Popular Media Cultures

Fans, Audiences and Paratexts

L. Geraghty

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137350374
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular Media Cultures explores the relationship between audiences and media texts, their paratexts and interconnected ephemera. Authors focus on the cultural work done by media audiences, how they engage with social media and how convergence culture impacts on the strategies and activities of popular media fans.

Part I

Writing in the Margins

1

“We Put the Media in (Anti)social Media”: Channel 4’s Youth Audiences, Unofficial Archives and the Promotion of Second-Screen Viewing

Michael O’Neill

Fans, and the agency of media audiences, are a longstanding cultural phenomenon. Their increased visibility and the everydayness of fan practice and user production, on the other hand, are relatively recent and have been propagated by the empowering function and disseminating power of online spaces and social media. These groups and audiences have long been recognised and often ill-served by UK broadcasting. However, in the case of Channel 4, a publisher-broadcaster with the remit to represent minorities and niche audiences while championing innovation and experimental content, minority audiences (particularly youthful ones) have historically been catered for in a variety of ways, often through the use of bespoke stranding strategies created within its schedules, catering for these neglected groups (and fans) while fulfilling its remit.

Its late-night content in the 1990s acted as a harbinger for user empowerment, with “The Collective” (an online forum and fan space connecting to 4Later, one such bespoke strand) contributing to the shape and feel of interstitial content, providing supplementary material around various televisual texts. The Adam & Joe Show (1996–2001), produced at a similar point in Channel 4’s history, was the culmination and evolution of public access-style programming such as Takeover TV (1995), displaying the power and appeal of user-generated content and amateur production, along with an active online fan community. Channel 4’s embrace of online and the recognition of the usefulness of user agency (however illusory) spread to promotional (paratextual) content after the turn of the millennium, with its work on the teaser campaign for Lost (2004–2010) in 2005 acting as a precursor and template for how it would subsequently approach and address specific audiences and demographics.

Channel 4 subsequently sought to adapt to, and exploit, changing audience practices, brought about by digital spaces and social media platforms since the turn of the millennium. Indeed, there was a greater awareness of, and emphasis upon, user practices and content which is generated outside the televisual text itself, yet which is vital to broadcasters in terms of their understanding and commissioning of future media texts. The increased exploitation of digital platforms and online spaces allowed the broadcaster to partially fulfil its promises made within its Next on 4 policy document in 2008 (championed by Andy Duncan, chief executive at the time, foreshadowing the Digital Britain report in 2009), to become a public service network, delivering varied types and shapes of content across a variety of platforms and spaces, both native to Channel 4 and external. This was in order to keep pace with rapidly mutating audience practices, as well as to allow itself the opportunity to draw upon alternative and untapped revenue streams. Channel 4’s content, in short, needed to change along with audiences and the broadcaster itself, while coherent multiplatform programme brands required careful development through Channel 4’s publishing-house-turned-digital-network. The aggregation of varied content across Channel 4’s network of branded spaces was therefore necessary in order to retain the interest of its designated youthful “minority audiences”, who themselves engaged with material across multiple platforms, not just the televisual.

This chapter aims to provide a snapshot of Channel 4’s recent provision and strategy in terms of social media, multiplatform commissioning and, most importantly, its dealings with changing user-consumption practices within a variety of spaces and platforms. By that I refer to the alternative, “unofficial” spaces and archives of content (such as YouTube) where users can not only consume difficult-to-locate content but also contribute towards alternative repositories of ephemeral content. This, while contributing to the processes of fandom of specific youth-oriented texts, as well as a more varied selection of content pertaining to them, also leads to increased policing of content and shaping of experiences within these spaces by Channel 4. I also refer to “second-screen” viewing – a practice whereupon the longstanding primacy of the television screen is no more in terms of consuming televisual content, due to mobile technologies and social media both supplementing and supplanting the televisual experience. These practices and strategies will be illuminated with examples of their implementation via both youthful factual and drama commissions. The former is showcased through the campaigning series Battlefront (2008) while the latter is highlighted through the E4 drama series Skins (2007–2013) and Channel 4’s “first multiplatform commission” Utopia (first broadcast in 2013).

