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The virtual big sister: television and technology in girls' media

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THE VIRTUAL BIG SISTER:

TELEVISION AND TECHNOLOGY IN GIRLS’ MEDIA

By

Taylor Nygaard

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Taylor Nygaard

ii
Dedication
In loving memory of my grandmother,
Patricia Louise Kreuzer

iii
Acknowledgements
Writing this dissertation has been a long journey that could not have been
completed without the help, support, and guidance of many important people. I am ever
grateful to the community of scholars, colleagues, friends, and family who inspired and
encouraged this project from its inception and helped it evolve along the way. First of all,
I owe so much to the professors and teaching assistants from the Film Studies and
Rhetoric departments at the University of California, Berkeley for fostering my passion
for media, expanding my worldview, and always challenging me. In particular, I would
like to thank Eric Smoodin for his kindness and generosity, Carol Clover for her
creativity and inspiration, and B. Ruby Rich for her dedication to teaching,
professionalism, and frankness. Together they were amazing role models that have
forever shaped me as a person and scholar.
Since arriving at the University of Southern California I’ve been incredibly lucky
to work with an outstanding group of professors, students and staff members. I feel so
honored to have been teamed with an impressive group of peers, including Jennifer
Rosales, Patty Ahn, Brett Service, Kate Fortmueller, Ghia Godfree, Elizabeth Affuso,
Suzanne Scott, Shawna Kidman, Kristen Fuhs, Sriya Shrestha, Anjali Nath, and Julia
Himberg. I owe them many thanks for their lively discussions, productive suggestions,
and constructive criticism throughout our coursework and writing groups, but also for
their affability, warmth, and consistent reassurance outside of school. A special thanks is
due to Julia Himberg who offered not only immeasurable intellectual support and
mentorship, but also emotional guidance during the many ups and downs during this
process, whether it was over margaritas, email, or skype. I also want to thank Howard
iv
Rosenberg for his humor, friendship, and clever emails. Thanks are also owed to Linda
Overholt, Kim Greene, Jade Agua, and Alicia White for always providing reliable
administrative support and a good laugh in the office as well as to Bill Whittington who
offered valuable advice on teaching, publishing, and career development.
I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee, professors Ellen
Seiter, Tara McPherson, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. I feel so lucky to have these strong,
intelligent women as role models both personally and professionally. Sarah’s course on
feminist theory and her guidance during an independent study on girl culture and
branding were crucial to the development of this project. But, she has also been a
constant buttress of support when I needed it most, particularly during the various
moments of restructuring or when stepping in during moments of crisis. I will be forever
grateful for her candid advice and astute suggestions. Tara consistently challenged me to
push the boundaries of my scholarship and to combine new and innovative research into
this project. The often-impromptu conversations about relevant books and articles we had
throughout the process have helped me grow as a scholar, but they also had a profound
impact on me as a teacher. I am thankful that she opened my eyes to the exciting work in
the digital humanities. I also want to thank professors Aniko Imre and Michael Renov,
who were members of my qualifying exam committee and gave productive feedback on
the project early on, but have also been incredibly supportive of various professional
endeavors along the way. Anne Friedberg deserves special thanks as well for her
unmatched wit when suggesting the title for this dissertation.
Most of all, I could not have completed this dissertation without the unwavering
faith, support, and mentorship of the incomparable Ellen Seiter. Ellen is the type of
v
mentor I hope to be someday. She’s sincere, practical, and encouraging. She gives
constructive criticism and she always helped me put things in perspective. I cannot
adequately express my gratitude for her pushing me to move quickly through this process
and for having more confidence in my abilities than I did at times.
I need to thank the institutions and colleagues outside of USC that helped shape
and suppot this project, particularly the Social Science Research Council for awarding me
their Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the summer of 2010. The
fellowship included two weeklong intensive workshops led by Douglas Thomas and Tom
Boellstorff in an interdisciplinary discussion of the emerging “virtual worlds” field of
inquiry. There, I was teamed with a diverse range of exceptional scholars from a variety
of disciplines whose projects, comments, and ideas all played a part in developing my
project. I hope to work with all of them again in the future. Thanks are also due to my
colleague Derek Johnson for inviting me to present on a couple of panels with him and
for propping up my work as a result.
This dissertation is dedicated to my Grandmother, who introduced me to strong
women in film and television at a young age and has inspired me ever since. Along with
her, I owe so much to my entire family who has been incredibly supportive of my career
and I’m exceedingly grateful of their love and encouragement. My graduate school
experience would not have been the same without my closest friend, Jennifer Rosales,
who I met the first day of orientation at USC. I could not have made it to the end of this
journey without our phone calls, carpool chats, and shopping adventures. Thank you for
being my partner in crime through it all and I look forward to our future adventures
together.
vi
Lastly, I am forever grateful for the love and support of my amazing husband and
best friend Coyote. Without him I would be lost. Thanks for talking through my ideas
after a long day of work, sending my relevant links, believing in me, and always having
my back. You are the love of my life and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

vii
Abstract

“The Virtual Big Sister: Television and Technology in Girls’ Media,” provides a
feminist analysis of the early 21st century convergent media industries in the contexts of
post-feminist girlhood, television, and digital media. Understanding how media
increasingly expands across platforms, it explores three dominant television brands for
girls, Alloy, Nickelodeon, and The CW and analyzes their transmedia strategies that cater
to girls’ increased use of digital media. Through a historical genre analysis, it pays
special attention to the interplay of industrial and cultural motives behind representations
of technological girlhood in specific transmedia television texts, contending that the
characters, storylines, and industry discourses of girls’ media culture at this moment are
strategic maneuvers on the part of the corporate girls’ media industry to regain control at
a time of industry instability and increased consumer autonomy. The media industry
confronts an inherently dynamic and unpredictable youth market by clinging tightly to
more stable gender scripts and mythologies that have served them well.
Drawing from trade papers, the popular press, and academic publications to frame
textual analyses, it considers the various ways in which the contemporary television
industry continues to produce a limited and contradictory definition of girls in relation to
technology. But even more centrally, it presents a theory of how the industrial discourses
that shape our understandings of girls and technology—including industrial anxieties,
technological fetishes and phobias, and changing definitions of adolescence, publicity,
and privacy—shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and consumption contexts of
the early 21st century’s convergent media culture.

viii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract vii

Chapter One: Introduction: The Virtual Big Sister: Television & Technology 1
in Girls’ Media

Chapter Two: iConverge With iCarly: Television, New Media, & Gender 55
in the Tween Sitcom

