The framing of value

Introduction

Part and parcel of the television industry’s transition to a digital media landscape in the United States has been an emphasis on learning how to reach participatory audiences. Rather than creating entirely new strategies to engage these audiences, television companies experiment with finding ways to retrofit existing audience retention strategies into digital environments (Caldwell, 2003).

A particularly well-worn strategy has been to use contests to gain and retain audience attention. A popular manifestation is contests designed for digital media environments that allow audiences to ‘talk back’ to media industries through creating user-generated content (UGC). For instance, in 2006, The Simpsons launched a create-your-own-promo ‘Slice-Dice-and-Win’ contest for its ‘Treehouse of Horrors XVII’ episode. Users couldn’t upload any of their own footage but were asked instead to assemble creatively video clips, sounds, transitions, and music from The Simpsons. Similarly, in 2009, ABC’s Lost ran a create-your-own-promo contest, where fans had to create a trailer for the final season of the show. ‘The Ultimate LOST Fan Promo Contest’ was a bit different in that contestants could mix and match their own content with images and sounds from the show. The winner, ‘Convergence’, which aired during an episode of Lost, used images of the show illuminated against various computer-generated black and white rocks that end up on a scale. It is a poetic piece that gets to the root of Lost’s good versus evil theme. The American Movie Classics show Mad Men also ran a contest from late 2008 to early 2009 for the release of season 2 on DVD. Fans were asked to send in a digital video of them reading preselected dialogue from famous characters like Don Draper or Joan Harris. The winner got the chance to appear in a walk-on role during season 4, whereas runners-up received, you guessed it, Mad Men season 2 on DVD.

The ways audiences use increasingly available digital technologies are central to these contests. Furthermore, digital technologies of media creation and distribution are seen as key drivers of empowerment for participatory audiences. ¹ While Clay Shirky (2010) wants us to stop watching television so much to orient the ‘potential’ of our cognitive surplus toward loftier goals, Jeff Howe (2008) suggests that companies harness this potential by designing for a crowdsourced world. As John Durham Peters (2006: 115) notes, ‘We live in the age of conversation. It is one of the unquestioned goods of the moment and a normative ideal of how the media are expected to work in a democracy.’ It is no wonder, then, that ‘in a capitalist society where the persuasion of audiences is essential for profits . . . that communicative styles have evolved from sender-oriented to audience-oriented’ (Peters, 2006: 119).

This article investigates how television companies include various forms of UGC in their textual universe as a way to experiment with harnessing the productive potential of participatory audiences. I focus primarily on user-generated video contests put forth by National Broadcasting Company (NBC) shows Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and The Office. In 2009, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon offered two contests, namely, ‘Jimmy Fallon Dance Challenge’ and ‘Late Night Intern,’ that asked fans to create videos that draw them into the official text of the show. I selected Late Night because the idea of using digital technologies to incorporate audience interactivity was central to the show from the start (Stanley, 2009). Additionally, in 2006, NBC, in conjunction with YouTube, offered its fans a contest, that is, create your own video promotion for The Office. For this contest, you provide the content while NBC gives you the show’s theme song and network tag to use. According to Daisy Whitney of TelevisionWeek (2006), NBC decided to use Apple’s iTunes as a secondary distribution platform for the show based on a belief in the computer-savvy nature of The Office’s audience. Therefore, the show allows us to see the ways television producers who perceive their audiences as computer savvy used digital technologies to engage with these audiences outside of the television text.

Through these contests, I focus on how audiences are positioned as collaborators by a rhetoric of empowerment emanating from the television industry. This rhetoric positively highlights interactive involvement and creativity and is part and parcel of the discursive surround for digital technologies. I pinpoint how important the audience-as-collaborator framing is, as it is increasingly central to how television producers imagine the industry–audience relationship.

