Media Franchising by Derek Johnson

Author:Derek Johnson [Johnson, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Anthropology, Cultural
ISBN: 9780814743478
Google: dEBsiqOOD9QC
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-03-22T02:53:48+00:00

Conclusion

To understand creativity within the entertainment franchise, this chapter has explored a tradition of world-sharing tied to science fiction television in which multiple networked production communities have negotiated tensions and social inequalities surrounding their heterogeneous creative use of shared resources. First, this chapter detailed the evolution of narrative, visual, and aural techniques whereby worlds have been constructed to enable systemic, emergent elaboration. By using story, image, and sound to create an overdesigned, rule-based system, franchise producers created contexts to support continual creative use. Second, this chapter explored the creative tensions that erupted when such worlds became shared industrially, uncovering a spectrum of creative and professional identifications that have produced both differentiation and deference within the socially networked production communities brought into relation through these shared resources. The shared use of worlds by peer producers in comparable institutional contexts led to pleasurable identification with franchising, but also competitiveness and a drive for differentiation supported by textual strategies that rendered labor meaningful through distinction. However, for producers occupying unequal industrial formations, and thus negotiating unequal positions of power, status, and creative authority, strategies enforcing a deferential continuity became more imperative. With such creative relationships governed by licensing agreements, and policed by various institutional forces, inter-industrial world-sharing operated via the imposition of creative hierarchies that rendered some creative uses less legitimate and privileged conformity with established canons. In their transmedia dimensions, therefore, immense energy has been spent to manage decentralized franchise creativity and bring it in line with a singular, centralized vision.

As framed through the authorial identity of Ronald D. Moore, its construction in relation to a host of other producers with whom he shared worlds, and its claims to creative authority across two science fiction worlds he did not himself originate, this chapter has problematized the idea of a franchise as the expression of a single voice, much as the previous chapter problematized the franchise as an expression of a conglomerate totality. As a context designed to support emergent, evolving creation, the franchise system must be understood as a system of resources animated by the social interaction of its users, and not a single, unified form. The reimagined Battle-star evidenced this potential for variation, but the licensing of that property across media demonstrated a simultaneous containment of its potential by binding creativity within expectations of unity and univocality.

The critical intervention made here, therefore, lies in challenging the way in which industrial creativity has been understood. On the one hand, the complex identifications, pleasures, and negotiations that media workers engage in during the course of their labor in service of media franchising suggests that we might rethink the idea that this means of reiterated cultural production is anathema to creativity. In developing production identities, producers and communities within media franchising at the very least make claims to creative identity that we should feel obligated to recognize—if only to see that media franchising is a site where creativity is culturally and industrially constructed. In making those claims to creativity, moreover, these producers often pursue

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.