· 2008
In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles–based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producers and directors but also many “below-the-line” laborers, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Caldwell analyzes the narratives and rituals through which workers make sense of their labor and critique the film and TV industry as well as the culture writ large. As a self-reflexive industry, Hollywood constantly exposes itself and its production processes to the public; workers’ ideas about the industry are embedded in their daily practices and the media they create. Caldwell suggests ways that scholars might learn from the industry’s habitual self-scrutiny. Drawing on interviews, observations of sets and workplaces, and analyses of TV shows, industry documents, economic data, and promotional materials, Caldwell shows how film and video workers function in a transformed, post-network industry. He chronicles how workers have responded to changes including media convergence, labor outsourcing, increasingly unstable labor and business relations, new production technologies, corporate conglomeration, and the proliferation of user-generated content. He explores new struggles over “authorship” within collective creative endeavors, the way that branding and syndication have become central business strategies for networks, and the “viral” use of industrial self-reflexivity to motivate consumers through DVD bonus tracks, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and “making-ofs.” A significant, on-the-ground analysis of an industry in flux, Production Culture offers new ways of thinking about media production as a cultural activity.
· 2023
Ethics? : stress, rifts, bad behavior -- Framework : spec, folds, leaks -- Regimes : craftworld, brandworld, specworld -- Case : warring creator pedagogies (the aspirant's crossover dilemma) -- Folding : stress aesthetics, compliance, deprivation pay -- Case : televisioning aspirant schemes -- Fracturing : rifts and stress-points as system self-portraits -- Case : conjuring micro-finance to overleverage aspirants -- Methods : production culture research design.
· 1995
The collision of auteurism and rap--couched by primetime producers in the Northern Exposure script--was actually rather commonplace by the early 1990s. Series, and even news broadcasts, regularly engineered their narratives around highly coded aesthetic and cultural fragments, with a kind of ensemble iconography. Televisuality interrogates the nature of such performances as an historical phenomenon, an aesthetic and industrial practice, and as a socially symbolic act.
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· 2018
Never before has the future been so systematically envisioned, aggressively analyzed, and grandly theorized as in the present rush to cyberspace and digitalization. In the mid-twentieth century, questions about media technologies and society first emerged as scholarly hand-wringing about the deleterious sweep of electronic media and information technologies in mass culture. Now, questions about new technologies and their social and cultural impact are no longer limited to intellectual soothsayers in the academy but are pervasive parts of day-to-day discourses in newspapers, magazines, television, and film. Electronic Media and Technoculture anchors contemporary discussion of the digital future within a critical tradition about the media arts, society, and culture. The collection examines a range of phenomena, from boutique cyber-practices to the growing ubiquity of e-commerce and the internet. The essays chart a critical field in media studies, providing a historical perspective on theories of new media. The contributors place discussions of producing technologies in dialogue with consuming technologies, new media in relation to old media, and argue that digital media should not be restricted to the constraining public discourses of either the computer, broadcast, motion-picture, or internet industries. The collection charts a range of theoretical positions to assist readers interested in new media and to enable them to weather the cycles of hardware obsolescence and theoretical volatility that characterize the present rush toward digital technologies. Contributors include Ien Ang, John Caldwell, Cynthia Cockburn, Helen Cunningham, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Guillermo G=mez-Pe±a, Arthur Kroker, Bill Nichols, Andrew Ross, Ellen Seiter, Vivian Sobchack, AllucquFre Rosanne Stone, Ravi Sundaram, Michael A. Weinstein, Raymond Williams, and Brian Winston.
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· 1979
Attribute measurement techniques for confirmation of declared irradiated fuel inventories at nuclear installations under safeguards surveillance are being investigated. High-gain measurements of the intensity of the Cerenkov glow from exposed assemblies in water-filled storage ponds are promising for this purpose. Such measurements have been made of Materials Testing Reactor plate-type fuel assemblies and Pressurized Water Reactor pin-type fuel assemblies. The measured intensities depend on cooling times as calculations predict.
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