Chapter Three: That’s a Secret I’ll Never Tell: Gossip Girl, The CW, and 113
the Franchise Teen Soap Opera

Chapter Four: Alloy Inc., YouTube & the Next Generation of Teen Television 175

Chapter Five: Conclusion: Reconsidering “the Virtual Big Sister”: Visibility 234
in Technological Girlhood

1
Chapter One:
Introduction:
The Virtual Big Sister: Television and Technology in Girls’ Media

In early February of 2011, Virgin Mobile USA, one of Sprint’s prepaid mobile
phone brands, aired a valentine’s day themed commercial as part of their “Go Crazy”
campaign unveiling the wonders of their new smart phone communication capabilities.
Lurking outside her new boyfriend’s house at night, a wiry, big-eyed, blonde girl sits
perched in a tree. Lit only by the glowing light of her android smart phone, she recites, in
a mix of hushed horror and awe, how her phone will help her keep tabs on her new beau,
Brad. According to our protagonist she can, among many things, “email the pics of their
first date to her mom,” follow his flicker stream to see if “she’s hotter than his exes,”
follow his twitter feed to “see if he’s mentioned her yet,” and “check his Four Square for
patterns,” all while observing Brad from her perch outside his house. Shaking with
enthusiasm at the idea that she can get all this access to Brad for only twenty five dollars
a month, she looks straight into the camera, directly addressing the audience and
surmising as lightening crashes in the background, “That’s crazy, right?” which, of
course, alludes to both the price of the phone plan and her extreme behavior.
The caricature of the young female protagonist in the ad reflects what Sherrie
Inness has described as the contemporary, national disdain for girls’ culture and media
practices: “In many ways, girls are inconsequential. Due to their youth and gender, girls
are granted less social status than men and boys. They are relegated to an inferior place in
American society because of the strength of the cultural stereotype that girls and their
culture are insipid and insignificant, unworthy of close attention” (Inness 1998, 1). The
2
ad’s exaggeration is played for laughs and encourages girl viewers to participate in what
Angela McRobbie (2004) calls “post-feminist irony.” Discussed as, on the one hand, a
generational divide and, on the other, a product of the global adoption of neoliberalism,
post-feminism reflects a female existence in the stage after (or in some cases a reaction
to) second wave feminism, when a ‘limited understanding of gender equality’ has been
achieved and the focus has shifted from collective consciousness to an individualism that
elevates consumption as a strategy to heal most social, economic or political
dissatisfactions (McRobbie 2004; Tasker and Negra 2007; Brunsdon 2006; Hermes
2006). As McRobbie describes, protesting against the ad would be the dull, politically
correct feminist response, while the post-feminist response is a recognition of the ad as
ironic: “the younger female viewer, along with her male counterparts, educated in irony
and visually literate, is not made angry by such a repertoire. She appreciates its layers of
meaning; she ‘gets the joke’ and denies any offense to the ad” (McRobbie 2004, 33).
Although the ad is an ironic example that media-savvy girls would presumably not take at
face value, it nonetheless reflects some of the dominant discourses about both technology
and girlhood in the contemporary neoliberal, post-feminist cultural landscape.
Both an unabashed celebration of the increase in interpersonal communication of
the early 21
st
century and an anxious critique of the loss of privacy and changes in visual
culture that this communication entails, “Crazy Stalker” reflects the types of gendered
discourses around technology and visibility that circulate in a variety of girls’ media texts
that are explored in more detail in this dissertation. Beyond the gross caricature, it
promotes a specifically gendered use of new technologies—one focused on heterosexual
coupling, narcissism, female competition, and physical comparison through peer and self-
3
surveillance. As the title of this dissertation alludes to with its play on George Orwell’s
concept of “Big Brother,” this ad explicitly connects the traditional notion of surveillance
(sitting outside in a tree stalking a boyfriend) with the online and technological
surveillance encouraged and enabled by digital technologies in the neoliberal information
economy. Her exaggerated enthusiasm for the phone’s surveillance capabilities is a
product, not only of America’s increased use of and reliance on information
communication devices, but also our changing relationships to privacy, surveillance,
performance, data-mining, and target marketing as a result of this use.
The ad’s humor in exaggeration, particularly for young female viewers, draws
attention to the all too salient traits of using technology for surveillance purposes. As the
girl stalker suggests, profiles on social networking sites like Flicker, Four Square and
Tumblr as well as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts are created and constructed
against the background of an audience—as something to be looked at. These technologies
often encourage what Alice Marwick calls “the dual gaze of social surveillance—
surveying content created by others and looking at one’s own content through other
people’s eyes—as a normative part of contemporary media use” (Marwick 2011, 1). The
girl stalker shows how the surveillance capabilities of her phone will allow her access to
information about Brad, but also shows how the technologies will aid her self-
surveillance in order to conform to Brad’s likes, dislikes, and habits. This type of self-
surveillance, which is heightened under neoliberalism when responsibilities for
improvement and success are placed on individuals as opposed to centralized
government, builds upon dominant discourses that haven been circulating in women’s
magazines for decades and are a major part of contemporary post-feminism’s focus on
4
independence and empowerment through individualized self-improvement. Magazines
have functioned as disciplinary manuals, encouraging their young readers to adopt an
ideology of self-improvement and practice self-surveillance through surveys, quizzes,
articles and advertisements that “reveal imperfections, which marketers promise to fix
through ever-improved commodities” (Kearney 2010, 10). Here, surveillance
technologies encourage similar behaviors and reflect how neoliberal post-feminism
“operates as both an ideology and an increasingly normative strategy of engaging with
the world” (Banet-Weiser 2012, 55).
Although “Crazy Stalker” represents a fleeting representation in an oversaturated
media environment, the ad was programmed during the commercial breaks of at least two
girls’ television programs, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, shows that also draw
attention to the surveillance capabilities of new media devices. In these television
programs and their various media extensions, the main female characters negotiate being
under constant surveillance and surveying others as a result of using those technologies.
Mark Andrejevic (2002) argues that certain surveillance-based television properties, of
which these programs and “Crazy Stalker” are a part, can be understood as playing an
important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an ‘interactive’
economy. The normalization of surveillance in these texts coincides with the developing
online economy, which is increasingly reliant on the economic value of information
gathered through sophisticated interactive communication technologies, which help target
products and media content to specific viewers.
The ad and these television programs also point to the changing nature of media
consumption and its increasingly mobile and interactive capabilities. In her quick listing
5
of all the smart phone’s features, the stalker illustrates the array of media options
available to girls at this time, resulting from rapid new developments in technology. The
palpable anxiety around this girl’s media use can also be read as symbolic of the
television industry’s anxiety about how new media technologies are impacting their
business. The ad may be a far cry from the moral panics around Internet predators and the
potential sexual exploitation that surrounded girls during the Internet’s early years, yet it
nevertheless exaggerates a sense of danger about girls’ agency (particularly their sexual
agency) that technology enables (Cassell and Cramer 2008, 55). Contemporary media
materializes an ongoing tension between the cultural anxieties about girls using new
communication technologies and the industrial desire to sell those technologies.
Seeing these tensions proliferate, I became interested in exploring what types of
representations of technology and femininity were being presented to girls. What forms
of interaction and participation with new media technologies are being encouraged and
what functions do these representations serve? In order to explore these questions, this
dissertation provides a feminist analysis of the girls’ media industry, focusing on popular
girls’ media discourses that represent or discuss new media technologies during the first
two decades of the 21
st
century—a time when media industry instability, economic,
technological, and cultural convergence as well as neoliberal and post-feminist ideologies
structure representations of contemporary girlhood. I began researching the discourses
circulating about girls in relation to new media technologies because I wanted to map
how a young girl might come to understand new media technologies, beyond just her
own experimentation and play with the devices.
6
In contrast to the myth of the “digital generation” that sees young people as using
media in profoundly new ways and abandoning old media like television (Palfrey and
Gasser 2010; Prensky 2012; Tapscott 2008), this dissertation conceptualizes television as
an important gateway for girls to first see, learn about, and understand digital
technologies. As Gutnick et al. note, television and commercial websites are some of the
first sites that girls peruse as they move online (Gutnick et al. 2010), and television
viewing continues to be the center of kids’ media consumption (Gutnick et al. 2010;
Rideout 2011; Horowitz 2010). Therefore the discourses that frame new media
technologies within television texts are crucial for girls’ social conceptions of their uses
and expectations. But as the chapters of this dissertation illustrate, television is no longer
just a piece of furniture in the living room, or even a type of programming, but rather it’s
a mode of viewing, a structuring logic, and an economic imperative impacting and
embedded in new media programming and business models of the convergence era.
Overall, conceptualizing media convergence as a series of practices rooted in
capital, my project aims to understand how and why contemporary popular girls’
television circulates gendered ideas about new media technologies to an audience of
young girls. As the increased use of new media technologies coincides with significant
shifts in gender constructions that also feel familiar, how do these representations
encourage or delimit new configurations of gender identity in contemporary culture?
How is the television industry’s instability impacting representation of girls in relation to
new media technology? How are girls positioned as citizens of a new media culture? Is
technology allowing for increased participation in the construction of their own media
culture and representations? If so, under what constraints? Do these representations
7
support or mask the democratic potential of the Internet’s interactive capability? To
address these questions, it is necessary to first understand what is at stake in studying
girls and technology.

