Interview Series: The Future of Cultural Production: Knowledge, Narrative, and Conceptual Media | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak

How do your studies interpret the power relations constructed within the writer–audience–platform triangle on social media, and how do these dynamics transform meaning-making processes?

My research is still in an embryonic stage, so I haven’t ventured far enough to make novel claims about power relationalities. What work I have done has suggested that there are, first, benefits to conducting aesthetic analyses of social media (which is so far a rarer approach amongst academics) and, second, that identity erupts at the aesthetic level of internet video on social media, and identity might be thought of as an expression of subjectivity that arises where power cathects. Understanding authorship on social media is, in my view, an extension of a problem with reconciling the contradictory nature of subjectivity (for all the baggage that comes defining various forms of subjectivity) with the emotional element of engaging with art at all.

When authorship was in vogue in literary and film studies circles, the conversation stalled out when it reached a particular series of impasses. Those who confidently advanced the position that there was a discernible, singular authorial figure were largely driven by neo-Romanticist impulses and myths. Auteur theorists like Andrew Sarris, for example, made it their aim to argue for the genius of the author in their evaluations of films. Because value judgments are arbitrary, it wasn’t hard to poke holes in the way these arguments were extrapolated into generalizations about the nature of creative production write large. Some in what we might think of as the poststructuralist strain of thought argued for decentering the author completely to accommodate the sociopolitical and economic forces that beget the author. For thinkers like Roland Barthes, the most fruitful point of analyses was the point of reception—so the audience point in the triangle you mentioned. At the same time, author-centric positions weren’t incompatible with an admittedly more tenable historicist argument that’s maddeningly simple: yeah, the author is a product of their context, and context is made up of individuals too.

I think what’s at stake with reviving and attempting to resolve those debates now is the right that any individual human has over their work, their identities, and the aesthetic vocabularies they share with other people. That conversation is a lot more fraught when so much of our direct engagement with media is monopolized by corporate conglomerates’ platforms. It’s all well and good to say that the author is irrelevant and all that matters is the audience’s reception of a work, but to say so when Netflix, Warner Bros. etc. are extracting so much from their workers without adequate compensation might be to forfeit creative producers’ quality of life, or even the base fact that they were involved in a project at all. Whose signature survives to the point of reception is a political one. What shape the point of reception takes is itself sculpted by the flow of capital.

In your master’s thesis, you explore the concept of “authorship on social media.” How do you define this notion, and in what ways does it intersect with or challenge classical authorship theories?

Authorship is a concept that changes definitionally based on the context in which we place it. For the purposes of this interview, it’s probably easiest to think of authorship as a guiding role in the production of a work on social media.

This isn’t a challenge to established theories of authorship, really. Modes of creative production on social media are so vast that we could reasonably verify almost every theory of authorship that’s been published so far anyway. Some forms of creative production really are solitary (think of a diary) and some are collaborative (think of blockbuster filmmaking) and some are communal (think of myths that are so old and endemic they’re attributed to cultures rather than individuals). Something like the Nyan Cat video seems to fit into all three of those tracks. Its status as a shared, almost mythological, text belonging to the commons of the internet is one that it accrued through time. Someone much smarter than me may be able to corral this galactic array of modes into one neat label. I cannot. My goal is to lean into the irreconcilable and fecund contradictions in the way we think about authorship, because that’s the only way to adapt. My aim is to understand more about the idiosyncrasies of creative producership from moment to moment and case to case.

In your work, you frequently emphasize the role of audience participation. How does participation reshape creative authority and the position of the author?

Maybe negatively! That’s my cross to bear. Participation is lauded by the admirable heirs of cultural studies scholar Henry Jenkins as a marker of the democratization of creative authority and creative production. I’m skeptical that audience participation has that effect. Or at least, where authority over textual interpretation might be more democratized with increased participation, what does not decentralize, diminish, or otherwise disperse is the expectation that the author is attached to the text for the rest of the author’s life and for the rest of the text’s. I do think there is a nascent expectation that authors recognize they are accountable to their audiences in a way that doesn’t apply in the inverse. Audiences do not have to present as consistent across all the comments they leave on a YouTube video, but a YouTuber must account for inconsistencies in their own corpuses. I think authorship on social media involves a pre- emptive awareness of how one’s work will be received that works almost like writing with someone looming over your shoulder might work.

