumphing over long-established love affairs, and a very normal married couple taking down a supernatural romance. These are all reasons we so thoroughly enjoy our TV Couple's tournament, because no win is guaranteed.

The tone became surprised and condescending by round five: "Don't go changing, shippers. Especially now that we're down to only four in our TV's Top Couples tournament and we need your crazy Internet ways more than ever." Then, in the last voting post: "Holy fandemonium. You Glee and Supernatural fans are passionate when it comes to this final round of our TV's Top Couple tournament. How passionate? Well, let's just say you nearly crashed the entire site yesterday!"

E! found the intensity to be surprising and indeed suspicious enough to warrant verification:

Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) from Glee have won our TV's Top Couple megapoll! Now, when we say "mega" that is, in this case, apparently an understatement. The fans for "Faberry" (Fabray/Berry) as they call themselves, set a new record high for page turns on E! Online for any single post in the entire history of the website. Umm...yeah, we are just as stunned as you. Also, we did an investigation into this voting and it showed no signs of false play among "Faberry" fans: Just a group of hardcore, dedicated shippers who organized mass-voting times (all hours of the night), and obviously took this thing very seriously.

But it's perhaps a sign of the times that the non-canon nature of the outcome seems to have been more distressing to them than the same-sex aspect. Or, rather, the same-sex aspect was distressing because non-canon:

Now, I know what many of you who casually watch Glee are thinking: What the what?! Are Rachel and Quinn even a couple? And wait a minute, aren't they straight? Why yes, yes they are, as far as we know. But the "Faberry" fans believe these two belong together. And from the very first step of this Top Couple tournament, they represented, making sure that the pair received a nomination. As you may or may not recall, we left the nominations solely up to you. And after starting with 64 couples, we are left with the winners, Rachel and Quinn.

However, for all of E!'s shock and awe, the incident didn't surprise me. (Well, I was somewhat surprised by the scale—almost 400,000 votes in the final--but not the outcome). People who are denied official acknowledgement of their desire already have to be more affectively attached and put in more work to make it happen.

Moreover, the poll as a chance to make extremely visible to the people making Glee that this desire exists probably had something to do with it. Certainly, one fan site had it that the winning couple would have an interview—which I can't find substantiated at E! anywhere, but was probably inspiring even if untrue.

It just goes to show that shippers and slashers, for all their supposed "resistance" to the text, would ultimately really love for their couple of choice to be legitimized by appearing explicitly in the text—even if they would reserve the right to critique the execution—and this sort of entertainment-website poll is one way toward that goal.

Certainly, the actors involved in the couples in question felt a need to respond to this desire on the part of the fans. E! posted

a little message we got from Misha Collins (who is in the final two) after his pairing (Dean and Castiel) beat out Community's Jeff and Annie in the second-to-last round: "So often Hollywood and pop culture portray relationships that don't reflect real life and relationships that lack a moral compass. I think it's nice to see a stable couple with grounded values getting this attention over that perverse relationship between Joel McHale and that girl on that other show. I mean, look how they're kissing. It's disgusting—you can tell they're not even using tongue."

Quipping, "Just when you thought you couldn't love him more."

And then Agron tweeted this picture of herself and Michele,

captioned: "In honor of the voters! @luanarama: @DiannaAgron @msleamichele Faberry won the best couple on E! http://www.eonline.com/news/watch_with_kristin/tvs_top_couple_tournament_winner/294212 http://yfrog.com/es75gsknj"

So, you know, here's another way in which fans may be powerful, though I say that with a sizeable grain of salt (perhaps even a salt-crystal boulder). By sheer dedication and time put in, they got to see what they wanted, even if only for a minute, and even if the (platonic) Faberry scene that appeared in promos was ultimately cut from February 21^st's episode over their #DontCutFaberry trending topic objection.

And, if we're thinking about the power of fan desire, it may be a total coincidence, but I'm quite suspicious about the timing of Agron publicly smooching the guy she supposedly broke up with in December the day those results came out. Maybe even straight girls need beards if people think they've got the gay. (Commenter Phil at this thread had the same suspicion)

Fans: Maybe Powerful After All?

Like most people living in a nerdy-friend bubble, I was surprised to learn—when it was cancelled—that NBC comedy Community, though seemingly adored by everyone I know, was not beloved by the population at large.

In an earlier era—the well-worn tale of Star Trek fans' write-in campaign notwithstanding—that would have been the end of that. Not enough eyeballs equals not enough show.

But then, a funny thing happened. Community, which once upon a time would have been consigned to the dustbin of history (or, you know, DVD sales and bit-torrent-ing) was picked up for syndication—even though at around 60 episodes it was well short of the magic 100 at which shows have traditionally been considered worth syndicating. And it wasn't just syndicated to one platform: the show was licensed for re-running by both cable channel Comedy Central and online video provider Hulu.

As the December 31 Los Angeles Times article explained, "'"Community" has not been a wild ratings success, but it is a show that people really love and they tell 10 other people about it,' said Andy Forssell, Hulu's senior vice president for content acquisition." That is, the sheer numbers of people who watched the show was less important in the decision these content providers made to license it than the fact that the ones who did watch it were very dedicated.