Girl Power:
This dissertation is part of an exciting, vibrant boom in the study of girlhood that
began with Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s seminal 1977 essay “Girls and
Subcultures” examining the absence of female subjects from the literature on subcultures
emerging from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University
in the 1970s. McRobbie and Garber claim that the field of youth cultural studies sustains
a masculine focus, ultimately maintaining a separation between “youth” and “femininity”
while reinforcing the prominence of patriarchal discourse and the insignificance of girls’
culture. McRobbie’s subsequent work, particularly her ethnographic observations of girl
subjects, foregrounds not only the blindness of male sociologists to the question of
gender, but also the simultaneous pressures on girls to achieve idealized expectations of
adult femininity, while maintaining the innocence of their pre-sexual childhood. She
points out how teenage girls grapple with both the pleasures and pains in reaching or
failing to reach those contradictory expectations and that their experiences need to be
understood as different than those of the male youths at the center of cultural studies
scholarship (McRobbie 1991). Building from this foundational work, scholars in media
studies, cultural studies, and the burgeoning field of girls’ studies have analyzed how
girls’ interactions with media, in particular, have been (and continue to be) instrumental
in perpetuating these contradictions and tensions while shaping their ideas, opinions,
8
outlooks, and attitudes on everything from body image and dating, to career choices and
politics. Moreover, because girls eventually grow up to be women, their experiences with
media can be seen as helping to shape their identities in both girlhood and adulthood. As
Sherrie A. Inness suggests, “studying girls’ culture is essential to understanding how
gender works in our society” (1998, 2).
Understanding the importance of studying girls and their culture, scholars of
girlhood explore such themes as agency and voice, representation and identity
construction as well as the relationship between femininity and feminism. They’ve also
explored girls’ everyday cultural practices, leisure activities, and consuming and
producing habits. Since the 1990s, however, we’ve seen a spike in the publications of
numerous new articles in major journals and books exploring girlhood as well as an
encyclopedia, a journal, and several recent academic conferences. Early on this spike was
positioned, in part, as a response to the raw portrait of adolescent girls struggling in a
“girl-poisoning culture” described in Mary Pipher’s Best-Selling book Reviving Ophelia
(Pipher 1995). But many scholars were also responding to third wave feminism’s desire
to redefine feminism for a generation of women who were alienated from bra-burning,
anti-sex, anti-feminine, and anti-commercial second wavers who had been maligned in
pop culture (Baumgartner and Richards 2000). Moreover, the 1990s simultaneously
witnessed an increasingly fragmented media environment led by a rise in niche marketing
that recognized girls as a profitable market and girls were increasingly visible in popular
culture as a result. Within this context, the 1990s gave birth to the Girl Power movement,
a concept that has dominant the discourses of girlhood in popular culture and inspired its
9
own subgenre of girlhood studies scholarship, which can also be considered a product of
niche marketing and brand logic.
Part marketing slogan, part political project, Girl Power was emblematic of “a
more general shift toward ‘mainstreaming’ feminism into popular and dominant culture”
(Banet-Weiser 2007, 114). Girl Power was visible on everything from T-shirts and
bumper stickers to media awareness projects and “girls only” self-esteem or career
planning clubs. It made its biggest splash in pop culture, however, with the breakout
global success of the Spice Girls and other girl groups and solo artists of the 90s, who
proclaimed that being a girl was just as cool or even better than being a boy. They
embraced femininity, reclaiming the mini skirt and mid-drift, and rebranded “girlie” from
symbolizing naiveté and innocence to signify the hip and powerful. Borrowing and
arguably appropriating the styling and political motivation from the underground punk
movement, Riot Grrrl, Girl Power became the watered down and highly commodified
version of the music genre and activist subculture of the time that sought to make visible
real issues concerning contemporary girlhood including rape, domestic abuse, sexuality,
and female empowerment (see Kearney 2006).
The Girl Power movement and even the increased scholarship around girlhood
that resulted from it has to be understood as a product of the changing media industries
and cultural climate in the 1990s, particularly the rising influence of neoliberalism which
shaped the conditions under which Girl Power media is produced and the notion of
individualized empowerment at its center. As David Harvey clearly defines for us,
neoliberalism is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-
being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills
10
within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free
markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007, 2). According to sociologist Ronaldo Munck, in
the 1980s and 1990s “Neoliberalism successfully articulated neoclassical economic
theories with a liberal individualist conception of political freedom” (Munck 2005, 65).
Because of these alignments, neoliberalism has become a hegemonic mode of discourse:
“It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become
incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the
world” (Harvey 2007, 3). Neoliberal ideology underwrote the development of third wave
feminism, which in response to criticism of the second wave’s white, middle class, and
heterosexual political focus, encouraged women to see themselves as individuals rather
than as part of a collective.
The notion of a “third wave feminism,” as influenced by neoliberalism and the
perceived successes of second wave feminism, however, is too simple of a concept to
explain the complexity of contemporary feminism and the discourses of gender. Feminist
scholars such as Shira Tarrant (2006) object to the “wave construct” because it ignores
both the consistencies and important progress made between the supposed waves. Tarrant
also suggests that the “first-, second-, and third waves’ time periods correspond most
closely to American feminist developments” and therefore they distract feminists from
recognizing the history and development of gendered political issues around the world
(2006, 222). Furthermore as Morgan Blue notes, some scholars describe “post-feminism”
as “a form of feminism without distinguishing between Third Wave Feminism and the
anti-feminist discourse of post-feminist culture” (Blue 2012, 5). Aligning Riot Grrrl and
other consciousness raising groups of the 1990s with the third wave’s political and social
11
agendas, Blue, like myself, understands post-feminism as a discursive formation or “a
dispersed and changing cultural phenomenon, rather than being constitutive of a focused
movement” (Blue 2012, 5). For example, Angela McRobbie draws attention to the
difference when she describes how post-feminism is positioned against feminism. In her
definition, “post-feminism” is emblematic of a “double movement” that allows young
women to earn respect and power in the public sphere on the condition that feminism is
no longer acknowledged or seen as needed (McRobbie 2009, 55). Assessing these
tensions, Rosalind Gill suggests that “post-feminism is best thought of as a sensibility
that characterizes an increasing number of films, television shows, advertisements and
other media products” (Gill 2007, 148). She outlines several key themes and features that
typify contemporary articulations of gender in the media and some of the contradictory
discourses around empowerment that symbolized post-feminism: an obsessive
preoccupation with the body, the increasing sexualization of culture, the evacuation of
notions of politics or cultural influence in favor of individualism, a reassertion of sexual
difference, and the intensification of self-surveillance and discipline.
Girl Power as symbolic of post-feminist discourse, for example, tapped into
neoliberal ideology in an effort for girls to be in control of their own self-esteem when
facing pressures from the media and culture more broadly, but more often than not the
power attributed to girls through Girl Power became tied to notions of consumer
citizenship. As Sarah Banet-Weiser notes, Girl Power and post-feminism in general
“embraced the visibility of consumer culture with the hopes that the kind of
empowerment that arises from being recognized as an important market segment would
translate to a politico-social power represented in terms of feminist subjectivity” (Banet-
12
Weiser 2007, 124). However, as girls’ studies scholars Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick
and Anita Harris note, “The neo-liberal incitement of individualism, rational choice and
self-realization bumps up against discourses of femininity, creating contradictory and
complex positions for girls” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005, 7). For example, both
McRobbie and Gill theorize how self-help and therapeutic discourses have intensified the
surveillance and policing of female bodies in post-feminism, pointing out how these
practices are also increasingly taking place on the part of women and girls themselves.
Girls are both empowered as individuals and increasingly policed under post-feminism.
With these tensions in mind, the underlying question of how young women reconcile new
understandings of feminist empowerment with messages of liberation through
consumption is a significant theme of this dissertation.

