I stumbled on your blog on Notes, and I am having a great time reading through older posts when I take a break from work during the day. Thanks for your writing.
Anyway, here's one perspective from someone who's working in an English department: academics really want to avoid seeming like elitists. In my discipline, this attitude stems from the long "canon wars" of, largely, the 80s and 90s. Scholars focusing on women's literature, African American literature, and literature from other marginalized groups began arguing that many "artistic" judgments (e.g., "women's literature from the 19th century is sentimental and psychologically shallow") were actually prejudicial and parochial. In many, many cases, I think they were right. Unfortunately, this substantive debate was eventually simplified into the assumption that any kind of artistic judgment, especially of popular art or literature, was potentially classist, racist, misogynistic, and so on. But, as the lit critic Michael Clune argues in his book A Defense of Judgment, this often means that the only method left for valuing art is by how it performs in the marketplace and in consumer culture. To avoid seeming biased or elitist, I think that some academics avoid criticizing things that are very popular. The results, as you suggest, can often be a studied credulity among academics, a refusal to transcend or criticize the dictates of consumer taste. Which is precisely what you'd hope academics would be capable of doing.
& I very much appreciate your insights! Someone else mentioned that many of these institutions are really "for profit" so they too are part of the marketplace and need to appeal to consumer culture.
I've heard of many journalists who are too scared to be even slightly critical of human brands because of the aggressive response from stans--no doubt many colleges find themselves in the same boat.
And Max Martin has surpassed John Lennon, this past March!
This post reminds me of bible classes in my high-school (in Israel), where I had very good teachers and the text was studied as a human artifact, treated as a document created at a time and place with a political agenda, and compared to such other texts as the Tale of Gilgamesh and the law code of Hammurabi as literary precedents/ context. These were much more interesting than the classes that just took the bible to be sacred, transcending/ beyond/ apart of history and our world.
I'm a relatively old-fashioned music historian--I have only ever written about dead musicians, and I do share your puzzlement at how some academics have become tools of corporate branding.
We used to separate historians (who work on the past) from critics (who work on the present), but that distinction is collapsing. The rise of the concept of "haters" means that it's become more difficult for folks to critique artists they love.
At this point, I actively discourage students from doing projects about the artists they stan.
Tools of corporate branding is a great way of putting it. I've written about the intentional effort to consecrate fandom, and a lot of it also feels like an extension of that, professional evangelizing.
I understood the way young kids would be encouraged to write about things that interested them because it was a way to get them engaged, but that was supposed to be a gateway to engaging that way with other content, not just burrow deeper into that obsession, imo.
As a Doctor Who fan since the 1980s, I have long recognized the parallels between fandom and religion. We have canon, and we have schisms, and we have different sects, some of which basically are "in communion" and others of which aren't.
But most of all: we have shared rituals. In TV fandom, the most fundamental ritual is *watching the show*, but there are numerous others in different sects. I found I was calling myself a "lapsed fan" during the three years when there were new episodes but I wasn't watching them.
Doctor Who fandom has its equivalent of the Haj: it is called a "Time Team run": watching every single episode in order, including listening to the audio recordings of the missing episodes (this takes almost 504 hours for the classic series alone), and anyone who's done it is accorded respect as being more expert than those who are not.
I studied a fair bit of comparative religion. One of the biggest questions in the academic field of religion is "what, exactly, is the meaning of the word religion?" What is the definition, for purposes of study? "I know it when I see it" doesn't cut it for an academic field. This field is literally unsure what its field encompasses and what it doesn't.
After looking at a LOT of the edge cases and corner cases, I finally concluded that the best working definition of a religion is "a set of rituals shared by a community". As in "I do this religiously." All else is extra and not necessary. You can have religions wihout beliefs (the official holy book of Discordianism prohibits its followers from believing anything they read).
At that point it became clear that fandoms actually are religions by this definition.
The biggest religions in modern society are probably sports like Monday Night Football. People are so attached to football rituals that otherwise-moral people routinely overlook the high rate of permanent brain damage incurred in football.