I argue that investigating these contests highlights the importance of value, as television companies must find ways to translate between different regimes of value, meaning ‘audience empowerment’ must make sense within a range of industrial and audience logics. These contests work only when value makes sense for all parties involved. Television producers are central to this process, as they define user roles and expectations, and they do so through the use of a rhetoric of empowerment.

Furthermore, an emphasis on how technologies are framed in public discourse points to the importance of rhetorical messages in our contemporary media landscape as television producers try to shape what active audiences do with digital technologies. Thus, I focus less on the technologies used by television and more on the official framing of these technologies and how they should be used. It is through translations of value framed by a rhetoric of empowerment that the television industry experiments with mapping itself onto the everyday lives of digital, participatory audiences.

Interactive involvement

Jimmy Fallon’s first appearance as host of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon didn’t occur on March 2, 2009, the day of the first live-to-tape broadcast on NBC. It happened many months before that, and it happened on the Internet. On December 8, 2008, Fallon’s first ‘Video Blog’ went live at Latenightwithjimmyfallon.com. These online videos – a new one appearing almost every weekday until the show went live on TV – were used as a platform to introduce the audience to Fallon, understand the transition from former host Conan O’Brien to Fallon, and introduce us to his cast of players like cohost Steve Higgins and The Roots, his house band.

In this first installment, standing in the yet-to-be-complete Studio 6B, dressed in gray T-shirt pulled over a long-sleeve shirt, Fallon gives off the kind of collegial charm and youthfulness seemingly appropriate for a late night college-aged demographic. In the process of showing off his set, Fallon sets the tone for the show when, addressing the camera, he says, ‘as soon as we see it, you see it, and we want to hear what you think’ (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2008a). Not only do these videos act as promotion for the show as they circulate through social media platforms, but they are also Fallon’s first chance to frame his relationship to the audience. In the video, Fallon further explains how he will relate to the audience by pointing out what these preshow video blogs are for:

. . . that is where the internet comes in, that's where you come in. You see this thing over here that says ‘Ask Jimmy’? Click on that and, uh, send me a video, send me an email, send me a question, complaint, concern, anything and we’ll answer them here on the blog every week. (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2008a)

It is important to note that Fallon followed through on his promise – the show is very dynamic and interactive. It is clear Fallon is hailing audience members for these videos as collaborators. At least in some small way, the voice of his audience is being heard and directly responded to. Fallon even let the audience of his video blogs pick the official logo for the show. To understand this discourse of audience as collaborator, I need to situate what Late Night is doing within a larger discussion about digital interactive involvement.

A key assumption about digital media is that it offers a ‘deeper’ experience for the user compared with traditional ‘lean back’ forms like television (Noff, 2012). We are in an ‘experience era’ in which we reportedly ‘want to touch and feel,’ and ‘don’t want to sit back anymore’ ( Fora.tv, 2012). It is up to the media producers to ‘enrich and deepen’ this experience for users ( Fora.tv, 2012).

Increasingly, we are asked by the media industries to share our point of view, contribute our opinion, and accept media (ostensibly) on our terms. Note, for instance, the YouTube–Canon funded ‘Project Imagin8tion’ where Ron Howard, the popular Hollywood director, chose 8 photographs from the 96,262 sent to YouTube.com/Imagination. Bryce Howard, his daughter, then directed a short film based on the inspiration she received from the contributors’ photos. Now more than ever, the media now seen to be our media, or even my media.

This type of technologically enabled digital interactivity can be defined as any activity ‘in which the text or its content is affected, resequenced, altered, customized, or re-narrated’ by an outside source, namely, the users (Cover, 2006: 140). This type of interactivity is championed as giving users the feeling that they can act upon their world via engagement across space. This has led to what, some say, is a collapse of the space between production and consumption.

The promotion of audience empowerment alongside interactive technologies is believed to foster a ‘greater interest by audiences to change, alter and manipulate’ texts (Cover, 2006: 140). This ability for users to engage with texts offers, according to Tim O’Reilly, a rich user experience (O’Reilly, 2004).

