Media Studies and the Internet Derek Kompare (bio) In November 1969, an SDS Sigma 7 computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an SDS 940 computer at Stanford were connected via telephone for the first permanent host-to-host connection of ARPANET, the US Department of Defense's project to build a dispersed computer network.1 This initial connection would grow over the coming years to form the physical and logistical infrastructure of what eventually became known as the internet, encompassing technologies and technological discourses at the global level. Along the way, new communication systems, codes, and protocols were developed (and just as important, evangelized) that fundamentally recast the functions and expectations of media culture. Like almost every other endeavor in advanced societies over the past few decades, film and media studies has long relied on the internet for its basic operation, but it has yet to fully acknowledge, understand, or incorporate the internet as such into its fundamental scope. I prompted the contributors of this In Focus to use the fiftieth anniversary of ARPANET's connection to explore concepts and uses that the internet has fostered that challenge, expand, and illuminate our field in significant ways. These essays argue that the field should regard the internet not only as a conduit for audiovisual texts and their related discourses but also, regardless of its "content," as a system of technical affordances, policies, and discourses that has long shaped and will continue to shape the parameters of media and politics. As Fred Turner has explored, the internet's initial design in its first decade or so was primarily shaped by seemingly contrasting but ultimately congruent American ideologies of technocratic Cold [End Page 134] War engineering and countercultural ideals of open communication, concepts themselves drawn from much older models of "networks," as Grant Bollmer explores in his contribution to this collection.2 These discourses fostered familiar narratives from communication history: a vast, technical deployment of industrial infrastructure and a utopian rhetoric of rapid, "limitless" communication, predominantly (though not exclusively) framed by the perspectives of educated upper-middle-class white heterosexual men. As computing became a consumer-focused business in the 1970s and 1980s, the network beckoned as a new frontier of commerce, adding then-ascendant libertarian discourses of economic expansion to the ideological mix. At the same time, although much of the initial hardware and software of the internet was developed in the United States, computing and networking technologies and cultures developed regionally as well, with European and East Asian cultures of computing and the role of public communication systems contributing substantively to the debates and development of the emerging network. Today, the network is global, with the vast majority of its users residing outside North America and Europe, and its most rapid expansion in Africa, South America, and South Asia. This brief industrial and cultural history of the internet's half century is not dissimilar from the histories of film, radio, and television in the twentieth century. It is appropriate, then, here in the pages of JCMS, to consider this history from the perspective of film and media studies. At the same time that the internet developed as a complex global media space, the film and media studies field broadened to encompass media beyond film and television, and approaches beyond textual, ideological, and industrial analysis. The acknowledgment and growth of the "M" in the purview of this journal, society, and the field coincided with the rapid public development and scrutiny of the internet since the mid-1990s. A look back through this journal reveals this expansion, from an exclusive concern with canonical Hollywood and Western European film in the 1960s to a broad and diverse exploration of a wide array of media forms, figures, genres, eras, regions, theories, and cultures. As Janet Staiger pointed out in a 2004 In Focus essay, this expansion has actually enhanced and deepened the field's original focus on film, drawing relevant connections between film and other media, because film "as a business and an art was never isolated from the other entertainments or from the political and aesthetic expressions with which it competed."3 This broader conception of the field helped fuel the...