It's unsurprising that evangelism is common -- though some religions discourage it, and some more inward-looking fandoms do too. It's unsurprising that some fandoms have turned into massive money-extracting or abuse-of-power operations. The Medieval Catholic Church certainly was both. Basically every form of toxicity which has ever spawned in the history of religion (and there are a lot) can and will show up in fandom if the community doesn't make an active effort to stop it.
Certain fandoms may need a Reformation; some may already have had one. It's interesting that some fandoms used to treat "Word of God" (from the creator of a movie or TV show -- George Lucas, Joss Whedon, etc.) as canon, but no longer do.
Classic Doctor Who fans *never* treated the views of the creators as canon, due to the circumstances of the show's creation, which saw the showrunners replaced very frequently, including the show's actual creators basically ending all creative activity before episode 1 aired in 1963, and their immediate successors, the first producer and script editor, leaving after a year, with the entire main cast leaving within three years, so I found the whole "Word of God" phenomenon odd and was viewing it from the outside.
As for attitudes towards the corporate creators, for Doctor Who it's the BBC and there was a decade when its leadership actively worked to cancel the show; nobody would treat them as authoritative. They're trying to cultivate branding and fandom now, but older fandom doesn't forget the history. And here's the most interesting thing: "new Who fans" are eager to learn from *classic Who fandom*, who are automatically accorded a certain amount of status, above the status of the corporate BBC leadership. I and most of the other older fans weren't expecting that when the flood of new Who fans came in, but it happened automatically. I'm not sure why.
I can see the same sort of complicated relationships with the labels, the artists, the music, and the fandoms in Kpop, where most current Kpop fandom groups want to support the group members against the labels to stop abusing the members (with the Loona purchasing boycott being one example). (And you can find histories utterly parallel to this in historic religions including the Catholic Church.)
One of the biggest problems with traditional religions is that they made actual truth claims (most of which are, well, proven false) and many were very coercive about behavior. One of the nice things about Doctor Who fandom as a religion is that *we all know the Doctor Who stories are made up* -- we may find ethical or moral value in them, and we do, or we may argue heatedly about interpretation, but we know they're made up. And we know they were mostly made up by people for a paycheck who cared about their art but were fundamentally just doing a job -- they aren't plaster saints. And we know there were dozens and dozens of creators, so most people don't idolize any one of them (even if people have favored and disfavored creators).
One of the problems with fandoms built on parasocial relationships is that it can edge back into the plaster saints area of hagiography (Kpop idols are arguably often already there); another is that it can head back into "corporate church" coercive territory (like the medieval Catholic Church or modern Scientology); another is that it can edge back into the territory of truth claims as doctrine. These risks are enough more severe in music fandom and sports fandom than they are in SF fandom that it sort of sets off alerts for us older SF fans.
Because, well, we managed to have schisms and fan wars and toxicity and blow way too much of our money on merch even with a strong understanding that all the stories were made up and that all the creators were falliable careerists. How much worse can it get when you don't have those two certainties?
This debate is as old as the origins of Birmingham School-era cultural studies and accusations some scholars took cultural studies in an overly affirmative direction under the excuse that the audience could decode a more sophisticated, resistánt meaning, while critics of CS implied a new generation of polytech professors were just using it as an excuse to revel in and legitimatise kitsch they personally enjoyed (among other criticisms of CS as a genuine form of praxis). The Fan Studies wave seems to be worse, though, because an element of the original CS oppositional reading re identity politics has long been incorporated directly and knowingly into big box franchise content, thus using this rubric, it is actually moral to claim the latest franchise fan product, and a non-hostile relationship between fans and the company, is good. This underlines the basic problems at the core of CS which fan studies has been unable to evolve from
Nothing new under the sun... It's definitely fascinating to me how many topics we chew on these days have incredibly relevant writing on them from decades ago.
People whose opinion I respect keep telling me that Swift is very talented but I don't hear it. I've tried. What annoys me most is that she gets so much press that she eclipses everyone else. There's lots of incredibly talented people out there making great music that no one's ever heard of because the media is so focused on Swift.