This ‘rich user experience’ is often compared positively to mass media technologies like television. In The Control Revolution, Andrew Shapiro positively compares the ‘many-to-many interactivity’ of the Internet to mass media where audiences cannot speak back (Shapiro, 1999: 15). The active–passive binary is a fairly common trope concerning the relationship of television to the Internet, where the TV is a weak object, and the Internet, being an interactive device, offers ‘a more demanding activity’ (Wellman, 2002: 231).

However, reception and cultural studies scholars have gone to lengths to show that television is not inherently a passive medium (Fiske, 1987; Hartley, 1999; Morley, 1992). Audiences have historically done lots of activities with and through a television text from writing fan letters to chatting with friends about a particular show.

The veracity of the active versus passive debate aside, a discourse that positively inflects interactive involvement is peddled by the television industry today to gain and retain audience attention in a digital media landscape. Television wants your digital participation, needs your conversation, and frames it as an unqualified good. In addition, indeed, the discourse of digital interactive involvement that is central to the early blog posts for Late Show with Jimmy Fallon is carried over into the show. The Webby Awards honored Fallon as the 2009 Webby Person of the Year for his ‘enthusiastic embrace of the Internet to connect with his fans’ (Webby Awards, 2010). In addition, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon won the 2009 and 2010 Emmys for Best Creative Achievement in Interactive Non-Fiction for ‘efforts to bridge the gap between Web and television via blogs, videos and other experiments in engaging audiences’ (Miller, 2010).

Late Night also has roots in the technology world; Gavin Purcell, who ran Attack of the Show on the technology and video game–friendly G4 channel, coproduced it. In addition, Fallon updated his video blog from CES 2009 – CNET’s big consumer electronics conference – while also doing an interview with Engadget’s (a popular technology blog) Joshua Topolsky, who would later not so coincidentally do technology updates on Late Night. Jimmy also interviewed Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation – a popular video podcast – on his January 20, 2009, video blog. He tells them ‘we are still experimenting on how to get interactive with our audiences and our fans,’ to which Rose responds, ‘the great thing is that you are having a conversation with them’ (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2008c). Jimmy responds that ‘there is a lot more positive people who are just like, just want to be part of building something, or making something, or having input in something’ (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2008c).

This preshow Internet media blitz operates as a grand act of contextualization. By associating with already known luminaries of the digital realm, Late Night positions itself in line with an already called-into-existence audience or a public in the third sense that Michael Warner discusses in Publics and Counterpublics, ‘[a] public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation’ (2005: 66). This public is not present in the physical sense; neither is it temporally and spatially situated public of the in-studio television audience, nor is it totally identical or concomitant with the situated audience at home. It is diffuse in terms of space and time interconnected by these technologies of transmission and exhibition that allow this public to come into existence and interact with others in the bounded network. The particular features of this public frame relationships with the show in particular ways, calling into existence the way this show will be positioned in public discourse.

The idea of the interactive involvement is also featured as part of the live broadcast. Fallon always has a computer at his desk and performs skits like ‘#LateNightHashTags’. In this skit, Fallon creates a #Hashtag (the metatags on Twitter that identify topic trends) for #whydonttheymakethat, which he then posts to Twitter. His followers tweet back replies like ‘eyebrow toupees’ or ‘wine in pouches, like Capri Sun for grownups’. After introducing the skit, Fallon says, ‘So tune in, you might see one of your tweets on the show!’