How does content production in digital culture reshape academic and cultural authority? And how do you build an intellectual bridge between your academic publications and the texts you produce for popular platforms? Do you think the circulation of academic knowledge on social media leads to the democratization of knowledge, or does it risk contributing to its simplification and superficiality? How does this process affect academic authority?

This is a big question that I am not equipped to answer. Nobody with any degree of awareness trusts anything they find online anymore. Nobody outside the academy trusts academics. But that might be because the neoliberal university’s promise that it could serve as a channel for class mobility has clearly been broken, digital culture or no. Everyone wants to dip their oar into humanities work too, so I don’t come to most interactions thinking anyone in or out of the university believes I have any authority over the things I research. People think film studies is woo woo. Where humanities scholars stumble is in trying to justify themselves in the face of what is almost hostility. They assume that explaining the value of their work to the public will work. But people have access to a seemingly infinite library of convincing arguments about media already, and those arguments are presented as well-researched.

That’s not a democratization of knowledge, really. The public’s current lack of trust in academic authority might signal a decentralization of what was previously a hierarchy of expertise. That is not necessarily the same as democratization. Even anarchist philosophy, with its refusal of unjust hierarchies, values expertise. Nothing online is trustworthy, but online is also the only place people go to do their research… You can see I’m pessimistic on this issue.

As for how I personally try to bridge the gap, all I can do is tell people why I care about something and try not to hide myself from the argument. Theory is dense to the point of inscrutability for many people. That’s a point of frustration for readers who consider themselves intelligent. It’s almost like people take it personally when they read something by an academic and it takes work to parse out. They want to find the human behind the work. When I’m bridge building, my aim is to retain my personality and the precision (sometimes obfuscation) of academic writing. Hopefully, I present to the intelligent kind of reader as neighbourly. If I’m successful, the intelligent reader will think, “ah, this person seems interested in the material, and it’s sort of confusing for me, but if she can do it, maybe I can too.”

The answer to both of these questions is probably just “with humility.” If you want to share your work with an apathetic world without going mad, you have to shelve your pride. Many people do not care about what you think. You share in the hopes of finding those who do.

When you consider YouTube and similar platforms not only as spaces of production but also as research objects, what structural and cultural dynamics stand out most to you?

Phewf! This is a hard question. If you’re referring to the dynamics between creators, I’m very interested in creators that use their work to address other creators across the discrete bounds of a single video or post. It’s as if we’re treating a corpus of videos like a single room that people can have live discussions within, and that liveness survives over time.

I interviewed a scholar named Nicola Watson years ago. She studies authors’ house museums. She spoke a bit about the author’s chair at their writing desk, which she says becomes (in these museums) a “negative space” that the reader-tourist’s body “slips along.” What I’m thinking through right now is the possibility that this dynamic is replicated on Twitch streams. Twitch streamers are incredibly lazy about their production. They’ll get out of their chairs and leave their cameras on as they do. Even v-tubers, who only appear on stream through their avatars, will have a chair that is similarly left empty when the streamer gets out of their desk. Viewers keep watching! I keep watching! That dynamic is interesting to me. Clearly, the streamer doesn’t turn the camera off for a reason, partly to continue to generate revenue; viewers will not keep watching if they think the stream is paused or the streamer isn’t around. That empty chair signals something interesting. It’s a lucrative, negative space, somehow.

In the context of cinema, how do you think the relationship between “authorial intention” and “audience interpretation” has changed in the age of social media? How do your studies on horror cinema, emotions, the body, and viewer experience help you understand this transformation?

You flatter me in assuming that my own creative corpus was produced with any degree of holism in mind. I tripped into my research on horror cinema, truth be told. I wrote an early draft of a paper for a grad class, my professor said some very kind things about it and encouraged me to pursue publication, and here we are. Everything we do as writers, researchers, creators, etc. feeds into every other aspect of our knowledge base, certainly. I suppose that writing on horror has challenged me to think from a somatic vantage point in a way that digital research rarely does. Digital media might bring us out of the somatic, even when we’re trying to ground ourselves in it. I was actually at a talk recently where a few social scientists had tried to engage research participants in thinking phenomenologically about their own data subjectivities.

They had to think about how much time they spent on their screens and journal about it. But there was one detail these researchers neglected to include in the study, and that’s what instruments their participants were encouraged to use. Were they journalling on paper, or Google Drive? Were the participants all using laptops, desktop computers, tablets, their phones, or something else? Were all of the participants able-bodied? These details seem deeply important for a study about data subjectivity in my view. But where was the discussion about the way the body was used as these people were reflecting on the separation of their bodies from digital media?