One example that comes to mind is Esperanza Spalding, a once in a generation talent who continues to make great music even though she's dropped off the media's radar.
I see no difference between the TS brand and other corporations such as McDonald's that mass produce a product for mass appeal. There's no artistry there.
And yes, it crowds out so many deserving creatives. The winner takes all approach has flattened culture to a depressing degree.
I don't think it has flattened culture at all, actually.
Pre-Internet, if you owned a store, you HAD to be a generalist. You HAD to cater to the "General Public". Specialization was practically impossible.
Now, being able to reach the entire world, you can find all people interested in your niche. There is a YouTuber who does videos which are basically PowerPoint charts on military economics. He just assumed that not enough people would be interested for this to get enough support to be more than an unpaid avocation. But if you're reaching the *entire world*, the number of people who are interested is.... 547K. Still a tiny fraction of the 1.5-billion-person English-speaking, Internet-accessing population, but it's *half a million subscribers*. It was *not possible* to find such an audience before the Internet; you couldn't get traction for something which only 1 in 3000 people were interested in, because they weren't in the same place.
I went around in the early 90s telling small business owners that they had to (a) go on the Internet and (b) specialize. There is a random hardware store which became the go-to place for cremone bolts in the entire US. Niche interests, specialization, is more supportable than it EVER was before.
This is described as the fragmentation of culture. This is the opposite of the flattening of culture!
To a surprising extent, we all listened to the same stuff in the 1980s because it's all we had *access* to. Madonna and Michael Jackson.
This is complicated now by having to fight the "algorithms" to find the stuff you actually want, but the niches continue to thrive.
A more nuanced analysis which I read recently said that in music the very most popular mass-market are doing fine, and the smallest niches are doing far better than they could have ever done in the 1980s, but the *midlist* has hollowed out.
Frankly, this is true in other industries too: you can be the behemoth Amazon or you can be a specialist tiny online shop selling your one ultra-niche product (whether on Etsy, as an Amazon seller, or with your own website), but there's no room for the old "semi-generalist" department stores, clothing stores, or product lines: if you don't have a niche, you don't have a chance. (This is probably why the Kpop industry is so obsessed with finding a prefab niche for any prefab group they produce.)
It's happened to journalism too. Journalism has a particular problem because the "biggest" names (like NYT or CNN) are actually genuinely bad now, for the most part, which has a corrosive effect on culture. The midlist is gone, as in every industry. The ultra-niche thrives but only the people interested in the niche *look* at it so most people are ignorant.
If the biggest names were paying more attention to the experts in the niches, and amplifying them when it was socially important, we'd be in better shape, but they aren't, they're publishing what can only be called lazy propaganda instead.
The most dramatic and horrifying examples of this come from the *ongoing* Covid-19 pandemic (killing 1000+ Americans a week as I write). Actual experts keep reporting on the ever-worse news of the damage Covid causes, and on the fact that it's airborne, and that it's preventable with respirator masks (N95, P100, etc) and air filters (HEPA, etc.) . It's not hard to find the info on the blogs of the top aerosol scientists.
The facts occasionally bubble up into the dying midlist newspapers and magazines (there's a great Wired article -- "the 60-year-old scientific screwup which helped Covid kill"). The facts never make it into the NYT, which uncritically reproduces dishonest government propaganda about handwashing (which will not help against an airborne viruses) and about vaccines (which are nice but the Covid vaccines are <50% effective). As a result, millions of people have died unnecessarily.
Because vital information isn't getting from the niche to the mass market. The mass market has winner-take-all behavior, and government propagandists can and do use this to lie to the public (which, I suppose, they have always done).
The niche of aerosol experts is spreading accurate information, but it only gets to the people who *bother to look for the niche*.
OK, I started this comment lighthearted but that got really serious. Anyway, here we are.
I stumbled on your blog on Notes, and I am having a great time reading through older posts when I take a break from work during the day. Thanks for your writing.
