I just went to a talk about the portrayal of women in shows and movies about the spiritual/supernatural in the late 1990's. Of course, the key text that the scholar was examining was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. the speaker described people's reactions when she told them she was writing about Buffy. Generally, people reacted negatively because so many media scholars (particularly those working in the feminist or cultural studies traditions) write about this one show. This was followed by a justification by the scholar as to why she was writing about this one very-written-about show. It was part of a larger trend that she was examining, it ran for a relatively long time (6 years), and it was fairly popular.
The idea of one show or movie being "better" than another is one that most media scholars, I would expect, would reject. And yet it seems impossible to get away from, because we must write about certain texts and not others. What do we base our selections on?
What we love: My problem with this is it will lead to a few shows/movies being written about a lot while most other shows/movies don't get written about at all. This seems to be happening in film studies. There are a million papers about The Searchers, which isn't a bad thing per se, but shouldn't the number of films that scholars examine and write about be larger? Shouldn't we aspire to examine a diverse set of texts, however one might define diversity? Also, there are plenty of hyper-articulate, passionate, super-smart people who write about texts they love on the internet. They're called fans. Part of the discipline of media scholarship, part of what sets us apart, is our willingness to consider texts that we don't like. Examples: Buffy, The Searchers.
What is popular: I like this strategy, but only if it pertains to films/shows that are popular over a long period of time in multiple cultures, and ideally, independent of the degree to which they were promoted (extra promotion gives some shows/movies an unfair advantage over other shows/movies that would've been just as popular had they had the marketing muscle behind them). If it is desirable to have the deepest knowledge about the greatest number of media experiences, starting with the most popular experiences seems like a good idea. Example: The CSIs and Law & Orders.
What isn't popular: Scholars often take it upon themselves to act as a corrective influence on readers' tastes, trying to counteract the effects of extensive mainstream marketing by "rescuing" lesser known works that are usually aimed at marginalized audiences. This isn't so much about enlarging our collective understanding about how media and culture work as it is about acting is opposition to the private corporate influence on culture. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Queer as Folk, soap operas (yes, I know soaps are "popular" in that they endure much longer than any other text, but it depends on how you look at it. Individual episodes are disposable in the way that news reports are disposable. They don't have a long shelf life).
What did/could/should have an impact on culture: Even if a show wasn't particularly popular, it may have exerted a significant influence on culture or cultural form thereafter. A show like My So-Called Life wasn't very popular when it aired. I doubt that its very popular now (DVD sales and all). And yet its hard to argue with the fact that every teen drama that came after it resembles it in many ways, and that no show that came before it was quite like it. Ditto to Arrested Development, which has spawned a ton of voice-over single camera comedies that might usher out the era of sitcoms (fingers crossed). Its exceptionally difficult to anticipate what shows/movies will have the greatest influence in the future, but if we look back, we can see some unpopular-yet-influential texts. Unfortunately, a lot of scholars try to promote texts they happen to like as highly influential (or possibly influential in the future), but this is just textual boosterism, plain and simple.
Selecting Purely at Random: No one I know of does this, but it strikes me as a good way to go about studying media. If you did it enough, you'd get a pretty good (that is to say, unbiased) sample of all media. Thus, the conclusions you drew about the texts you happened to look at would be generalizable to a much larger portion of all media than any other selection technique. I was going through old TV Guides for some research and kept seeing shows that I knew no scholar or fan was ever going to write about, and this seemed like a shame to me. Again, if we want to form larger theories about how media works, we should broaden our horizons to include texts that don't fit into any of the above categories: the truly mundane texts.
Some texts can fit into more than one of these categories. My next project: taking a survey of texts written about in scholarly journals and those written about on blogs, to see what categories and texts we've got covered and which ones need covering.
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