In the same vein, Late Night ran fan video contests that offered a more involved form of audience creativity. On March 12, 2009, Fallon introduced the ‘Jimmy Fallon Dance Challenge,’ which asked fans of the show to create videos in the hope of having them – both the videos and the participants – appear on the show. For the contest, Fallon sets the stage by talking about how artists and everyday people are using YouTube to popularize dance moves like Soulja Boy’s ‘Crank Dat’ or ‘GSBoyz’ ‘Stanky Legg’ (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2009a). He wants to join the fray by creating his own dance for Late Night. Using a song created by members of The Roots and Late Night staff writer Diallo Riddle, Fallon opens up the contest to the audience:

You ready to get your dance on? Now it is up to you guys to show us what the Late Night dance is . . . I have no idea what it could be, can't wait to see what you people come up with . . . we saw what these guy can do with this [in studio audience members], we want to see what you guys can do with this! (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2009a)

On 5 August 2009, Fallon also introduced the ‘Late Night Intern Contest’. For this contest, Fallon was looking for a fan of the show to be a new type of intern. Although he states that they already have many college interns working on the show, he wants someone to be a correspondent that lets the home viewer learn about college life. Like the Dance Contest, fans were asked to send in videos where they do something creative to prove that they should be the Late Night intern. Late Night made an instructional video aimed at explaining the contest, setting expectations, and, of course, creating laughs:

Welcome to the LNJF Intern Contest, this will be an exciting opportunity for just the right person, is that person you? The LNJF intern must be responsible, energetic, fun, plugged in to the world around them, outgoing, creative and positive. Now that you know what we're looking for, we thought you might also like you know what we're not looking for: you should not be a slacker, someone who passes out in public, fight instigation guy, unsolicited massage guy, the girl who cries too much, the all-night library girl, or the Juicy sweatpants girl. You should not be: the campus weed dealer, the guy who wears pajama bottoms and flip flops to class, or the guy with the acoustic guitar on your floor, and as always, no Lebowski quoters. We are looking for someone who is enthusiastic for working hard for no monetary reward. But if you win, you'll be on television, the best reward of all! So be a Late Night intern, send in your videos today! (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2009b)

In the collapse of space between producer and consumer roles, a particular type of immediacy is created between the text and audience. According to Bolter and Grusin, designers see a sense of immediacy produced through interactivity that draws users closer to the text (2001: 28). What is most important here is this collapse of space and how this frames a relationship with fans as a type of interactive, loose collaboration.

Yet, while there is something new about the way digital technologies are being incorporated into Late Night and the way they address their audience as a tech-savvy public, it all feels fairly standard for the talk show format. While scripted, prerecorded shows like Mad Men occasionally integrate fans as walk-on actors into the show, late night television programming has always been very audience friendly. Shows like Late Show with David Letterman have used the live audience in skits like ‘Know Your Cuts of Meat’. What makes late night shows like Late Night or The Colbert Report different is how they utilize and integrate diffuse digital audiences. For instance, the Jimmy Fallon Dance Contest’s introduction, the on-air Contest progress reports, showing the winning submission on air, and inviting the choreographers to the studio all become content for the show. In this way, both the makers of the video and the video itself are literally drawn into the official text of the show.

Although network television shows are deeply invested in attracting eyeballs, they are equally, and relatedly, invested in attracting advertiser dollars. In a media landscape where consumers have a lot of choice and routinely skip past traditional commercial spots, television producers and advertisers seek ways to reaffirm the historical network of association between television and advertising. They do this, in part, by returning to time-tested practices like product integration. As part of the Intern Contest, the winning contestant, Jason – cleverly wearing the same ‘normal guy’ authentically rumpled shirt and jeans outfit he wore during his winning submission video – appeared on the show to talk about his experience. During his visit, he was awarded free Late Night T-shirts to pass out to friends, a new Mac Book Pro, and a Canon Vixia HF20 digital camera. In addition, during the interview, Fallon hit the nail maybe a bit too precisely on the head when he told Jason, ‘Nothing comes for free, you know, even this free stuff doesn’t come for free. We’re going to get you started working right now’. His assignment? Go out into New York and find everyone in the crowd a free doughnut. He performs this task admirably, returning at the end of the show with an arm full of prominently displayed Dunkin Doughnuts that he and Fallon pass out to the crowd. This contest works well with contemporary branding practices that emphasize a movement toward customization for the consumer, going where the consumer is, folding products into content, and an intimacy and engagement with brands.