Technological Girlhood
While this dissertation is grounded in the debates circulating around post-feminist
girlhood and the various media messages about gender that are shaping cultural
understandings of girls today, it is also part of a larger feminist inquiry into the gendered
nature of technology. The development of the Internet and other digital media
communication devices has led many feminist scholars to celebrate the potential of new
media technologies to disrupt gendered power structures in the media. Notions of
“cyberfeminism” with which this dissertation is engaged, began with Donna Haraway’s
“A Cyborg Manifesto,” where she uses the metaphor of a cyborg and the intertwining
relationships between technologies and bodies to construct a new understanding of
feminism that moves beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender norms and
13
assumptions (Haraway 1991). Haraway inspired a lot of feminist researchers to challenge
“the inherently masculine nature of techno-science” (Wajcman 2004) and the ‘toys for
boys’ perception of new Internet technologies in order to look for their feminist potential.
For example, in her early book on identity and Internet communication, Life on the
Screen (1997), Sherry Turkle argues that individuals can escape their physical
characteristics and perform multiple identities through online interactions. She argues
that the Internet creates a space that allows women to explore the implications and
limitations of identity and the physical realities of gender. As Dafna Lemish notes, “The
unique characteristics of the internet—its expansiveness, accessibility, and decentralized
nature—feed the aspiration and hope that it will serve to facilitate breaking down
traditional power structures” (Lemish 2010, x). Like these feminist theorists, this
dissertation is invested in exploring the shifting complexities and social realities of girls
as they are changed by the profound impact of communications technologies on all our
lives.
While the work of cyberfeminists sought to explore technology as a source of
power for women in the 1990s, popular culture was simultaneously generating a moral
panic about girls using technology, claiming they were at risk to all forms of exploitation
and danger. Television programs like Dateline’s To Catch a Predator (2007) and
countless articles and news specials were devoted to warning parents that their daughters
were at risk of being lured into the traps of “internet predators” waiting in chat rooms and
posing as teens online in order to take advantage of them. As a result, girls were
discouraged from participating in the freedoms that new technologies offered and their
14
technological practices were heavily policed. As Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer (2008)
point out,
The panic over young girls at risk from communication technologies is not new
rhetoric in America. There has been a recurring moral panic through history, not
just over real threats of technological danger, but also over the compromised
virtue of young girls, parental loss of control in the face of a seductive machine,
and the debate over whether women can ever be high tech without being in
jeopardy (54).
Cassell and Cramer point to Carolyn Marvin’s research on the gendered discourses
surrounding the telephone, as “the first electric medium to enter the home and unsettle
customary ways of dividing the private person and family from the more public setting of
the community” (Marvin 1988, 17).
Discussing the social perceptions of late nineteenth century technologies, Marvin
observes how popular discourse of the time perpetuated social anxieties that continue
today, particularly about “the escape from parental supervision made possible by new
communications technologies” (Marvin 1988, 74). For example, telephone
communication allowed for “irregular courtship [that] threatened the orderly exit of
children from the family into approved relationships with the opposite sex” (73).
Teenagers could talk on the phone to those who parents did not know, about things of
which they wouldn’t approve. In particular, telephones allowed daughters, especially
those finding work as telephone operators, to associate with a number of men not only
outside of their peer groups, but also outside their parents’ purviews. And, even today
15
telephones continue to be associated with these parental anxieties about the loss of
control over their children (Shade 2011).
Throughout the 19
th
and 20
th
century, media technologies from film, radio, and
television have all led to moral panics surrounding youths, and particularly girls. “Access
to others, access to information, access to opportunity—all these accesses, however
partial, also meant loss of social control” (Cassell and Cramer 2008, 62). In the 1990s and
2000s the Internet, however, took a dominant position within these panics creating a
hyperbolic discourse of danger for girls’ technological use. And, as Cassell and Cramer
argue “the dangers to girls online are not as severe as they have been portrayed, and the
reason for this exaggeration of danger arises from adult fears about girls’ agency and
societal discomfort around girls as power users of technology” (55). They add that
“Unfortunately the myth of girls’ vulnerability online has unfortunate consequences,
because it may result in positioning girls as disempowered with respect to technology”
(70). With an understanding of the historical legacy of these myths, exploring whether or
not girls continue to be positioned as disempowered in relation to technology is another
key theme in this dissertation.
As Internet use, social media sites, and mobile communication have become
normalized into everyday social life as well as a major form of interaction and leisure
activity for people of all ages, some of these moral panics have died down. Nevertheless,
as signified by the “Crazy Stalker” ad, discourses of fear and danger in relation to
technology continue to circulate, particularly in television properties for girls like
Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Revenge. For example, in a short
piece for In Media Res Louisa Stein notes how that danger is often reframed:
16
The young women in these series are attuned to digital and physical dangers,
especially to the dangers of sexual violence and digital surveillance. In these
series, cell phones and laptops become tools used by millennial girls to uncover
inescapable corruption that crosses generations (Stein 2012).
By creating a fan vid juxtaposing scenes from the various television shows depicting girls
using new technologies, Stein looks at the relationships between girls and technology,
accounting for what she sees as both the risks and the opportunities. She suggests that
new media technologies “give voice to millennial female perspectives, as the girl
protagonists in the shows use technology to shape the plot, connect with one another, and
to guide viewer experience of the narrative” (Stein 2012). Despite and because of the
dangers associated with technology, girls use them as an instrument of power, as a
weapon, and as a tool of connectivity. My own reading of Gossip Girl in chapter three
unpacks some of these tensions by situating these risks and opportunities within the goals
of The CW to create transmedia extensions around the television property.
Stein joins a growing number of Girls’ Studies scholars that have begun to
explore girls’ active uses of new media technologies, showing how girls are quite deft
and informed users of new media technologies. They illustrate how girls defy stereotypes
of innate technical deficiency and sophisticatedly wield new media technologies for their
own goals and purposes. In her book Girls Make Media (2006) Mary Celeste Kearney
points out,
Although American girls have always been culturally productive, using various
media to express themselves creatively and communicate with others, more girls
are engaged in cultural production today than at any other point in U.S. history,
17
largely as a result of the development of entrepreneurial youth cultures, a renewed
focus on young people’s media education, and perhaps most significantly, the
increased availability of inexpensive, user-friendly media technologies for
amateurs (Kearney 2006, 2).
Kearney and other scholars like Janice Radway, Vicki Mayer, and Sharon R. Mazzarella
explore girls’ cultural production in Riot Grrrl, written “zines,” film production, and web
design as examples that importantly challenge entrenched notions of girls as passive
consumers and voiceless victims of a dominant cultural industry. Often showing how
girls have responded to being alienated from the culture they experience—one which is
heavily marked by white, suburban, heterosexual, middle class girls—they illustrate how
these practices are a way for girls to craft their own politics and participate in creating the
culture they want to live in. In fact, Mazzarella has edited two collections, Girl Wide
Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (2005) and its sequel Girl Wide
Web 2.0 (2010), where authors examine a variety of girls’ technological practices—from
instant messaging and web-diaries to online fan communities and game play—as
examples of the way girls negotiate their identity and have their voices heard through the
use of new media technologies. Moreover, even though many of these same scholars
acknowledge the limited visibility and subcultural nature of these practices, they tend to
frame them as idealized feminist exercises: “Young female media producers are the
newest generation of cyborgs, the interfaced human/feminist machine organisms whom
Donna Haraway boldly predicted would lead the feminist movement into the twenty-first
century” (Kearney 2006, 13)
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While I believe in the importance of these projects and I support the cultural and
institutional structures that both encourage and draw attention to these significant aspects
of girl cultural production, this dissertation is less focused on these participatory
practices, which Henry Jenkins (2008) defines as emblematic of cultural convergence.
Instead it focuses on what Jenkins calls media convergence or forms of “structured
interactivity” where media institutions try to “force consumers back into old relationships
and into obedience to well-established norms” (Jenkins 2008, 8). With this approach I do
not wish to participate in what Kearney sees as “the continued focus on girls’ consumerist
practice…[that] risks reproducing conservative ideologies of sex and gender that link
females and femininity to the practices of consumerism and males and masculinity to the
practices of production” (Kearney 2006, 4). My goal in taking this focus is not to
repudiate the significance of girls’ cultural production, to discourage it, or to even
critique girls’ potential to make progressive political or feminist media on their own.
Throughout this dissertation I hope to maintain the idea that girls are savvy and capable
agents of media culture. Rather, my goal is to draw attention to both the structures of the
media industries and the circulations of discourses that work to control the way media
flows and limit some of that potential.
There has been some great innovative work by Kearney and others thinking
through how girls take media into their own hands, which is an important intervention in
to how we think about and approach girls’ media. I look at these practices from a
different angle. I’m interested in the ways in which the industry strategically tries to
control these practices by structuring their own forms of media convergence that work to
reinstate their role as cultural gatekeepers. I understand that cultural production takes
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place in a messy and dispersed environment defined by Jenkins as Convergence Culture:
“where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where
the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in
unpredictable ways” (Jenkins 2008, 2). I contend that many of the current characters,
storylines, and selling of girls’ media at this moment are strategic maneuvers on the part
of the corporate girls’ media industry to regain control at a time of industry instability
and increased consumer autonomy. They confront an inherently dynamic and
unpredictable youth market and an unstable industry environment by clinging tightly to
more stable gender scripts and mythologies that have served corporate culture well. The
industry is turning to traditional television genres, tropes, and modes of representation
that encourage a form of gendered consumerism that works to condition young female
viewers and media users to consume and use media according to their rules. With this
perspective I am, like Sonia Livingstone (2009), trying to avoid both the traps of over-
determined celebratory discourse of new media technologies and moral panics over
possible harm (particularly for girls) by locating contemporary girls’ media somewhere
between the “great expectations” and “challenging realities” of the contemporary media
environment.

