Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future by Denise Mann (review)

To read much of the scholarship of the past decade on television’s transformations in the digital era is to be invited to see new possibilities—aesthetic, cultural, political, social—in the displacement of “old” television by “new.” As Amanda Lotz has argued, for example, television “as we knew it”—as a mass medium, viewed in the home, addressing a broad and diverse audience—is being revolutionized through increased viewer control over the where, the when, and the what of viewing.¹ Technological changes, along with the remarkable expansion of media outlets, as Jason Mittell has demonstrated, have facilitated the growth of a new mode of narratively complex television programs.² Television in the digital era, according to Sharon Marie Ross, is premised on tele-participation, a reciprocal process in which viewers are hailed to interact with texts as television producers, writers, and executives increasingly incorporate an awareness of, and a desire to elicit, viewer engagement within them.³ The mainstreaming of participatory culture that Henry Jenkins outlines in his Convergence Culture has expanded into “spreadable media,” discussed in his recent book coauthored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, which speaks to a mediascape in which the rigidities of old media—of top-down distribution methods, of a one-to-many broadcast model, of presumedly passive audiences for media content—have given way to a more democratic and flexible environment in which audiences create and circulate texts and in which hard distinctions between producer, marketer, and audience become blurred.⁴ To think of media as spreadable, according to Jenkins, Ford, and Green, is not only to reimagine the flows and uses of content but also to see its “potential to dramatically reshape how central cultural and political institutions operate.”⁵

To read Denise Mann’s impressive new anthology Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future is to feel that the bloom is off the rose. In her introduction Mann acknowledges that her collection builds on insights from a number of the texts listed just above, yet the essays within it offer a more sobering look at the practices of television in the digital era. And though, as Mann suggests, the essays address “the myriad of new digital threats and the equal number of digital opportunities that have become part and parcel of today’s post-network era,” the threats loom a bit larger than the opportunities.⁶ What emerges across the essays is a picture of contemporary industry practices defined not by freedom from restraints but by their reimposition, and a picture in which the blurring of boundaries and the leveling of distinctions yield not liberatory possibilities but practices that predominantly serve the interests of media companies.

As the subtitle indicates, the contributions in this volume focus on labor. Across the collection, the articles address the labor of fans, the division of labor across industry professionals, and the labor performed by media texts themselves. Four of the eleven contributions focus specifically on the imagined and actual labors of fans; the remaining seven interrogate labor and cultures of production within the contemporary television industry. And although in her introduction Mann suggests that what unites the collection is a shared methodological commitment to media industries study, what also emerges as one reads across the contributions is a recurring preoccupation with narratives of failure from which the contributors draw important lessons about the continued salience of cultural and institutional hierarchies for the way media are imagined, produced, promoted, and used.

The essays on fandom build on and expand what has been a central line of analysis in current media studies, namely the mainstreaming of fan practices as a defining characteristic of the convergent media era. In his contribution, Robert Kozinets analyzes marketing literature to map the increased acceptance of what he labels “fan creep,” the notion that consumers should be courted as fans rather than as consumers. His analysis underlines that to bring consumers into brand fandom communities is not only to elicit...