A rhetoric of empowerment and creativity

An emerging rule of thumb in the fragmented, convergent, brand-centric cultural industries today is connecting to a consumer in a meaningful way across a variety of platforms. In relation to the television industry, John Caldwell states that there is leakiness to this flow back and forth between the TV and the Internet. To Caldwell, companies try to control this multi-device flow by programming a degree of ‘stickiness’ to digital endeavors (2003: 139). The concept of stickiness is echoed in industrial literature about audience retention when, for instance, Alex Alexander says that for Web sites ‘to be sticky, they need to have three general characteristics: They should be interactive, dynamic, and personal’ (Alexander, 2001). Like Late Night, NBC’s The Office emphasized interactive involvement as a way to create audience loyalty and stickiness.

On June 26, 2006, NBC launched a contest for fans to make video promotions for The Office, an adaptation of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) show of the same name. The genre mixing show, shot in a faux-documentary style, revolves around the life and times of the employees at the Dunder Mifflin Inc. paper supply company. Over the space of a month, 347 videos were submitted for the contest and 3321 people applied to be part of the contest’s YouTube group. ² The breadth of these videos is impressive, ranging from computer graphics to live action, from simple paper animation to Claymation. The winning video, by Elliot Diviney of Plymouth, Minnesota, shows a ‘typical’ corporate office where an employee is bouncing a rubber band ball off the wall. The ball accidentally bounces into another worker’s cubicle who then takes out a substantially larger ball, tosses it back, where it makes a large clatter offscreen while the name of the show and NBC logo appear. This video, which is quite funny, takes its humor from the everyday objects that are part of corporate office culture. In many ways, this promotional contest allowed people to take experiences from their everyday, mundane corporate office lives – mediated by knowledge of the genre and style of The Office – and do something creative with it.

The promotion itself could only be 20 s long. Video makers could not use any found footage from the show and were only able to use its theme song and the network logo. NBC suggests that this is to make you more creative to show something of yourself. This address can be seen as a rhetoric of empowerment when clearly crystallized in NBC’s own promotion for the contest. To help facilitate video production by amateurs, NBC uploaded an instructional video on YouTube. In this video, Bill, the usual promo guy for The Office, is cleaning out his office because he has been fired and ‘you’ have been hired. He explains the nature of the contest and its rules:

Hi, my name's Bill, I usually do the promos for The Office. So why is NBC having a You Do the Promos contest? Oh, I don't know . . . apparently somebody thinks you can do just as good of a job as I can. Hey, I got an idea for a contest, how about I take a video of me doing your job and send it to your boss? Hey look at me, I can sweep!

Just click the link at the bottom of the page that will take you to NBC.com for all the rules and registration and everything else you need to know to steal my job. You can also get the graphics and the only music you can use, or use no music at all. Your promo has to be exactly 20 seconds long and you have to upload it here at YouTube by July 21st.

Still think it’s easy? Try doing it without using any footage from the show. That’s mine. You have to shoot it yourself, so be creative. Maybe it’s something from your office or Dwight as a boy or you reenact a scene from the show. Just remember, it may seem funny on TV, but sneaking into your boss’s office and leaving a present on his carpet gets you fired in real life. ³

In this video about video making, we get a wide range of information about the relationship this video tries to articulate with an audience. First, the incompetence of ‘official’ employees is foregrounded because ‘somebody’ (presumably the NBC brass) thinks that fans can do the job just as well as paid employees like Bill. This message is reinforced by the mise-en-scène where Bill, in casual dress, clears out his desk, emptying his possessions into a box. This visual imagery rhetorically reinforces the message by drawing on this familiar representation and what it signifies.

