Rhiannon Bury

"More Moments of Television: The Producerly Text in the Age of Convergence"

There is no text, there is no audience, there are only the processes of viewing,– that variety of cultural activities that take place in front of the screen. 
--John Fiske, 1989. 

Twenty one years ago, there was no ambiguity about the screen being referenced. In an era of multiple modes of viewing and reviewing, and multiple sites of reception, any scholarly work on television published in the 1980s may seem too outdated to be useful.  Moreover, John Fiske’s work has received a fair amount of criticism over the years on other grounds. Doug Kellner (1995), for example, has criticized it for being devoid of politics and naively celebratory of all things popular. He refers to Fiske’s “fetishism” of resistance, accusing him of failing to distinguish between types of forms of resistance and oppositional readings.  

While Fiske’s conceptualizations of cultural economy, popular cultural capital, and semiotic democracy are problematic, it is important not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Based on my research on online media fandom over the past ten years, I argue that technological developments and the broader phenomenon of  media convergence have not caused processes of viewing to be altered substantially. Fiske’s fundamental logic that television is a “producerly text,” as expounded in the 1987 monograph, Television Culture, and in a subsequent 1989 article, “Moments of Television: Neither the Text Nor the Audience,” is just as relevant as it was when it was first published. Indeed, rather than disrupt primary/secondary intertextual relations or diminish “the oral culture which surrounds and defines television,” both the first and second generations of information and communications technologies expand and extend them.  

I will first discuss a few central characteristics that Fiske ascribes to the producerly television text, including transience, segmentation and seriality. With the advent of home recording technologies, beginning with the VCR and now including PVRs, as wells as downloading, streaming and On Demand technologies, these concepts do need some reworking—viewers in general and fans in particular are no longer locked in to network schedules and programming fragmented by advertising.  

In addition, multiple modes of viewing and multiple screens have unquestionably extended and expanded the oral culture surrounding television. The migration to cyberspace began a number of years ago with the Usenet and listservs. As I have argued elsewhere, fans have proved to be early adopters of social media, including discussion boards, livejournal, facebook etc. Moreover, easy access to previous seasons of popular series on DVD or on the internet creates multiple entry points into fandom. Finally, social networking technologies and Youtube have unquestionably increased the production and distribution of fan-produced secondary texts (fan fiction, vids, etc). To support these claims, I will present data from both past and current research projects.