At this point, certain optimists would proclaim a victory for fans. Henry Jenkins, for example, has put intensified attention to fan wishes into the long tradition in which:

from time to time, networks reprioritize certain segments of their audience and the result is a shift in program strategies to more fully reflect those tastes—a shift from rural to urban viewers changed television content in the 1960s, a renewed interest in minority viewers lead to more Afrocentric sitcoms throughout the 1990s, and a shift toward an emphasis on loyal viewers has been changing what reaches the air in the early twenty-first century. Fans are seeing more shows reflecting their tastes and interests reaching the air; those shows are being designed to maximize that appeal to fans; and those shows that fans like are apt to remain on the air longer because they are more likely to get renewed in borderline cases" (Convergence Culture, p. 62)

Over time, different groups get recognized and incorporated, this view goes, and it's just fans' turn at long last. He adds, "For years, fan groups, seeing to rally support for endangered series, have argued that networks should be focused more on the quality of audience engagement with the series and less on the quantity of viewers. Increasingly, advertisers and networks are coming to more or less the same conclusion" (p. 63).

Imagine the sound of the needle being pulled rapidly off the record here. (For younger readers, that's what this sound that you've heard throughout media sources actually is.)

Reality check: that word "reprioritize" suggests some sort of shift in who television-making entities found valuable, but the fact is that the priorities didn't change at all—they wanted as many people as possible to watch their shows (or, really, their ads), and they realized that more people lived in cities now or that there were a lot more black people than they realized such that they were worth pitching shows to. Long story short, the math changed.

So in looking at this shift toward recognition and rewarding of fan-style investment, instead of thinking of this as a "reprioritization of audience segments" or a realization that intense investment is better, the fact is that, like earlier shifts, the math must have changed in some fashion.

Having finally finished Amanda Lotz's 2007 book The Television Will Be Revolutionized a month or two ago, I can now put my finger on what it is: kinds of media distribution that didn't used to be possible have become possible, and these shifting technological and economic possibilities is what has made the difference on series like Community.

The first factor here is economic viability beyond a mass audience model. Once upon a time, as Lotz explains, "network programmers knew that the whole family commonly viewed television together, and they consequently selected programs and designed a schedule likely to be acceptable to, although perhaps not most favored by, the widest range of viewers" (p. 11). This model was based in attaching monetary value solely to sheer number of eyeballs.

Later on, as this norm of whole-family viewing went by the wayside, "instead of needing to design programming likely to be least objectionable to the entire family, broadcast networks—and particularly cable channels—increasingly developed programming that might be most satisfying to specific audience members" (p. 14). Value here came from having largest possible numbers of particular kinds of eyeballs parsed out by gender, age, or income.

In the contemporary moment, what Lotz calls the "post-network era," this process of making content for more specific subgroups has intensified dramatically. This change has "shifted production economics enough to allow audiences that were too small or specific to be commercially viable for broadcast or cable to be able to support niche content" (Lotz, p. 124).

As we’ve moved beyond mass or even large audiences as the only model of financial viability, that is, it becomes possible for a show like Community, which NBC cancelled because it didn't do the mass audience thing well enough, to survive and thrive in alternative economic frameworks like new-style syndication.

The second feature of the landscape—which is of course intimately tied to the first—is new technological possibilities for distribution. Forssell, the "senior vice president for content acquisition" quoted above, pointed to this when he said that Community is "a good fit for online audiences, and in today's digital and aggregated universe, shows like that can survive and thrive." We can think of what's "online-fitting" about the show in two ways.

On one hand, this is because, in that online distribution is a "pull" medium, where people seek out content they want and "pull" it down, rather than a "push" medium, where people have content "pushed" out to them whether they seek it or not, Community's audience dedication suits the way the technology works.

On the other hand, in a pretty basic way, "infinite shelf space and near zero marginal cost [ . . . ] radically shifts much of the operational logic of commercial creative industries" (Lotz, p. 131). These technological possibilities shift television away from a scarcity model and into one of abundance, where there isn't a requirement to select only the things that sell the best but instead everything can be made available however much or little it sells. As Lotz puts it, "another benefit arising from on-demand distribution is that it allows studios to profit from content that may be pretty obscure or fairly far down [ . . . ] the 'long tail'" (p. 131).

These sorts of shifts away from determining what kind of TV can be made on the basis of mass-audience economic norms and network-television technological ones are reshaping the landscape in some surprising ways.

Perhaps the biggest coup in this regard is that "Netflix in November announced that it planned to restart production of another cult favorite, Fox's 'Arrested Development,' which won an Emmy for best comedy but lasted just three seasons before being canceled in 2006. Netflix was drawn to the series because of its young, affluent and fervent fan base."

This isn't the first time a show has gone back into production on the basis of fan enthusiasm—FOX's Family Guy, after all, was put back into production in 2004 after the DVD sold well (Lotz, p. 129)—but what's important in both of these cases is that not only is a show that once would have been dead being distributed (as with Community), but they're actually making episodes of a show on the basis of the strength and attributes of its fan base.

This is the point at which scholars who cheerlead technological change as empowering fans would probably declare victory. It is, undeniably, the case that fans and intense devotion are now taken much more seriously.

And it's equally true that "this new participatory culture has its roots in practices that have occurred just below the radar of the media industry throughout the twentieth century," such that what has in some sense happened is that "the Web has pushed that hidden layer of cultural activity into the foreground, forcing the media industries to confront its implications for their commercial interests" (Jenkins, p. 133).

But to just be glad about this strikes me as at best overly optimistic and at worst naïve. These shifts have happened only because courting this sort of audience can now make not just sense but cents. To look at these shifts in technology and practice with no critique of capital is pretty distressing to me.

Yes: the landscape has changed—a smaller number of people can now be enough to be worth selling to advertisers. What those people want to see is now worth enough revenue that they actually get it. That's pretty cool compared to the alternative of not getting what you want at all, but it isn't cool beyond that relative sense

Fans might well be powerful after all. What they want is now taken into account in a way that it never was before because shifts in the mediascape have made them into a viable market. To the extent that that's generally what constitutes having power in contemporary society, yeah sure, they've got it. But I'm not comfortable just accepting that equation of monetary value with value, full-stop.