Wrapped up in this address is this dynamic between the authority of business leaders and the creativity ‘you’ possess. While the higher ups at NBC still fulfill functions you presumably cannot, they bequeath onto you this opportunity to show how creative you can be on the big stage of television. This message is enhanced by juxtaposing your mundane real job, which Bill identifies as ‘sweeping the workplace’, with this creativity you have inside you.

The persuasive strength of the address is achieved by articulating creativity and pleasure to production – it is not enough to just watch the shows you love, you have to get involved in some way. This rhetoric suggests that there is always something more than the televised text, that is, to really understand the universe of The Office you have to become involved in some way. In addition, as a rhetoric of empowerment and creativity would suggest, Bill’s address hinges significantly on making the audience feel as if it has some power over the meanings and directions of the text. This empowerment takes the form of telling your story or giving your unique take in a way that shows your abilities. You have the chance to have your work shown during the live broadcast of the show and placed within The Office canon (or at least among its official paratexts).

Digitally interactive involvement here is seen as not just being about pointing and clicking, it is also undergirded by the psychological notion of empowerment. The implication is that, by interacting, the consumer gains some measure of power and control. Thus, how NBC addresses its audiences is as important as the platforms and technologies it uses. To say this is to acknowledge that technologies have no inherent use and are open to the flexibility of social protocols. I call NBC’s audience address a rhetoric of empowerment to put an emphasis on the persuasive quality of the message. In this case, there are many ways for audiences to use digital technologies, while NBC actively pursues avenues for audiences to embrace a certain vision of empowerment and creativity within the ambit of NBC.

I would further argue that a rhetoric of empowerment has become a fundamental feature of all media industry modes of address, as media companies move from managing employees to managing audiences as de facto employees. Because of increased competition over audience attention, addressing audiences as active is important to how the cultural industries work. Audiences with a bewildering amount of choice at their fingertips must be persuaded to stay, play, and engage, in order for them to invest themselves over the long term. Thus, one could see how a rhetoric of empowerment is a key feature of all digital media interaction. This rhetoric crisscrosses wide ranges of society, from industrial compounds to Internet start-ups to suburban bedrooms. Yet, we must acknowledge that this empowerment is not in the ether, swirling around like some zeitgeist of the times. Rather, it is something that is put into practice through the work of television companies for specific reasons and goals.

The question to ask here is how are these empowerment strategies realized? What do the different actors get from participating? From the perspective of the producers and distributors of TV shows like The Office, a central value present in contests is their ability to generate, if not free, then cheap labor. Your play is their work, so to speak. Indeed, a central contemporary concern is on how work and play are understood in relation to free labor. Tiziana Terranova says that free labor is ‘a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies’ (2000: 33). She sees this free labor as existing in a wide variety of practices, such as building Web sites, modifying software, engaging in mailing lists, message boards, etc. She defines free labor as ‘the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced at the same time often shamelessly exploited’ (2000: 37). For my purposes, I would like to frame what constitutes work narrowly as the translation of labor into monetary compensation. Too often what people are and are not paid for is incredibly important when trying to understand how opportunities and power are constituted. That these television shows can get hundreds of people with varying goals and reasons to spend their time making promotions for no monetary compensation is important.

What ties notions of free labor together across the cultural industries is a discourse of audiences as collaborators centered on creativity and empowerment. For instance, Bill, the ‘official’ promo guy for The Office, positively inflects what it means to be a fan and empowers the participants of the contest to imagine that they could do the same job. NBC and The Office use a rhetoric of empowerment to tell audiences that their ideas are worthy of merit and, if they win the contest, they are potentially worthy of broadcast. Why not? Many people who watch The Office presumably have an intimate knowledge of the show and probably have an equally sophisticated understanding of genre and narrative structure from having watched years or even decades of television. An implication of Bill’s rhetoric is that the difference between the amateur who owns inexpensive home editing software and the expert who cuts promotions for a living is relatively marginal. There are, in fact, lots of people who could do what ‘Bill’ does for a living. In a sense, they could do it better because, ideally, their motivation comes from a nonmarket source of pleasure. The goal of this contest is to set up an instance where the pleasure of playing with and augmenting texts can be translated into a productive kind of industrial work.