Methods and Theoretical Framing:
The critical approach that I employ in this dissertation is what Havens et al.
(2009) define as “critical media industries studies.” In articulating this approach, Havens
et al. hoped to bridge a growing division between top-down political economic analysis
and bottom-up cultural studies approaches. Both approaches have been invested in the
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analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts as well as the examination of
the connections between culture and industry. However, their articulation of this position
acknowledges that scholars have also been increasingly divided between humanities-
based culturalist approaches that focus primarily on texts and audiences and more
empirical social-science-based approaches that focus on larger economic goals and the
logics of large-scale cultural industries. Recognizing how this division created a chasm
between two modes of analysis with similar goals, critical media industries studies
“emphasizes the complex interplay of economic and cultural forces, as well as the forms
of struggle and compliance that take place throughout society at large and within the
media industries in particular” (Havens, Lotz, and Tinic 2009, 235). Their approach
works to combine the modes of analysis established by the Frankfurt School and British
Cultural Studies, while revising some of the flaws and blind spots in order to offer a
better understanding of the way power operates within cultural production and reception.
The Frankfurt School, established in the 1930s by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W.
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, contemplated among other things how
Hitler and the Nazis came to power. They developed a theory of “the cultural industry”
that signified the processes of mass production and the commercial imperatives that
drove the system. They defined the cultural industry as a key institution of social
hegemony in the era they “called state-monopoly capitalism,” where the media
institutions simply reproduced the existing society and manipulated mass audiences into
obedience (Kellner 2009, 96). The Frankfurt School drew attention to the importance of
understanding and contextualizing the modes of production and reception of a particular
text or cultural artifact within existing structures of power in order to truly understand its
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meaning—a foundational tenet in media and cultural studies today.
The modes of analysis established by British Cultural Studies in the 1960s and
1970s, however, sought to correct what they found to be several of the Frankfurt School’s
flaws. Specifically, the Frankfurt School had established a dichotomy between high art
and low culture, which envisioned a distinction between “authentic art,” with the
potential for subversive or emancipatory critique, and “mass culture” that was written off
as ideological and debased, deceiving passive consumers. British Cultural Studies from
which girls’ studies emerged, rejected high/low distinctions and suggested, in the
Gramscian understanding, that cultural forms could serve to either further social control
or enable people to resist (Kellner 2009, 98). As opposed to seeing all popular culture as
oppressive, they looked to all cultural forms as sites of both domination and resistance,
believing that in locating moments of resistance they could aid in the process of social or
political transformation (Kellner 2009, 98). British Cultural Studies also drew attention to
the differing processes of encoding and decoding media artifacts, recognizing that
viewers and consumers produce their own meanings and uses for products of the cultural
industries, which are often negotiations with or resistant to those intended by producers
(Hall 1990).
Even though British Cultural Studies always understood and sought to emphasize
the relationship between industrial forces and cultural production, many cultural studies
scholars have been critiqued for “overemphasizing reception and textual analysis, while
underemphasizing the production of culture and its political economy” (Kellner 2009,
100). At the same time, those scholars focusing on more top-down political economic
analyses in the Frankfurt mode tend to “reduce the meanings and effects of texts to rather
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circumscribed and reductive ideological functions” (102). With the model of critical
media industries studies, both Havens et al. and Kellner propose merging these two
divisions, which as Kellner writes, “can help individuals become aware of the connection
between media and forces of domination and resistance, and can help make audiences
more critical and informed consumers and producers of their culture” (105).
Key to the critical media industries studies approach is to rethink political
economic analysis. In response to John Caldwell’s (2008) critique of political economy’s
“jet-plane view” of the operations of power within complex media industries, Havens et
al. purpose the metaphor of a “helicopter” that offers a less reductionist view of the
relations between the economic, political, technological, and cultural dimensions of the
media industries:
The “jet-plane” vision offers a more expansive view, but many details are
obscured. The “helicopter” view allows us much finer detail, albeit with narrower
scope. As per this metaphor, the view of industrial practices and approach to the
operations of power particular to critical media industry studies informs us of the
complexity and contradiction of power relations that are often obscured at jet-
plane heights (2009, 239).
In adopting this “helicopter” approach to political economy, this dissertation examines a
narrow slice of the media industries, particularly those institutions, divisions, and
individuals focused on producing media content for girl viewers and consumers. In line
with Havens et al.’s suggestions for this approach, it offers an understanding of how
particular “media texts arise from and reshape midlevel industrial practices,” such as
target marketing and the development of transmedia extensions as well as various trends
23
and anxieties circulating within specific business cultures of the girls’ media practitioners
that are visible in trade journals and the popular press. This view provides a detailed and
telling portrait of some of the key structures and operations of the contemporary media
industries, including conglomeration, target marketing, and technological convergence.
Another way that I engage this “helicopter” method of political economy research
is through genre analysis. As Jostein Gripsrud writes, “thinking about genre allows us to
show the intricate interplay between change and stability, and between technological,
financial and cultural factors in the development of actual program material” (Gripsrud