Anyway, here's one perspective from someone who's working in an English department: academics really want to avoid seeming like elitists. In my discipline, this attitude stems from the long "canon wars" of, largely, the 80s and 90s. Scholars focusing on women's literature, African American literature, and literature from other marginalized groups began arguing that many "artistic" judgments (e.g., "women's literature from the 19th century is sentimental and psychologically shallow") were actually prejudicial and parochial. In many, many cases, I think they were right. Unfortunately, this substantive debate was eventually simplified into the assumption that any kind of artistic judgment, especially of popular art or literature, was potentially classist, racist, misogynistic, and so on. But, as the lit critic Michael Clune argues in his book A Defense of Judgment, this often means that the only method left for valuing art is by how it performs in the marketplace and in consumer culture. To avoid seeming biased or elitist, I think that some academics avoid criticizing things that are very popular. The results, as you suggest, can often be a studied credulity among academics, a refusal to transcend or criticize the dictates of consumer taste. Which is precisely what you'd hope academics would be capable of doing.
& I very much appreciate your insights! Someone else mentioned that many of these institutions are really "for profit" so they too are part of the marketplace and need to appeal to consumer culture.
I've heard of many journalists who are too scared to be even slightly critical of human brands because of the aggressive response from stans--no doubt many colleges find themselves in the same boat.
And Max Martin has surpassed John Lennon, this past March!
This post reminds me of bible classes in my high-school (in Israel), where I had very good teachers and the text was studied as a human artifact, treated as a document created at a time and place with a political agenda, and compared to such other texts as the Tale of Gilgamesh and the law code of Hammurabi as literary precedents/ context. These were much more interesting than the classes that just took the bible to be sacred, transcending/ beyond/ apart of history and our world.
Ah, I love that approach! Context provides so much more depth than projection. It seems so obvious, and yet....
I'm a relatively old-fashioned music historian--I have only ever written about dead musicians, and I do share your puzzlement at how some academics have become tools of corporate branding.
We used to separate historians (who work on the past) from critics (who work on the present), but that distinction is collapsing. The rise of the concept of "haters" means that it's become more difficult for folks to critique artists they love.
At this point, I actively discourage students from doing projects about the artists they stan.
Tools of corporate branding is a great way of putting it. I've written about the intentional effort to consecrate fandom, and a lot of it also feels like an extension of that, professional evangelizing.
I understood the way young kids would be encouraged to write about things that interested them because it was a way to get them engaged, but that was supposed to be a gateway to engaging that way with other content, not just burrow deeper into that obsession, imo.
Yes to all of this. The religion comparison is interesting--I have to read more of your stuff!
As a Doctor Who fan since the 1980s, I have long recognized the parallels between fandom and religion. We have canon, and we have schisms, and we have different sects, some of which basically are "in communion" and others of which aren't.
But most of all: we have shared rituals. In TV fandom, the most fundamental ritual is *watching the show*, but there are numerous others in different sects. I found I was calling myself a "lapsed fan" during the three years when there were new episodes but I wasn't watching them.
Doctor Who fandom has its equivalent of the Haj: it is called a "Time Team run": watching every single episode in order, including listening to the audio recordings of the missing episodes (this takes almost 504 hours for the classic series alone), and anyone who's done it is accorded respect as being more expert than those who are not.
I studied a fair bit of comparative religion. One of the biggest questions in the academic field of religion is "what, exactly, is the meaning of the word religion?" What is the definition, for purposes of study? "I know it when I see it" doesn't cut it for an academic field. This field is literally unsure what its field encompasses and what it doesn't.
After looking at a LOT of the edge cases and corner cases, I finally concluded that the best working definition of a religion is "a set of rituals shared by a community". As in "I do this religiously." All else is extra and not necessary. You can have religions wihout beliefs (the official holy book of Discordianism prohibits its followers from believing anything they read).
At that point it became clear that fandoms actually are religions by this definition.