In Distinction (1984), Pierre Bourdieu examined the interplay of economic, cultural, and social capital in French society, emphasizing the interchangeability of these forms and their uneven distribution among individuals and groups in society. Thus, social capital overlaps with and finds equivalence in economic capital or, rather, they are not incomparable entities. The contests mentioned above work when they create equivalence between various forms of capital. Indeed, part of the reason social and monetary capital are translatable is because of the fluidity of the categories of work and play.

To Terranova, what happens in cultural economies is the channeling of labor into ‘monetary flows and its structuration within capitalists business practices’ (2000: 39). This does not mean human creativity is reduced to a capitalist imperative nor does it suggest that actions are determined by the base of capitalist production. Yet, it does highlight how cultural industries are deeply invested in materially and rhetorically opening up opportunities for consumers, while trying to build certain tendencies into those opportunities that always loop the circulation back through business market imperatives.

It is worth pointing out that The Office and NBC get free promotion not only in the form of the videos themselves but also in the way knowledge of this contest circulates among a network of fans who in turn help to translate the pleasure and play of fandom into productive work. For instance, The Office contest generated a considerable amount of attention among YouTube users and fans on unofficial The Office fan pages. On fan sites like LifeInTheOffice.com and OfficeTally.com, the contest was posted on the main page. On both sites, fans asked if others had heard of the contest, said that they thought it looked cool, and asked other fans to pass it along. This circulation not only increased the ambit of both The Office and NBC’s branded image (and a willingness to work with fans) but also increased awareness of a more interactive engagement with audiences as fans.

On the other side of the coin, we must ask about the value participants receive from these contests. If we have already stated that there is no monetary value in these contests, what are the personal, psychological, or social equivalence that can be made between these contests and audiences?

In Buying In (2008), Rob Walker makes an intriguing discovery while investigating contemporary word-of-mouth marketing campaigns: the people who sign up to be covert marketers of Al Fresco sausages or Crest toothpaste don’t mind that they don’t get paid. They put in hours of work each week, casually chatting up people on the street about their product and organizing parties around certain brands. In the process of doing all this, Walker finds that most of them don’t even collect the prizes they win while working for stealth word-of-mouth firms like BzzAgent. In fact, most of them ‘just wanted to be part of something’ bigger than themselves and relished the fact that they got their hands on consumer goods before their friends (2008: 188). Their motivations weren’t monetary; they were personal and social.

This type of thinking is an inroad into understanding why audiences sign up for these types of contests. It could be that contestants are seeking 15 min of fame. The discourses of fame, stardom, and ‘getting noticed’ are deeply connected to the present moment of online video making (Burgess and Green, 2009: 24–25). Television, for all of its characterizations as an old medium, still seems to be a cultural legitimate institution, that is, ‘You were on TV?’ It could also be that contestants are fans and want to interact or be part of the branded media they love (Arvidsson, 2006: 13).

In the case of The Office contest, how one should approach the social value of exchange is by being open to interpretation. It is hard to make a clear distinction between fans and the aspiring professionals. Kris Van Nest, a self-described ‘actor/host/precision driver’, displays his contest entry on his Web site and demo reel, while others, like Ronin at OfficeTally.com, simply want you to check out their video and are glad people liked it. ⁴ Maybe this variedness is the point when thinking about how value translates between economic, psychological, and social realms; consumption is so deeply embedded in our everyday lives that there is a fluidity between economic and social value because we think through and with the objects around us. ⁵ For example, Amanda Zweerink and Sarah Gatson, in their work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer Web sites and users, notice that ‘people have adapted the advertising purpose of the site itself and colonized it as a point of entry for face-to-face socializing, networking, and other community-building activities’ (2002: 240). Here, Buffy fans are playing with resources of the show and refashioning them to suit their own needs and desires. They are using the material and social conditions of the site through which to think, feel, and relate.