2010, xvii). Genres are malleable and evolving. They reflect “recognizable patterns in our
culture that take shape because they are deeply embedded in institutions and social
practice” (Ito 2009, 3). A critical attention to genre allows me to focus on the interplay of
industrial and cultural motives behind representations of technological girlhood, which
brings together political economic analysis and cultural studies. In order to do this, I
move beyond a focus on just texts that signify particular genres by applying “a cultural
approach to television genre theory” as defined by Jason Mittell (Mittell 2008).
In his effort to explain why television studies scholarship had avoided genre,
Mittell speculated that it was because the formal and aesthetic concerns of much
traditional genre theory seemed incompatible with or insufficient to the questions of
cultural power and politics at the center of many television scholars’ research agendas
(38). In his essay he proposes an alternative approach that can better account for the
cultural operations of television genre. It also offers a unique way to map the
intersections of industry, culture, and power through a combination of political economic
and textual analysis. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse, Mittell sees
24
genre as not being located within certain features of a text, but rather as a discursive
practice and defined through discursive formations or “clusters.”
Foucault’s theory of discourse provides a radical alternative to how we conceive
of both power and knowledge. Instead of being associated with a state, institution or
singular center, Foucault suggested that power and knowledge are operationalized
through discourse and that there is no real outside of discourse. According to Foucault
discourses do not represent the real, but in fact to produce the real. For example, in his
discussion of “The Repressive Hypothesis” Foucault (1990) discusses how bourgeois
idealists sought to control sexuality through discourse, but that in order to do so sex had
to be defined, delineated and appropriated from everyday life through language. As an
extension of Foucault’s discursive formations, Mittell argues, “by regarding genre as a
property and function of discourse, we can examine the ways in which various forms of
communication work to constitute generic definitions and meanings” (Mittell 2008, 44).
His cultural approach to genre suggests paying attention to the different ways in which
discourses of genre are operationalized by various groups of interested parties:
institutions, producers, consumers, academics and journalists: “We might look at what
audiences and industries say about genres, what terms and definitions circulate around
any given generic instance, and how specific cultural concepts are linked to particular
genres” (50).
By examining genres as discursive practices, the goal of each of my chapters is to
locate girls’ media genres within the complex interrelations among texts, industries,
audiences, technologies, and historical contexts. With a “helicopter” perspective
examining a broad scope of discourses around girls’ media properties, I illustrate
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Mittell’s idea that “genres work in discursive clusters, with certain definitions and
meanings coming together at any given time to suggest a coherent and clear genre” (47).
For example, chapter three explores how the Gossip Girl transmedia property can be
understood within the context of the soap opera’s generic practices. I examine how the
CW’s network practices constitute our understanding of the teen soap genre and explore
how other aspects like gender impact the discursive practices of the soap opera genre. I
argue that the soap opera is at the nexus of a number of crucial discourses and practices
in an era of convergence, including gender and age based distinctions and hierarchies,
industrial debates over the genre’s proper target audience, assumptions of the genre’s
textual “essence,” and changing understandings of audience engagement with television
and new media. In each of my chapters I emphasize the industrial discourses and
practices of genres to see how they fit into larger systems of cultural power.
Beyond the specific television genres that I examine in chapters two (sitcom) and
three (soap opera), I also examine television itself as being defined through discursive
formations and clusters. In particular, chapter four examines how in an era of media
convergence television has become a malleable concept defined through various forms of
discursive practice in the media industries. In particular it examines Alloy Digital, a
leading video content aggregator (also called a multi-channel network) working within
the YouTube platform, as key player in shaping contemporary understandings of
television, YouTube, and the teen girl demographic. Acknowledging how television has
always been an unstable discursive construct, it considers whether YouTube offers a
space to re-conceptualize television or girls’ relationship to technology and media
cultural power, while tracing the way media industry practices attempt to delimit its
26
potential.
Throughout my chapters I draw from various discourse in trade papers, the
popular press, and academic publications to frame my own textual analyses, which
consider the ways contemporary media continues to produce a limited and contradictory
definition of girls in relation to technology. But even more centrally, I theorize how the
industrial discourses that shape our understandings of girls, technology and television—
including industrial anxieties, technological fetishes and phobias, and changing
definitions of adolescence, publicity, and privacy—shape the visual forms, storytelling
practices, and consumption contexts of the early 21st century’s convergent media
environment.
Through this “helicopter” approach to political economy, this dissertation
provides a Foucauldian genealogy of girls’ media in the convergences of television and
new media. While in many ways difficult to characterize, Foucault’s genealogical method
can be understood as a historical mode of inquiry, but not a comprehensive one. His
conception of genealogy is focused on a specific historical instance and often deals with
complex processes, which can’t be subordinated to some very general narrative; they
must be dealt with in their specificity and locality (Foucault 1984). As a result although
this dissertation is historical in nature, its history is partial and limited. It doesn’t claim to
be a complete overview of girls’ culture or even girls’ media at this moment. The breadth
of such an undertaking is beyond the scope of a project such as this. Instead this
dissertation intends to characterize the contemporary media industries and open up new
ways of thinking about and acting towards girls’ media culture.

