Food For Thought

Human communication and technology begins with the invention of writing. It includes pitching training, ink, wood blocks, 16th–century books, and 17th–and 18th–century pamphlets. It includes photography, audio recording, radio waves, moving pictures, the Telegraph, television, and countless other technologies, more of which have been from London remembered. There are long traditions of scholarship into these other once–new technologies. – p720

Although Internet research is often seen as a relatively new area of research, in A Call for Grounding in the Face of Blurred Boundaries Baym suggests that it should not necessarily be ascribed as ‘new’ because this blinds us to the areas of new media which are already familiar.  Today’s new communications technologies create much the same dilemmas as new technologies through history such as quality of interaction, the nature of community, the effect on relationships, the idea of fake identities, the safety of children, and trust and privacy issues. Social theorists have to work out what is new and what is recycled and the key to the future of communication can often be found in the past.

One of the main areas that Baym focuses on in this article is the idea that online realms are no longer separate and distinct from each other.  They lack boundaries and, although they appear to be many singular communities, their identity is multimodal. Group members connect with one another in multiple locations using multiple media such as  YouTube, Flickr,  blogs,  websites etc. The main presiding point in this article is that what happens on one medium is much the same as what happens another medium or communications device be it online and telephone or face-to-face. It is largely a matter of what is convenient.

Most people connected online are also connected offline. Online and offline are not different entities to be contrasted. What happens via new technology is completely interwoven with what happens face-to-face and via other media–the telephone, the television, films, music, radio, print. Even behaviors that only appear online are put there by embodied people acting in geographic locations embedded in face-to-face social relationships and multimedia environments that shape the meaning and consequences of those online practices. - p721

Finally, Baym suggests that academic researchers should take note of this practice and consider dipping into other disciplines for influence, inspiration and ideas.

We need to think about how to transcend academic boundaries, while recognizing what we have to offer that is distinctive. There is little that we study under ‘‘human communication and technology’’ that is not also being studied by those in Sociology, Women’s Studies, Political Science, English, Law, Business, Psychology, Linguistics, and many other fields in this and many other nations. We need to draw on that work. We need to speak to scholars in other traditions. We must avoid insularity. p722

Cathrine Agnew & Irene McGinn

Introduction

We decided to study the community formation and hierarchical structure of Misha’s Minions, a community that arose from the twitter feed of actor Misha Collins (http://twitter.com/mishacollins). This twitter feed, created approximately one year ago, is constructed differently to other celebrity twitter feeds that we have encountered.  Rather than sharing details of his life and work, Misha Collins has created an alternate reality in which he is an overlord and his twitter followers are his minions. Taking inspiration from Misha, his fans (minions) took this idea and created a community around it.  In this community they are directly inspired by the ‘tweets’ (twitter posts) that Misha posts, but they have gone further than that, creating forums, facebook groups, maps, arts and writing that all contributes to the alternate reality established by the twitter feed.

We decided to conduct this study because one of Matt Hills’ main criticisms of many previous studies on fan culture is that they assume the pre-existence of a community rather than investigating this conception.

Previous studies have nothing to say on the emergence of fan cultures, precisely because they always assume a pre-constituted fan community and hence a set of fan ‘norms’ against which the fan as subject can be measured and placed, and through which the fan as subject can be determined. (Hills 2002 pxiv)

This struck us as an area we would be interested in looking into further which is why we decided to concentrate our study on the area of community formation and hierarchy. Misha’s Minons seemed to be a perfect community for this kind of study because its origins appeared to be relatively clear, in that the community grew from the twitter feed of a particular actor. We could therefore look at the forums on the related sites from the very first post.

We identified the sociological framework developed by Pierre Boudieu as containing a number of concepts that could perhaps be gainfully applied to the development of online communities. We also looked at theorists who had used Bourdieu’s work in areas similar to ours such as Sarah Thornton and John Fiske.

In order to do this we undertook a qualitative analysis of the related forums and then augmented our conclusions from this analysis with a short quantitative survey. We found that social capital appears to hold more weight within this community than other forms of capital and that the hierarchy does not conform to normative structures.

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From the horizontal integration of multinational corporations, which guarantees extensive media crossovers, to the digitization of Hollywood, which has affected the business, production, and marketing of cinema, big-screen films are indebted to a similar intimate congress among media. (Klinger 2006 p236)

In recent years we have seen many changes in technology.  Processing power has increased, software is getting more and more integrated and complex and the hardware that is needed to run programs is getting smaller and more cost-effective.  For the film industry this means new editing software, more powerful digital imaging programs and new formats like digital projection, DVDs and Blueray. Digital cinema provides a clearer picture, a better cinematographic experience and faster and easier distribution and is now becoming an industry standard. (Taylor 2006) DVDs and Blueray have replaced the now-obsolete VCR as the new home entertainment standard and home cinemas with bigger screens and better sound have changed the home viewing experience. The media integration and convergence that new technologies are creating encourages increased franchising and intertextuality, a lucrative development that production companies are only too glad to encourage.  Now blockbuster films have all sorts of associate ancillary products, from video games to special edition DVDs to theme park rides and action figures.

A lucrative franchise is known in the commercially driven film industry (particularly in Hollywood) as one of the best ways to make money.  Hollywood blockbuster films may cost millions of dollars to make but studios are willing to put money into them if they expect them to provide a high financial return.  Successful blockbuster films are what fund Hollywood studios.  The studios can afford to take some financial risk in other areas, funding many smaller films that are not guaranteed to recoup money if they have a couple of blockbusters in hand. This is because the revenue from blockbusters is not simply dependant on income from seats sold in theatres. Lucrative sponsorship and product placement deals as well as the sale of merchandise, like games and special edition DVDs, supplement this income. These films are known as ‘tentpole pictures’ (Bordwell 2006 p12) because they are the productions that ‘hold up’ the rest of the studio in the same way as a central pole in a tent keeps the rest of the tent upright.
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