What this points out, to me, is not that Buffy fans are taking control of the meaning of the text. Rather, that media forms work not because we ingest the ‘preferred’ meaning of a media text but, rather, that we do something with it at all. By actively engaging with a media text and drawing it into our everyday lives, we create avenues for equivalences in value to take place.

In these equivalences, we find ‘conversation’ happening on industrial terms ‘in the service of the shifting patterns of global capital’ (McPherson, 2006: 207). To Jodi Dean, these forms of networked communication fit within a ‘contemporary ideological formation of communicative capitalism [that] fetishizes speech, opinion, and participation’ (2009: 17). Thus, forms of networked participation from online political debates to participating in, say, user-generated contests, reinforce the individualizing force of neoliberalism rather than strengthening communal ties.

In the discussion above, I hope to have shown that there is a range of logics at work in these contests. The meaning and values that contestants, advertisers, and/or television producers ascribe to these contests do not have to be the same, provided they are translated successfully across each group. In this way, what these contests mean to various participants is open and flexible as long as, from the perspective of NBC, it can be productively fed back into the company’s goals. That these motivations are multiple does not matter to NBC as long as they do not disrupt the translation of social or psychological value into economic value.

Conclusion

The different ways that the Late Show and The Office gain value from these contests – as promotion, as free labor, as ad hoc focus groups, as content, and as audience retention – are characterized by the ability to translate between work and play. To facilitate this translation, a rhetoric of consumer empowerment on the cultural industries’ terms is utilized, one that leaves the relationships with advertisers and audiences intact. In a moment of seeming instability of television, where audiences are both rhetorically empowered and unruly in their mobility, what better way to find the mobile consumer then to ask them to contribute?

An article focusing on how television companies create and shape avenues of engagement with participatory audiences will invariably intersect with academic questions about the potentials of digital technologies. One could also argue that one-off contests come and go and do not have considerable and lasting influence. Yet, I argue that these contests are specific articulations, concrete instances of theories and methods of reaching the audience in practice, where we start to see their effect in the aggregate. What I find instructive is how television companies successfully continue to use promotional practices – retrofitted to the possibility of digital media – to engage the added influences of the audience. Television is finding outlets for this energy, this creative surplus. Thus, it seems that creativity has been brought into the logic of the industry in a way that shapes its possibilities in highly sophisticated ways. Viewed in this light, as Joseph Turow says, ‘the rhetoric of consumer power begins to lose credibility’ (2013: 3).

It is instructive to remember that, as the shape of television transforms, as it mutates in relation to changing environments, it still holds a great deal of monetary and cultural power. I believe that acknowledging this helps when thinking about how it may deflate the unrestrained buoyancy of an industrially evoked rhetoric of empowerment without reducing human creativity before the fact to simple market imperatives. My goal is not to reduce human creativity to industrial logics but to acknowledge that the discourse of collaboration peddled by the cultural industries today is so prevalent and sophisticated that we need to take a step back and interrogate these claims.

In the instance of these contests then, audience empowerment looks more like Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing (2008) than Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence (1997). This change in emphasis brings the idea of audience control back into focus and complicates the conversation about empowerment. If one were to imagine a walled city, market-driven consumer empowerment is about breaking through the outer walls and milling about the courtyard. As this metaphor implies, the inner-walled sanctuary remains intact. To me, any industry-led rhetoric of empowerment is undercut in every instance by the realities of intellectual property. At the end of the day, all creative labor remains in the ‘rightful’ hands of the producer. Through interactive contests, the audiences end up where television companies wanted them to be all along, within the porous walls of its walled city. In this light, the participatory audiences we see in these contests are not in control per se; rather, they are already working inside of what John Durham Peters calls the ‘cold righteousness of dialogism,’ a ‘moral tyranny’ of the call to the other to interact on a subject’s pregiven term (1999: 159).