The biggest religions in modern society are probably sports like Monday Night Football. People are so attached to football rituals that otherwise-moral people routinely overlook the high rate of permanent brain damage incurred in football.
It's unsurprising that evangelism is common -- though some religions discourage it, and some more inward-looking fandoms do too. It's unsurprising that some fandoms have turned into massive money-extracting or abuse-of-power operations. The Medieval Catholic Church certainly was both. Basically every form of toxicity which has ever spawned in the history of religion (and there are a lot) can and will show up in fandom if the community doesn't make an active effort to stop it.
Certain fandoms may need a Reformation; some may already have had one. It's interesting that some fandoms used to treat "Word of God" (from the creator of a movie or TV show -- George Lucas, Joss Whedon, etc.) as canon, but no longer do.
Classic Doctor Who fans *never* treated the views of the creators as canon, due to the circumstances of the show's creation, which saw the showrunners replaced very frequently, including the show's actual creators basically ending all creative activity before episode 1 aired in 1963, and their immediate successors, the first producer and script editor, leaving after a year, with the entire main cast leaving within three years, so I found the whole "Word of God" phenomenon odd and was viewing it from the outside.
As for attitudes towards the corporate creators, for Doctor Who it's the BBC and there was a decade when its leadership actively worked to cancel the show; nobody would treat them as authoritative. They're trying to cultivate branding and fandom now, but older fandom doesn't forget the history. And here's the most interesting thing: "new Who fans" are eager to learn from *classic Who fandom*, who are automatically accorded a certain amount of status, above the status of the corporate BBC leadership. I and most of the other older fans weren't expecting that when the flood of new Who fans came in, but it happened automatically. I'm not sure why.
I can see the same sort of complicated relationships with the labels, the artists, the music, and the fandoms in Kpop, where most current Kpop fandom groups want to support the group members against the labels to stop abusing the members (with the Loona purchasing boycott being one example). (And you can find histories utterly parallel to this in historic religions including the Catholic Church.)
One of the biggest problems with traditional religions is that they made actual truth claims (most of which are, well, proven false) and many were very coercive about behavior. One of the nice things about Doctor Who fandom as a religion is that *we all know the Doctor Who stories are made up* -- we may find ethical or moral value in them, and we do, or we may argue heatedly about interpretation, but we know they're made up. And we know they were mostly made up by people for a paycheck who cared about their art but were fundamentally just doing a job -- they aren't plaster saints. And we know there were dozens and dozens of creators, so most people don't idolize any one of them (even if people have favored and disfavored creators).
One of the problems with fandoms built on parasocial relationships is that it can edge back into the plaster saints area of hagiography (Kpop idols are arguably often already there); another is that it can head back into "corporate church" coercive territory (like the medieval Catholic Church or modern Scientology); another is that it can edge back into the territory of truth claims as doctrine. These risks are enough more severe in music fandom and sports fandom than they are in SF fandom that it sort of sets off alerts for us older SF fans.
Because, well, we managed to have schisms and fan wars and toxicity and blow way too much of our money on merch even with a strong understanding that all the stories were made up and that all the creators were falliable careerists. How much worse can it get when you don't have those two certainties?
This debate is as old as the origins of Birmingham School-era cultural studies and accusations some scholars took cultural studies in an overly affirmative direction under the excuse that the audience could decode a more sophisticated, resistánt meaning, while critics of CS implied a new generation of polytech professors were just using it as an excuse to revel in and legitimatise kitsch they personally enjoyed (among other criticisms of CS as a genuine form of praxis). The Fan Studies wave seems to be worse, though, because an element of the original CS oppositional reading re identity politics has long been incorporated directly and knowingly into big box franchise content, thus using this rubric, it is actually moral to claim the latest franchise fan product, and a non-hostile relationship between fans and the company, is good. This underlines the basic problems at the core of CS which fan studies has been unable to evolve from
Nothing new under the sun... It's definitely fascinating to me how many topics we chew on these days have incredibly relevant writing on them from decades ago.
