Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future

1. Authorship Up for Grabs: Decentralized Labor, Licensing, and the Management of Collaborative Creativity

32 1 Authorship Up for Grabs Decentralized Labor, Licensing, and the Management of Collaborative Creativity DEREK JOHNSON In one of the most dramatically tense storylines offered by the “reimagined” television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009), the crew of the titular spacecraft encounters another military battlestar, the Pegasus, which had also escaped the Cylon attack that destroyed their homeland and the rest of the Colonial Fleet. This joyful reunion gives way to a power struggle, however, when the two commanders recognize their competing ideals and incompatible plans for the surviving civilization. Galactica and Pegasus briefly formed one big happy fleet, but they soon served as two poles in a line of tension between competing claims to authority. Ultimately, the claim made by series protagonist Commander Adama is upheld, and the newly introduced Admiral Cain is conveniently killed by a Cylon agent. Within the franchise that is Battlestar Galactica—operating at an institutionalandculturallevel ,ratherthanthediegetic—similartensionsovercreative authority within shared, collaborative structures can be observed. Authorship and creative power, like the command of a battlestar fleet, come up for grabs wheninterestedindividualsfromacrossawiderangeofinstitutionallinesshare creative resources and collaborate in the process of sustaining an intellectual Authorship Up for Grabs • 33 property. In media franchising, production is multiplied across a range of sites. Within the single industry of television, the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica supported a remake in 2003 and the Caprica spin-off in 2010. Yet multiplication can also happen across institutional and cultural lines, where the property is proliferated by authorized licensees as well as by consumers who make bottom -up contributions to the content network via fan fiction, online video, and grassroots video game production. The media franchise, therefore, is a cultural form defined and animated by a multiplicity of production cultures, wherein differing market motivations, competing visions, and unequal positions of institutional power ensure that creative collaboration is a negotiated process rather than the neat outcome of economic synergy and cross-promotion. The result of Battlestar’s decentralized network of creative labor is not a singular, monolithic brand, but a struggle over creative authorship by diverse interests. Nevertheless, Battlestar has been accompanied by discursive claims about singular authorship and centralized creative power. Writers such as Michael Newman and James Longworth consider television to be an authored medium in which auteur “showrunners” control and unify the collaborative creative work of writing staffs.1 As Derek Kompare argues, online podcasts and other sites of extra-textual television discourse have constructed executive producer and developer Ronald D. Moore as the authorial voice of the contemporary Battlestar franchise.2 Moore explained in his podcasts that in the collaborative medium of television his role as showrunner was “to maintain the voice of the show, as it were. The show has a voice. And it’s my voice.”3 Through such declarations, Moore positioned himself as the singular creative force driving Battlestar, suggesting that an authorial unity emerged from his supervision of what was otherwise a collaborative process. As that collaboration multiplied beyond television, however, Moore’s role in harmonizing multiple creative voices became less certain. Moore had minimal contact with licensed creators. His interface with writers of Battlestar comic books, for example, consisted largely of a passive approval that required very little active participation or intervention. Brandon Jerwa explained that his pitches for licensed comic books were “run directly through Ron Moore’s office,” but his goal as a licensed writer was actually to receive as little corrective input as possible. “My editor told me that I was getting the fewest notes of any Galactica [comic] writer,” Jerwa boasted. “That was great.”4 Though the goal was apparently to minimize Moore’s input and interference in these licensed products, Moore remained a central authority against which other producers had to negotiate their own creative positions. Despite feeling strongly, for example, that the Cylon Number Six character needed a real name, Jerwa regarded such questions as “something that’s more Ron Moore’s call.”5 Like Commander Adama, Moore’s singular power persisted in the face of decentralized and potentially competing claims to creativity authority. 34 • Derek Johnson This essay explores the contradiction between singular authorship and the decentralized creativity of networked production cultures as demonstrated by the franchising of a television series like Battlestar, especially as the creative process extends to encompass grassroots production cultures animated by the socially collaborative architectures of the Internet and other digital technology . How did creative authority come up for grabs in...