TV Milestones Series Derek Kompare (bio) Batman by Matt Yockey. Wayne State University Press. 2014. $15.64 paper; $9.99 e-book. 160pages. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In by Ken Feil. Wayne State University Press. 2014. $15.99 paper; $9.99 e-book. 168pages. 24 by John McCullough. Wayne State University Press. 2014. $15.99 paper; $9.99 e-book. 144pages. The L Word By Margaret T. McFadden. Wayne State University Press. 2014. $15.99 paper; $9.99 e-book. 152pages. Short monographs based on single films, TV series, or video games have been a prominent format in media studies for the past decade or so. They’re popular with publishers and scholars, though for different reasons. Publishers can build a potentially long-running series around a particular medium or genre, and scholars can carry out a relatively deep, multifaceted analysis on a single text. That said, as a form longer than an article but shorter than a traditional book, they also have their own potential pitfalls. While the singular focus has its advantages, the format certainly isn’t boundless. The word count of thirty-five thousand provides enough room to develop multiple points but not enough to dig too deeply or too broadly. Similarly, the understandable remit from publishers to be widely accessible (to undergraduates as well as interested fans of the text) necessitates clearer writing, including the brief treatment of theoretical [End Page 168] concepts that would otherwise be expanded in more advanced work. As someone who’s written one of these, I appreciate how difficult it can be to balance the depth, breadth, accessibility, and brevity necessary to cover a long-running TV series in this format. With twenty-eight titles published since 2004, the TV Milestones series from Wayne State University Press has been one of the most prolific and consistent of this type of series. It has covered a wide array of mostly US TV shows dating from the 1950s through the 2000s. Despite the great variety of genres and authors, the series editors, Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, have effectively managed each volume’s usual mix of historical, industrial, and cultural contexts, always coupled with extensive textual analysis. These books are effective introductions to key television series (particularly for the classroom) and provide intriguing analysis, even for those familiar with their subjects. This review concerns four of the latest volumes, representing two distinct but, in retrospect, similar historical eras in American television. Matt Yockey’s analysis of Batman (ABC, 1966–1968) and Ken Feil’s investigation of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968– 1973) examine how the turbulent cultural changes of the late 1960s to early 1970s were managed at the peak of the classic network era by television producers and networks. Each of these series briefly dominated popular culture, and both were emblematic of television’s political dance between appealing to a younger, more iconoclastic counterculture and retaining an older, more conservative mainstream. The other two books, John McCullough’s study of 24 (Fox, 2001–2010, 2014) and Margaret T. McFadden’s exploration of The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009), focus on the more recent era of multichannel television, fragmenting audiences, and divergent industrial and cultural priorities. Appropriately, neither of these series aired on one of the traditional “big three” so dominant forty years earlier. However, as with the 1960s, the first decade of the twenty-first century was also a television era of shifting ranges of expression (in both form and content), as television producers and networks strategized to appeal not so much to a mainstream but to the extended loyalty of particular viewers. The L Word and 24 are radically different texts, yet both could have flourished only in the divided television ecosystem of the 2000s–2010s. The TV adaptation of Batman blazed bright and faded quickly for just over two years, but Matt Yockey’s long-needed volume rescues the iconic series from its usual footnoted treatment in television history as either a bold experimental failure or a sign of mid-1960s cultural vapidity. Yockey displays a thorough understanding of the ramifications of this particular comic book character, the status of television, and the issue of “mass” culture...

Abstract This article explores the opportunities and problems thus far presented by the movement of old TV shows into new online platforms. Media users can easily view, remix, and share old television content, and media industries struggle to adapt their old business models to these new modes of communication.

