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  • Hive-Sourcing Is the New Out-Sourcing:Studying Old (Industrial) Labor Habits in New (Consumer) Labor Clothes
  • John T. Caldwell (bio)

When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.1

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

Brecht, meet Wired. We stumble all over ourselves to engage new media, digital platforms, and online fan activities—YouTube, MySpace, critical fan sites, social networks—as a next important stage in cinema and cinema study. Yet in doing so, we may be missing a valuable opportunity. Rather than viewing film and television as one disciplinary chapter being displaced by the "next digital chapter," film and television can be viewed as resilient organizational cultures that prefigure both participatory media's creative relations and its social practices. From this perspective, the industry may help guide online social networks to work their democratic, unruly wonders. This realization may be a tough pill to swallow. Yet I am not cynically dragging the old "industry" warhorse out of the barn as part of a familiar project: to underscore corporate resilience and final advantage. I am not talking about traditional ideas of ideological "recuperation," that is, where industry serves as the bad guy again hijacking good resistant activities on culture's fringes. I am instead suggesting that much of the cultural complexity, agency, and sociality we now find in online film and fan [End Page 160] media activities have also been unfolding for some time, decades even, in the very local cultures and work worlds of film and television production. This is why SCMS scholars, at this retrospective vantage point, would benefit by refiguring older models of industry practice, economics, and labor in order to understand current new media practices. Such a refiguring would allow us to go beyond certain utopian theorizations about new media, and to consider "digital media" on terms other than its own.

Several disciplinary assumptions guide my argument here. First, much can be gained in film studies by understanding media industries not just as corporate institutions, but as collective cultural activities and embodied social communities as well. Second, viewing "cultures of production" in this way in no way undercuts or prevents political economic analysis of industry. Far from it, my own critical fieldwork on production cultures largely confirms the insights of many contemporary political economists like Dan Schiller, Toby Miller, and others (about conglomeration, runaway production, post-Fordism, etc.), even as it underscores some of the sobering human consequences of recent economic changes. Third, film studies scholars can gain rich insights—about larger historical projects, political economy, and onscreen texts—through the material, grounded study of workers, their tools, and their work habits. Finally, I hope to draw out these notions by looking at production culture's mirror image (or "flipside") of the "participatory" fan culture—or "networked sociality"—that Henry Jenkins and others have so ably mapped out.2 It is around these linked cultural flipsides (production work and consumer work) that I hope to provide some historical grounding and parallels that complicate recent, optimistic claims about participatory media culture.

Changing Production Labor Markets

Many Hollywood executives now complain that viable or profitable business models for film and television no longer exist. They alternately base their chorus of pessimism on "losing control of distribution," the unrealistic and "industry-killing" demands of unions and guilds, and/or the ad hoc proliferation of technical platforms that prevent "monetization" of content once thought to be secure and proprietary. I have argued, however, that underneath these public complaints, the industry complainers have in practice adopted a profitable new business model. Specifically, the creeping, long-term goal of many contemporary media corporations now seems to be to acquire content for little or no cost, and to get everyone to work for free.3 Reactions to this spartan but opportunistic state of affairs vary widely—depending on whether one is an above-the-line executive dredging the outlands for user-generated content or a below-the-line film and television craft worker trying to stay employed and pay the rent.

The industry now talks out of both sides of its mouth. Even as some media conglomerates continue selectively flogging their old big-budget standbys (out front)—tent...

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