The Digitextuality of NBC's The Office
I have been a big fan of the Office going back to its days on the BBC. I had high expectations for the US version because I was familiar with Steve Carrell from the Daily Show. I became more interested in the US version as it developed a style of its own. A stiking component of this unique style is its focus on appropriating internet comedy memes and content.
I have presented work at conferences which describes the way in which the Office struggled to become a ratings hit until it garnered attention as a popular show on iTunes. The information age cache attributed to the show by industry executives helped to save it from cancellation despite low initial ratings. The producer's of the show seized on the new found status of the show by offering all kinds of online supplementary content. This strategy has been maintained even as the Office has become an enormous ratings success.
In many ways, last night's show was the culmination of the show. Within the narrative, the shows romantic storyline came to a culmination with the Jim and Pam wedding. Aesthetically the show pulled from a popular YouTube Video, JK Wedding Entrance Video to be the stylistic homage being referenced in the climatic entrance of the wedding party.
Here are the links to the two videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0&feature=player_embedded
http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/video/clips/office-wedding-dance/1164915/
The research that I do with the Carsey-Wolf Center and that I am working on in my dissertation is focused on the way in which the Media Industries negotiate a relationship with new media culture. Scholars that have done work on histories of emerging technologies always stress the importance of understanding the connections between old technology and new. Bolter and Grusin have called this relationship "remediation." They point out that new technologies do not replace old but that a reshuffling of cultural and aesthetic sensibilities occurs during the early stages of development.
Anna Everett has created the neologism Digitextuality to describe the role of the media industry in creating an understanding of the "new modes and codes of digital media texts" including "their semiotic densities and semiotic polyvalence in terms of earlier media structures." Cultural moments like Jim and Pam's wedding are important markers for this semiotic work. In my work I try to understand why these humurous YouTube videos are so often employed with in traditional media texts like The Office.
Its clear that the inclusion of videos like JK Wedding Entrance is an act of cultural currency. The writing staff of the Office is signaling that they are aware of popular YouTube videos that their audience enjoys. Intertextual references have been a significant strategy for television shows and fandoms throughout television history. What is so interesting about using YouTube as cultural reference is that it not only upholds a certain aesthetic as the worthy content to be consumed but it also offers a business model for new media.
JK Wedding Video garnered much industry attention as it was among the first YouTube videos to successfully monetize "viral" peer to peer sharing. YouTube's content identification system was able to identify the Chris Brown song that plays on the video and provide a link to purchase the song. Though the song had been released a well prior to the spreading of the YouTube video it rocketed to the tops of the iTunes Download chart. As with many internet video memes, several versions of the JK Wedding Entrance now exist. The choice of the producers to create an Office version of the dance will most likely result in increase traffic to the website and free marketing from fans that share the video.
Even more interesting than that, the homage has increased traffic to the original video to such a degree that it has once again become one of the most viewed YouTube videos. This feedback loop between viral video status, media industry appropriation and back to viral video is evidence of the way in which entertainment content can shape our understanding of digitextuality and the uses of new media content.
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Memetic Mashups
Ethan,
While this is outside my area of scholarship, I've been entranced by the synthesis of traditional culture and modern culture and trans-national culture in new media. Over at my less serious blog, I just made a post about how a wiki-based community has broken down the tropes not only of Manga and comic books and movies, but of Gilgamesh and the Illiad, relating them all to each other such that terminology drawn from a cartoon in the 90s is used to describe the activity of Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The memes you reference (and are so assiduously documented by Rocketboom) are an integral part of this understanding of storytelling and media creation. While the canon is currently underrepresented and sci-fi movies, cats, anime and HP Lovecraft are over-represented, it is an absolutely fascinating--and from my lay perspective singular--phenomenon. I referred to it as the Underculture (drawing obviously from the concept of the "Undernews") and its vibrancy is matched, in my mind, only by the rigor of its amateur literary analysts.
digitextuality
Hi Ethan,
I'm interested in this idea of digitextuality that you raise. I haven't read Anna Everett but I am trying to get my head around her quotations in your post and I am wondering what exactly is meant by the term "media industry." I understand that you focus on Hollywood, which obviously boasts the large and powerful film industry, but I wonder if we could understand media industry as a more distributed kind of network in which a lot of production is taking place in the tentacles, so to speak.
The reason I raise this is because I have been thinking of Lady Gaga and her Haus of Gaga which is basically a design team in NYC and LA that creates all Gaga paraphernalia. In one of her videos (The Fame, Part One) which I am writing a blog post on, she wears sunglasses made of iPods, which display the message “Pop music will never be low brow.” Perhaps the idea of digitextuality would be a useful framework for looking at this act of speech and how it is mediated by the technologies of the music video and the portable digital media player, including what these production structures and material artifacts contribute to how the utterance is interpreted by audiences.
Claire
Semiotic densities and semiotic polyvalence
Hi Ethan.
I agree, the semiotic densities and polyvalence of this Office scene are particularly striking, not only in the dance portion, but in the Niagara Falls wedding scene as well.
There's an interesting user comments for the Office Wedding Dance from a user named koi_girl which reads, in part:
'Best espisode ever!!!!! I hadn't seen the dance on YouTube, so that was a surprise....and LOVED the Niagra Falls "real" wedding. Very Jim and Pam.....and very "Office" as well!!!'
The way in which the Niagara Falls "real" wedding sequences are intercut with the wedding dance is evocative of the digitextuality you discuss, in the sense that it invokes overlapping realities and recursive referentiality. By having a "real" wedding apart from their work personas, Jim and Pam assert boundaries between themselves and their work personas. But simultaneously, the editing intersects the "real" and "fake" weddings, indicating that the two are overlapping and inextricable. This discursive loop between real and fake carries on throughout the series at a metatextual level with the mockumentary-style camera work and program. It even has echoes in the user comments, where koi_girl calls the wedding "Very Jim and Pam" as though the characters were real people, and "very 'Office' as well," re-subsuming the identification with the characters' reality within the overarching understanding of it all as a fictional construct.
koi_girl is pointing to another culmination in the series, the culmination of the show's plays on referentiality, the post modern self referential distance that allows the Office to both identify with and satirize new media culture. Certainly, the dance functions as cultural capital as you suggest above, but I think there's also a satirical attitude towards new media in the scene emblematic of a more critical view of new media culture. When Michael explains the reference to Pam, it is a play on Michael's lack of pop cultural savvy, because the explanation is unnecessary for Pam, and indeed a likely segment of the audience. Not only is the Office in on the culture by displaying their knowledge of a video their audience enjoys, I think the show is also displaying a knowledge that their audience is perhaps oversaturated by the video, or in some sense critical of the perceived ubiquity of such viral videos. The "real" wedding intensifies this satirical element, indicating that there is a more authentic experience, referential of older traditions (i.e. wedding at Niagra Falls). Thus, in its juxtaposition with the Wedding Dance, Jim and Pam's "real" wedding makes a statement in favor of tradition (and perhaps by extension traditional media).
The two weddings together further perform a narrative of processes of remediation.
Damian