People whose opinion I respect keep telling me that Swift is very talented but I don't hear it. I've tried. What annoys me most is that she gets so much press that she eclipses everyone else. There's lots of incredibly talented people out there making great music that no one's ever heard of because the media is so focused on Swift.
One example that comes to mind is Esperanza Spalding, a once in a generation talent who continues to make great music even though she's dropped off the media's radar.
I see no difference between the TS brand and other corporations such as McDonald's that mass produce a product for mass appeal. There's no artistry there.
And yes, it crowds out so many deserving creatives. The winner takes all approach has flattened culture to a depressing degree.
I don't think it has flattened culture at all, actually.
Pre-Internet, if you owned a store, you HAD to be a generalist. You HAD to cater to the "General Public". Specialization was practically impossible.
Now, being able to reach the entire world, you can find all people interested in your niche. There is a YouTuber who does videos which are basically PowerPoint charts on military economics. He just assumed that not enough people would be interested for this to get enough support to be more than an unpaid avocation. But if you're reaching the *entire world*, the number of people who are interested is.... 547K. Still a tiny fraction of the 1.5-billion-person English-speaking, Internet-accessing population, but it's *half a million subscribers*. It was *not possible* to find such an audience before the Internet; you couldn't get traction for something which only 1 in 3000 people were interested in, because they weren't in the same place.
I went around in the early 90s telling small business owners that they had to (a) go on the Internet and (b) specialize. There is a random hardware store which became the go-to place for cremone bolts in the entire US. Niche interests, specialization, is more supportable than it EVER was before.
This is described as the fragmentation of culture. This is the opposite of the flattening of culture!
To a surprising extent, we all listened to the same stuff in the 1980s because it's all we had *access* to. Madonna and Michael Jackson.
This is complicated now by having to fight the "algorithms" to find the stuff you actually want, but the niches continue to thrive.
A more nuanced analysis which I read recently said that in music the very most popular mass-market are doing fine, and the smallest niches are doing far better than they could have ever done in the 1980s, but the *midlist* has hollowed out.
Frankly, this is true in other industries too: you can be the behemoth Amazon or you can be a specialist tiny online shop selling your one ultra-niche product (whether on Etsy, as an Amazon seller, or with your own website), but there's no room for the old "semi-generalist" department stores, clothing stores, or product lines: if you don't have a niche, you don't have a chance. (This is probably why the Kpop industry is so obsessed with finding a prefab niche for any prefab group they produce.)
It's happened to journalism too. Journalism has a particular problem because the "biggest" names (like NYT or CNN) are actually genuinely bad now, for the most part, which has a corrosive effect on culture. The midlist is gone, as in every industry. The ultra-niche thrives but only the people interested in the niche *look* at it so most people are ignorant.
If the biggest names were paying more attention to the experts in the niches, and amplifying them when it was socially important, we'd be in better shape, but they aren't, they're publishing what can only be called lazy propaganda instead.
The most dramatic and horrifying examples of this come from the *ongoing* Covid-19 pandemic (killing 1000+ Americans a week as I write). Actual experts keep reporting on the ever-worse news of the damage Covid causes, and on the fact that it's airborne, and that it's preventable with respirator masks (N95, P100, etc) and air filters (HEPA, etc.) . It's not hard to find the info on the blogs of the top aerosol scientists.
The facts occasionally bubble up into the dying midlist newspapers and magazines (there's a great Wired article -- "the 60-year-old scientific screwup which helped Covid kill"). The facts never make it into the NYT, which uncritically reproduces dishonest government propaganda about handwashing (which will not help against an airborne viruses) and about vaccines (which are nice but the Covid vaccines are <50% effective). As a result, millions of people have died unnecessarily.
Because vital information isn't getting from the niche to the mass market. The mass market has winner-take-all behavior, and government propagandists can and do use this to lie to the public (which, I suppose, they have always done).
The niche of aerosol experts is spreading accurate information, but it only gets to the people who *bother to look for the niche*.
OK, I started this comment lighthearted but that got really serious. Anyway, here we are.