Cinema Journal

Let me start with an obvious fact: we exist in an era of media production, distribution, and consumption vastly different from the one in which most of us came of age as viewers and learned our trade as students and teachers. Perhaps because of this fact, we often teach [End Page 182] at a distance from our students’ own media experiences. Of course, there are good reasons for this distance: primarily, we challenge our students by confronting them with texts and ideas they haven’t encountered before. But new conditions should also force us to rethink our core ideas and to reconsider the texts we use in our teaching. For example, we once again need to reconsider the concept of “flow” as a foundational principle of the television experience. Raymond Williams’s seminal idea has, of course, been thoroughly reworked by any number of prominent media scholars in order to account for the variety of everyday viewing practices as well as changing modes of distribution and reception.¹ And yet the basic idea of some sort of organizing principle of media flow persists, even if it is characterized today more by DVR menus or the scattershot, hyperlink-driven availability of the short clip via YouTube or Facebook than by the neater contours of the channel or the viewing strip. In what follows, I want to explore the tension between random and planned access that defines contemporary media distribution and consumption practices as a model for how we might structure our own pedagogical practices in a multiplatform media environment.

My approach responds to several interconnected trends in the era of convergence and neo-network structures, an era defined at least in part by two trends that point in opposite directions. On the one hand, it is characterized by more flexible technologies that allow for new modes of production and distribution, increased abundance of products across platforms and over time, and extended access to products from a variety of often interconnected outlets. On the other hand, it is also characterized (as part and parcel of these same institutional and technological factors) by tighter corporate control of products in terms of intellectual property rights and by the drive to safeguard the interests of vertically and horizontally integrated conglomerates. As Henry Jenkins has argued, ours is a “convergence culture” in which “old and new media collide, grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”² What Jenkins points to is the need to attend to new and emerging forms of media production, distribution, and consumption without losing sight of media history or the theoretical and critical ideas about power that have animated studies of media for at least the past four decades. With this in mind, I want to highlight the value of randomness, flexibility, and nonofficial voices, as a way of understanding both Media Studies itself and Media Studies as a pedagogical process—a process that is also necessarily grounded in specific historical, theoretical, and critical contexts.

In a class I taught during the fall of 2010, a student asked, “Have you seen this video on YouTube? You have to see it! Oh my God, it’s so hilarious! Can we watch it now?” [End Page 183] She was referring to a YouTube posting of a news story out of Huntsville, Alabama, about an attempted rape. The news report detailed the information about the attempted rape, and then featured the victim’s brother, Antoine Dodson, addressing the perpetrator and the viewing public by looking directly into the camera and venting his frustrations. The news video went viral in a matter of days, spawning a song by the Gregory Brothers (now available on iTunes) and an accompanying music video (which also went viral). The viral nature of these videos points to the fact that, while the production of these videos, and our access to them, has an arbitrary quality, the viewing of them (via Internet buzz and word of mouth) crystallizes...