However, before these texts can be discussed in terms of how Channel 4 deployed its multiplatform/paratextual strategies, an outlining of the struggles that it faced in order to address audiences and to ensure that they engaged with its content in a fashion commensurate with its goals, both commercial and public service, needs to take place. In this instance, YouTube, along with other “unofficial” spaces of consumption, proved to be a battleground between fan users and Channel 4.

Unofficial fan archives, ephemera and YouTube

Patterns of audience usage are shifting dramatically, to the bewilderment of network executives who seem willing to embrace new models of viewership (and economic support), from iPods to streaming video, at the drop of a hat in the pursuit of the youth demographic. Viewing patterns that had been enshrined as laws, such as flow, now appear washed away with the click-accessibility of Internet TV.

(Simon and Rose, 2010: 52)

it is not enough to offer read-only access, the market demands to be able to read and rewrite. For the ability to read, hear or view stories at any point has led inevitably to the desire to annotate, comment and mark, alter and remix, the work ourselves.

(Knight and Weedon, 2010: 149)

Whereas social networking spaces such as Myspace and, latterly, Facebook were deployed in aid of the officially sanctioned promotion of various youth-centred texts, such as Skins, via links within Channel 4/E4 programming webpages, the interrelationship between such programming, YouTube, (fan) audiences and broadcasters was considerably less straightforward. YouTube is a contrary entity, as Burgess and Green (2009) have illustrated, in that it operates as a corporate, commercialised concern that happens to enable “cultural citizenship” through its “communities of practice” (2009: 78). It can be seen as an alternative public sphere that allows its users to participate democratically, interacting with one another on a global scale through their submission of video content, which is often concerned with the personal politics of everyday life (Burgess and Green, 2009: 78–79). However, it has also acted as a somewhat disorganised but culturally vital repository of visual content, collating filmic and televisual ephemera, promotional material and historical footage as part of an “accidental archive”, in that this was never its intended purpose (Burgess and Green, 2009: 87–90). Prelinger (2009: 270–272) outlines YouTube’s appeal to audiences and those seeking alternatives to official (and limited) media archives in a succinct fashion:

First, it was a complete collection – or at least appeared to be … Second, YouTube was open to user contributions … Third, YouTube offered instantaneous access with very few limitations other than reduced quality … Fourth, YouTube offered basic (if not overly sophisticated) social-networking features … Finally, though it takes some skill to download a video from YouTube, the videos were very easily embeddable.

As Wilson (2009: 190–191) points out in his work on ephemera and media history, the official, corporate system often favours the exploitation of finished products to consumers rather than showcasing entire archives that display “evidence of the process and supporting materials”. He articulates a vision of media history that is shaped through commercial interests and corporate institutions, where success, quality and public value are emphasised. The utility of digital spaces such as YouTube is to potentially preserve moments of media history that would otherwise go unremarked upon or be supplanted in favour of official rhetoric and corporate narratives that showcase either media institutions or programming policy in the best possible light. As Garde-Hansen (2011: 75–76) suggests, “the logic that drives the archiving of content by major institutions has been less interested in what media means personally, emotionally and memorably to (fans and individuals)”, meaning that tools that allow fan audiences to build their own archives are vital in the process of experiencing content in an idiosyncratic, rather than standardised, way. It is often left to those who are not affiliated with broadcasters or media companies to provide an accurate insight into modern televisual history, as Nelson and Cooke (2010: xviii) postulate:

The role of fans and enthusiasts in caring about television history, and in sustaining the quest for as full an information retrieval as possible, is clear when institutions, careless of television history in the past, now follow mainly commercial – or other institutional – interests.

Artefacts such as idents, interstitial promotions, music videos, trailers and fan-produced materials seemingly have little place within official discourses and histories concerned with televisual institutions such as the BBC and Channel 4. These ephemeral moments and artefacts “offer a snapshot of the past that seems to capture our forebears when they weren’t looking” (Byerly, 2009: 1), uncovering patterns and revealing cultural preoccupations of the period (Byerly, 2009: 7). This ties into Jermyn and Holmes’ (2006: 55) discussions regarding the rise of “telephilia” and the prominence of television fan practices, which are often stymied by broadcasters, suggesting that

only certain kinds of television series typically make it to DVD in their entirety, so that the telephile does not quite have a free rein in choosing and building their television archive in this regard, but is instead hampered by institutionalised hierarchies. But these hierarchies are perhaps more fluid than they once were: the various spaces and forms of consumption open to the telephile, whether institutionally sanctioned or otherwise, are more diverse than they have ever been.