Cinema as a concept had already transformed completely from its roots long before the internet took hold. Maxim Gorky’s famous account of watching a movie for the first time paints a picture of a guy sucked into an uncanny otherworld populated by shadow people. No film goer in the 1980s would describe a film that way. That naturalization happened long before social media was bound to most facets of everyday life. This isn’t a satisfying answer, and I haven’t thought about this closely enough to cite any of my forebearers properly, but it seems that the cinematic experience has been folded into every other experience that can occur on digital platforms. I watched the leaked version of the new Avatar the Last Airbender movie on TikTok, which is also where I can shop, chat with my friends, and obviously watch short form videos. Meanwhile, going to a movie in theatres now requires accepting that someone is going to scroll on their phone with maximum brightness, or allow their smart watch to light up with notifications. The membranes separating these things have fused.

In your work on Midsommar, you argue that breath becomes central to ritual, emotion, and meaning-making in the film. Does this analysis offer a broader theoretical framework for understanding the sensory and psychological relationship between contemporary horror cinema and its audience? How is this experience reshaped in the digital age?

The people to look to for direction about the wider implications of the politics and mechanics of the breath in cinema are Davina Quinlivan and Jean-Thomas Tremblay. I’m really just building on what they’ve done and drawing their work into the very specific historical moment that Midsommar was caught in. I found that the most popular discussions about Midsommar were restricted to deciding, once and for all, whether its characters’ many ambiguities marked their evilness, their contemptibleness, and more. What’s more, there was some, but not much, attention devoted to the crypto-fascist codices of the community the film is set within.

What I found was that the motif of the breath held all of these qualities together in a perplexing and unsolvable admixture. Dani’s character is very relatable to many viewers at first. This changes over time as she embraces and is embraced by this new nefarious society she finds herself within. I think these black-and-white discussions about whether or not Dani is brainwashed into a cult signposted viewers’ attempts to absolve themselves of initially relating to Dani. If Dani is susceptible to cultish thinking, and we sympathize with Dani (even just in the confines of her terrible relationship), what does that mean for us? Scary! Far better for our own peace of mind to try to outsmart the main character, to chart out exactly how she was psychologically manipulated, than to sit in that anxiety. To avoid holding that ambiguity is to ignore the core structure of the film, though.

Breathing is one of the most useful vehicles for thinking through this conundrum: we can’t see the particulate matter in the air, we can’t see the contents of another person’s breath, so how can we know whether or not keeping the company of another person is to our detriment or not? We can’t. I concluded my article with a note that Midsommar was released shortly before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. People struggled to keep their bubbles closed, as if opening their quarantines to select trusted individuals was adequate for filtering out the diseases carried on the breaths of other human beings. Meanwhile, there was an uptick of racist hate crimes against east Asian people as some North Americans began to view East Asians as representatives of China, and therefore as envoys of the disruption the Pandemic posed to their lives. This was the backdrop against which the George Floyd uprisings were set, and many of us ought to remember that Floyd’ last words, like Eric Garner’s before him, were “I can’t breathe.”

My thinking is that there is an ambiguity in viewing media that reflects the ambiguity of every day life. We can’t escape it, we can’t resolve it. I don’t take that argument to the moral level and make claims about how the viewer’s relationship to the cinema ought to take shape, nor do I have any idea about how to evacuate ambiguity from relationships. That dynamic thrives in the horror genre, though. The thought of being taken in and taking in strangers—that’s terrifying to people. People have strong somatic responses to media: our breath might hitch when the tension is high, we might gasp at a jump scare, and sometimes we might breathe in tandem with a character. This synchronicity is exactly what people want to avoid. It’s also core to media. We are brought into uncomfortable alignment on a somatic level.

As for the way this connects to the digital age, I have no idea. I wrote the article during the digital age. Four years on (I finished drafting it in late 2022) I can only say that the fervor of these adjudicating discussions about the morality of people online has only intensified. People want to feel that the authors they support online are aligned with their own ideals. As much as I am interested in digital media, I am very hesitant to overpromise that digital culture shatters or revolutionizes existing dynamics. At the same time, I am enormously anxious about what I post online. I fear at all turns that people will approach my words the way they approach Dani’s character in Midsommar. Immediacy of access between viewers and authors has never been so immediate as it is now. Sometimes that’s wonderful. Sometimes that’s terrifying.