Sam Ford

"Rethinking the Anthology: Inviting New Voices into the Academy"

John Fiske's contributions to media studies have been substantial not only from the theoretical ground he covered but also from the ways in which it has encouraged the academy to take new approaches for the serious consideration of commercial media content and the audiences that not only receive but actively rework and speak through those "official" media texts. While Fiske's work could only have alluded to the "digital revolution" that was to come, the larger themes behind his writing have become all the more prevalent in a digital age, particularly in understanding how material produced by mass media become active material for a variety of audience purposes. 

In the past few years, I've been involved with a variety of intellectual projects that owe their roots in one way or another to Fiske's work. For instance, online initiatives like Transformative Works and like were not only started from organizations with roots in fan activism but likewise encourages scholarship that looks at fan activity around media texts. The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT works directly with media industries to understand how media companies need to rethink their approach to intellectual property, promotion, and distribution now that manifestations of how active audiences are surround us.  

Particularly, I am interested in how Fiske's notions of the context in which cultural material is produced and consumed may reshape how we think about scholarship about mass media and particularly how we rethink institutional staples of the academy such as the anthology.  

At the moment, I am working on two essay collections that build, in one way or another, on Fiske's work. Spreadable Media, which I am co-writing with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, has its roots in Fiske's work, arguing that scholars and the media industries alike must come to understand how audiences use commercial media texts as fodder for their own conversations, owing much to Fiske's use of the "producerly," for instance (as project contributor Xiaochang Li has written). Also, The Survival of the Soap Opera is an academic collection I'm co-editing with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington. The book draws substantially from Fiske's considerations of masculine and feminine television, especially at a moment when the soap opera genre is losing influence even as many elements popularized by the soap are manifested in primetime television genres that were traditionally considered "masculine." 

In both cases, we are interested in rethinking the model of the anthology itself. In the case of Spreadable Media, we are drawing on scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines, pulling them into our overall argument for short case studies, illustrations, and arguments, rather than simply citing their work elsewhere. This idea of actively engaging those we cite seems in itself to owe something to Fiske's contributions. Similarly, for The Survival of the Soap Opera, we invited soap opera writers, online bloggers/critics, fan historians, fan site moderators, and a variety of other audiences outside "the academy" to contribute to our discussion about the current state and the future of the genre. At the time of this conference, I’d like to reflect how such projects that invite new voices into the dialogue of media studies can build on the foundation that Fiske and others created for media studies. At a time when new spaces such as the Internet and the proliferation of visible active audience practices poses new questions for the academy, we must invite new and relevant voices into the discussion to broaden and deepen our knowledge about how media texts are contextualized in our culture.