Indeed, this process has been aided by new technologies and new media spaces, such as YouTube and BitTorrent, to facilitate archives and collections of texts that broadcasters have not favoured with commercial DVD or digital releases, along with the promotional ephemera that surrounded the texts upon their initial broadcast.

The archiving function of YouTube, as well as its potential for democratic community, highlights its usefulness to fan cultures, who desire not only to post and share examples of fan work on the site (such as homemade music videos), but also to use the space to upload any material that is associated with their object of fandom. This includes the aforementioned ephemera, such as interviews and adverts, which fall into the “spirit” of YouTube archiving of miscellany. However, it also includes material ripped from DVD releases or recorded from broadcast television, in order to provide an extensive variety of material within a single site. It dwarfs the selective and incomplete collection made available by broadcasters such as Channel 4 within its own branded spaces and through its own bespoke video delivery systems (e.g. 4oD). Understandably, the latter material is often rapidly pulled from YouTube at the request of the broadcaster under the banner of copyright infringement. However, this situation may not be as clear-cut as it first appears. To provide a pertinent example with the E4 teen drama Skins, weeks prior to the broadcast of its third series in 2009, such copyrighted content had been hosted on YouTube via fan channels Skinsonline, Skinsmedia and Skinsissss. This material was subsequently pulled from these unofficial channels – and by association, the “accidental archive” that YouTube represented, impacting upon the utility and usefulness of the resource – upon the relaunch in 2009 of the E4 online Skins space, which made video materials available that were previously only accessible through unofficial channels. This was a foreshadowing of Channel 4’s renewed push to digitise and exploit its televisual archives via its 4oD service, made accessible through digital television services and online through Channel 4/E4 hubs. The desired effect of closing off this unofficial digital avenue to fans was to push them towards Channel 4’s proprietary technology and enclosed, branded online spaces, which is something that has subsequently been re-emphasised through the recent removal of full-length programming from Channel 4’s 4oD YouTube channels. This would subsequently limit the alternatives to officially sanctioned viewing while promoting a more unified, less fragmentary fan user experience. As Marshall (2009: 44) confirms,

[Both commercial and public] broadcasters have worked to make their own sites the portals for their own content through a partial embrace of the internet cacophony via multiple add-on videos to productions and extended capacities for viewers/users to write in or video in their own comments.

This suggests that broadcasters wish to control not only the delivery and consumption of the primary televisual text, but also all of the associated ephemera, “paratexts” (Gray, 2010) and “overflow” (Brooker, 2001) along with it, which served to make the relationship between users and producers antagonistic. However, complicating the situation further is the equally complex and uneasy relationship between “old” (broadcasters) and “new” (Internet-centric) media producers and institutions, which Ross (2008) discusses in depth in the context of US television.

This discouraging of unofficial or “illegal” practices of consumption, as Newman (2012) discusses regarding “peer-to-peer” distribution and the use of the BitTorrent protocol, can often be counterproductive in that this “closing down” of choice can alienate fan users, pushing them to utilise alternative methods of viewing as a means to countering overbearing institutional practices. These torrent communities also run counter to officially sanctioned, preferred modes of consumption (which within the online realm revolves around on-demand streaming) in a manner similar to YouTube. As Smith (2011: para. 10) highlights in relation to “bootleg archives” of film content, “these filesharing communities offer a makeshift archive of rare material that provides access to films that might otherwise be forgotten”. It is the closing-down of choice and restrictions to access that cause unofficial and unsanctioned audience practices, while the broadcasters’ attempts to control the televisual experience within non-televisual spaces leads to issues when it comes to either monetising or restricting access to it, given its previous position as “a public good, freely available to anyone” (Newman, 2012: 467). As Newman (2012: 466) again mentions,

The ability of users to program their own viewing rather than being “slaves to the schedule” of broadcasters, and the possibility of watching television shows purged of commercials and promotions, function to legitimate television (Newman and Levine, 2011) … Thus the P2P distribution of television is one among a cluster of technologies of agency …

Mittell (2005: para. 10) also suggests that, relating to the online consumption of US television serie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Fans and Paratexts
• Part I: Writing in the Margins
• Part II: Reading between the Lines
• Part III: From Spoiler to Fan Activist
• Afterword: Studying Media with and without Paratexts
• Index