27
The Contemporary Media Industry
The early 21
st
century has signaled profound changes in the American media
industries as new technological innovations in communication—especially the Internet,
mobile phones, social media, and digital video—have led to increased competition,
interactivity, and diversity of media content and consuming practices. Although
technologies are often at the center of our understanding of these developments, these
changes are as much a function of changing economic and social relations during
American’s transition into the neoliberal information society, as they are of technological
progress. Technology has certainly played a central role in this transition, but these
changes are not determined by the technology alone.
One of the most profound changes in the media industries has been the rise in
conglomeration and the consolidation of media ownership as a result of mergers aided by
the deregulation of government restrictions on media-cross ownership. Neoliberal
economic policies supported the rapid deregulation of the media industries that took place
from the Reagan era and on, culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Holt
2011). As a result of these loosening regulations, almost all television networks, film
studios, major newspapers and magazines are now part of one of six major media
conglomerates, which allows for both vertically integrated capabilities of production,
distribution and exhibition, and horizontally integrated business interests across a wide
variety of media industries (Kunz 2006). This consolidation was encouraged to increase
profit margins, reduced risk, and to maintain a competitive edge in what was seen as an
increasingly expansive and unwieldy media culture. Robert McChesney and Josh Silver
argue, however, that monopolistic or oligopolistic control of the media industries
28
prevents them from being fully accountable and dependable in serving the public interest:
“the U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history
of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and
read” (McChesney and Silver 2012). And even Ted Turner, an American media mogul
who built his own media empire during this time of extreme deregulation expresses some
regret that he took advantage of the relaxed rules that allowed greater concentration of
media ownership: “In this environment, most independent media firms either get gobbled
up by one of the big companies or driven out of business altogether. Yet instead of
balancing the rules to give independent broadcasters a fair chance in the market,
Washington continues to tilt the playing field to favor the biggest players” (Turner 2004).
Turner also raises concerns about the quality of information and debate in an
environment where the media is controlled by only a few wealthy corporations and
individuals: “When the ownership of these firms passes to people under pressure to show
quick financial results in order to justify the purchase, the corporate emphasis instantly
shifts from taking risks to taking profits. When that happens, quality suffers, localism
suffers, and democracy itself suffers” (Turner 2004).
Conglomeration has been critiqued by many political economists who see media
consolidation as the streamlining of cultural production in the service of capital, but as
Henry Jenkins suggests, “from the ground, many of the big media giants look like big
dysfunctional families, whose members aren’t speaking with each other and pursue their
own short-term agendas even at the expense of other divisions of the same companies”
(Jenkins 2008, 7–8). Drawing attention to the ways in which consumers, producers and
media institutions interact and engage in new messy ways Jenkins adds, “Convergence
29
doesn’t just involve commercially produced materials and services traveling along well-
regulated and predictable circuits. It doesn’t just involve the mobile companies getting
together with the film companies to decide when and where we watch a newly released
film. It also occurs when people take media in their own hands” (Jenkins 2008, 17).
Nevertheless, in tracing the discursive formations around girls media content, this
dissertation shows how conglomeration has changed the ways teenage girls are targeted
as a market for media and consumer products. It analyzes contemporary girls media
through the lens of conglomeration focusing on properties that are exponentially
capitalized on via conglomerates’ synergistic production of a broad range of media and
entertainment products. For example, according to Valerie Wee: “the cross-media
marketing and promotional activities in the 1990s teen-oriented culture was marked by an
unprecedented degree of intersection across multiple forms of media and distribution
outlets” (Wee 2004). Conglomeration has definitely altered the way the media industries
target girls as a market. As Jenkins notes, “Media texts, genres, characters and stories
flow across platforms with the cooperation and synergy of multiple media industries and
youth consumers are encouraged to follow them across the various channels” (Jenkins
2008). The discursive formations around girls’ media conglomeration therefore help map
the increasingly entwined relationships between advertisers, producers, distributors,
sponsors, and viewers within the contemporary media industry.