Futures of Entertainment 3 November 21–22, 2008, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Derek Kompare (bio) The third Futures of Entertainment (FoE) conference was held at MIT in late November 2008. As with the previous events, the two-day conference was sponsored by the Creative Culture Consortium (C3), a northeast US–based group of media scholars, practitioners, managers, and consultants anchored by Henry Jenkins of MIT. C3 aims to provide a working model of academia-industry collaboration, bringing together people who share a broad interest in developing media, and in "convergence culture": the evolving and expanding transmedia spaces of contemporary media where old categories and practices break down in favor of malleability, mobility, and increased user control and participation. Each FoE conference has functioned as a public forum on convergence culture, as scholars and industry professionals have discussed key aspects of contemporary media. With convergence introduced as a theme at the first two conferences, on the heels of Jenkins's influential 2006 book, Convergence Culture, this year's event was more focused on the labor of convergence, i.e., how it is made to happen by people and groups across media and culture. Jenkins's opening keynote set the tone in this regard, critiquing the blanket usage of the term "viral media" in journalism, industry, and the academy, which he believes inaccurately describes a diverse array of media practices. Instead, Jenkins argued, we should think of these media forms (e.g., YouTube videos, Photoshopped images, audio mash-ups, etc.) as "spreadable media," emphasizing the actions of media creators and sharers, rather than their passivity as suggested by the metaphor of a virus. The term "viral" suggests the old model of broadcasting, where media use is regarded as the result of centralized coordination, and users are mere receptacles for targeted content. "Spreadable," [End Page 116] by contrast, frames media users as creative and collaborative agents, building media texts and communities outside corporate strategies of market control. Jenkins raised the example of the new Organization for Transformative Works (http://www.transformativeworks.org/) as an important champion of such spreadability. Similarly, he likened spreadable media practices to Lewis Hyde's theories of gift economies, arguing that convergent media's very malleability and mobility have granted new registers of value to active media users. This linkage of spreadability and "gifting" was reinforced in Jenkins's discussion with networking theorist Yochai Benkler, who argued that our understanding of human behavior has been too limited to assuming "selfish rationality" to be the dominant motivation, and that instead we need to better understand and value the social relationships that are enhanced by digital production and distribution technologies. If spreadability was the theme of FoE3, then networking was its instrumental logic. Though rarely referred to directly by that term, networking repeatedly emerged as a key concern of participants and attendees, and was understood fluidly in terms of the capabilities of digital technologies, the viability of content across multiple nodes and mediums, and the collaboration of people embedded in key but increasingly indistinguishable areas of production and distribution. All of these practices were discussed in the hallmark sessions of the weekend, which focused on ongoing real-world transmedia projects. The examples ranged in scope and strategy, and included: the robust expansion of CBS's supernatural drama The Ghost Whisperer (2006–present) across multiple media platforms; the aggressive, guerrilla-theater tactics of the independent horror film/multimedia experience Head Trauma (2006); and the sumptuous world-building involved in the 2009 cinematic adaptation of the acclaimed Watchmen graphic novel. Participants throughout the weekend generally agreed that definitions of "audience" and "success," long measured by the media industries in terms of sales or ad revenue, are uncertain in a transmedia age. What does it mean when significant components of a media experience are made freely available outside the "core" text (i.e., an individual film, TV show, novel, or album)? In a session entitled "Making Audiences Matter," Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer, detailed her series' "infinity loop": an extensive array of online and offline campaigns, images, and narratives coordinated by her team (much, interestingly, without the prior approval of CBS). Many of the elements in the loop involved...

Commercial television has functioned as a flow medium for more than fifty years, premised on the sale of time (and ostensible viewers) to advertisers. By contrast, the film industry has operated as a publisher, selling or renting its individual media products to theaters. During the home video era, while the film industry shifted its focus to the VCR, television remained reliant on advertising and has held only a marginal presence in the video software market. However, increasing corporate synergy and the swift rise of DVD technology have prompted the practice of publication as an alternative means of television distribution and reception. This article explores why television did not succeed on VHS but has been transformed by DVD. The DVD box set in particular, as introduced with Fox’s first set of The X-Files in 2000, has reconceived television series as collectible objects, fostering a new commodity relationship between television and its viewers.

INTRODUCTION 1. Industrializing Culture: The Regime of Repetition in the United States, 1790-1920 2. Transcribed Adventures: Radio and the Recording 3. (R) : Film on Early Television 4. Familiarity Breeds Content: Reconfiguring Television in the 1960s and 1970s 5. Our Television Heritage: Reconceiving Past Television 6. Old Wine in New Bottles: Broadcast Rerun Syndication since the 1980s 7. TV Land: Cable and Satellite as Boutique Television 8. Acquisitive Repetition: Home Video and the Television Heritage CONCLUSION NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY