Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy - Softcover

Mayer, Vicki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822350076 ISBN 13: 9780822350071

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2011

Synopsis

Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She shows that these workers are increasingly engaged in professional and creative work, unsettling the industry’s mythological account of itself as a business driven by auteurs, manned by an executive class, and created by the talented few. As Mayer demonstrates, the new television economy casts a wide net to exploit those excluded from these hierarchies. Meanwhile, television set assemblers in Brazil devise creative solutions to the problems of material production. Soft-core videographers, who sell televised content, develop their own modes of professionalism. Everyday people become casters, who commodify suitable participants for reality programs, or volunteers, who administer local cable television policies. These sponsors and regulators boost media industries’ profits when they commodify and discipline their colleagues, their neighbors, and themselves. Mayer proposes that studies of production acknowledge the changing dynamics of labor to include production workers who identify themselves and their labor with the industry, even as their work remains undervalued or invisible.

About this title

About the Author

Vicki Mayer is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is a co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries and editor of the journal Television and New Media.

Review

“At a moment when production studies and critical media studies are thriving, Below the Line has the potential to not merely refresh academic work of this kind but to reconceive it in a way that is completely attuned to the global political media economy and the complications and paradoxes of labor within it.” (Diane Negra, co-editor of Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture)

“This is an immensely original and innovative book on television production processes and laboring practices long overlooked within media studies until now. This ethnographic and interview-based analysis of groups including television assembly-line workers and soft-core television producers marks a new departure for scholarship into precarious working lives in the global media.” (Angela McRobbie, author of The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change)

“Vicki Mayer’s excellent and extraordinarily thoughtful scholarship, commitment, and political imagination link aspects of the television and media industries that have simply not been considered together so well before.” (Nick Couldry, author of Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0822350076
• ISBN 13: 9780822350071
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256