Core Post 3: "Industry studies" isn't just convergence, but it's a big part of it

I really enjoyed this week’s batch of readings and how each piece approached the “industry.” For all three scholars, industry was described as some kind of infrastructural arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption: vertical integration for Holt, “convergence TV” / “culture of production” for Caldwell, “convergence” for Jenkins. Each approach to the industry offers different insights into how we might study industry.

Holt’s examination of the “regulatory climate” (Holt 14) allows her to trace the relationships between political philosophies, the marketplace, and media corporate organization. Holt concludes that the political philosophies behind broadcast deregulation beginning in the 70s was a prominent factor in determining “must see” TV, or at least what gets put on prime time. For Holt, prime-time TV as an aesthetic form or scheduling arrangement isn’t just a marketing tactic by discrete “vertically integrated entertainment conglomerates” but also products of government regulation and the industry as such.

Caldwell’s piece adds to the conversation by looking at how individual series are brokered and pitched within the new regulatory climate of different vertically integrated players that Holt describes. Whereas Holt focused on the historical and economic conditions determining TV’s industrial organization, Caldwell is interested in how these conditions necessitate certain changes in television’s textual forms. For Caldwell, the shifting modes of distribution due to both “vertical integration” and “television-Net convergence” requires practitioners to produce stuff that best fits how that stuff might move around in a dynamic set of industrial relations. He lists different aesthetic changes and strategies for how TV has “looked differently” because of the new industrial and regulatory landscape. I found his analysis of the “stunt genre” as both an industrial strategy and aesthetic of “television-Net convergence” compelling and convincing in his argument towards reconsidering “aesthetic analysis in television studies itself.” (Caldwell 44) At the end of the day, stuff has to be pitched and sold not only to “producers” but “consumers” as well. For Caldwell, the stunt-genre becomes a way to examine how the “culture of production” behind convergence TV gets to go on-air, and why it can be “articulated,” “revised,” and “rearticulated” by consumers as well as other industrial players. People simply liked it/bought into it in different ways, and Caldwell shows how the text’s form appeals to these different players.

Jenkins’ piece bookends the batch of readings by offering a conceptual account of convergence and its implications/consequences for the relationships between producers and consumers. If Holt and Caldwell provided historical accounts of vertical integration and convergence TV, describing past and contemporary events, then Jenkins could be understood as prescribing convergence as both a historical account (e.g. how are these new materials regulated and regulated through what platforms or infrastructures?) and conceptual model (e.g. where might the “agency” lie between producers and consumers? Who has “ownership”?) for media studies. For Jenkins, convergence is not just industrial organization, or the produced aesthetics demanded by the industrial arrangement of different media corporations, but the ways in which he argues that consumers can, and have, leveraged their “emerging power through new collaborations with media producers.” (Jenkins 36) Thus, I might trace the shifting emphases across the readings, from Holt’s thorough historical account, Caldwell’s historical and textual analysis, and Jenkins’ historical and conceptual frameworks and conclude that the dynamism of media industries requires a similarly interdisciplinary approach towards studying industries as such.