Changing Role of Television
For many people, especially those working in the youth television industry, the
pace of industrial and technological change since the 1980s has been dizzying. With the
30
rapid spread and relatively swift adoption of new media technologies, the US television
industry witnessed an almost unprecedented change in the consumption and production
of its programming. During the 1980s and 1990s, with the advent of remote controls,
VCRs, cable, and subscription channels, television audiences became increasingly
fragmented and more discriminating of their content choices; with the development of
DVRs and DVD box sets soon thereafter, time and place shifting gradually began
replacing appointment viewing, and traditional advertising models were less and less
effective. Then, as new media technologies like the Internet, mobile smart phones, and
web 2.0 technologies began leading to more audience control, interactivity, and an almost
incomprehensible amount of media distribution and monetizing models, the audience
became not only further segmented and dispersed, but also demanding of different
methods of consuming content. Amanda Lotz (2007) notes in her thorough overview of
how television has been “revolutionized” over the past 20 years, “As a result of these
changing technologies and modes of viewing, the nature of television use has become
increasingly complicated, deliberate, and individualized… Alterations in the production
process—the practices involved in the creation and circulation of television—including
how producers make television programs, how networks finance them, and how
audiences access them, have created new ways of using television and now challenge our
basic understanding of the medium” (2-3).
Along with Lotz, several media and television scholars have taken up the
changing role of television with a sense of urgency. In a predictive review essay that
signaled a shift in television studies scholarship, Lynn Spigel (2000) draws attention to a
paradox facing the study of television: just as television studies had finally established
31
and, in a way, legitimated itself as a field of research and teaching, the future of
television was being called into question after a series of technological, social, economic,
and industrial changes. Gathering essays from some of the leading scholars of television,
she explores some of these changes in technologies, program forms, government policies,
and practices of looking in her provocatively titled book Television after TV (Spigel and
Olsson 2004), where they discuss how the practices, economics, relationships, logics and
narratives of television have expanded beyond the medium of TV.
One of the tendencies in television scholarship that marks the shift was revisiting
and revising foundational models of television’s textuality in relation to changing
audience viewing patterns and distribution outlets. For instance, Will Brooker discussed
how the diegesis of the series Dawson’s Creek “overflows” television’s boundaries,
spilling out into immersive websites that merge television “with the vast diversity of the
internet” (Brooker 2001, 457). Among others, Jason Mittell (2006) details the “narrative
complexity” of serious adult dramas, which Charlotte Brunsdon (2010) describes as a
type of “bingeability” that is enhanced when watching television on DVD box sets.
Michael Newman and Elana Levine suggest in their book Legitimating Television: Media
Convergence and Cultural Status (2011) that this type of analysis and television’s
growing prestige emerges alongside the convergence of media at technological,
industrial, and experiential levels. They argue, “Television is permitted to rise in
respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media and audiences” (2011, i).
Analyzing taste hierarchies and class-based distinctions, Levine and Newman suggest
that television’s newfound legitimating disassociates the medium from its feminine,
mass-based, domestic roots in favor of a more masculine, elite, sophisticated presence in
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the contemporary technological convergences, ultimately reinforcing cultural hierarchies
that perpetuate instead of break down gender and class inequalities that television
scholars have been concerned with since the development of the discipline.
Nevertheless, these legitimating moves have been extended as several television
scholars responded to popular tales of television’s perceived threat at the hands of new
media. Numerous books and edited collections were produced in what can be read as a
defensive strategy that worked to recentralize the subject of television in the utopian
technophilia of “new media” discourses. Books following this trend include Sheila
Murphy’s How Television Invented New Media (2011), Jennifer Gillan’s Television and
New Media: Must-Click TV (2011) and Jostein Gripsrud’s edited collection, Relocating
Television: Television in the Digital Context (Gripsrud 2010). Many of them have taken
on claims that television is dead or dying by convincingly pointing to the endurance of
previous forms of media including painting, print, radio, and film. They take on similar
themes explored in this dissertation more broadly, particularly, how television is
embedded in the structures of new media content, business models, and viewing
experiences. More often than not, they conclude “television is neither ‘beating’ nor
‘losing’ to new media in some cosmic clash of technology. Rather, television is an
intrinsic part of so-called new media” (Gray and Lotz 2011, 3).
In terms of content alone, television seems to permeate the Internet and other new
media technologies. As Gray and Lotz note, television is increasingly experienced online
and on mobile devices, whether by being repurposed on YouTube, streamed over the
Internet, or otherwise downloaded (3). Television, particularly live television like
sporting events, is also frequently the subject of tweets, status updates or online forums
33
and discussion boards. Significantly they add that “rather than seeing an exodus from the
business of television by telecommunications companies, we see more attempting to enter
the field, as when both Verizon and then AT&T recently challenged the regular pack of
cable operators in many American markets by offering television service” (3). Overall,
the utopian rhetoric of how new digital technologies will transform the media industries
misleadingly tend to displace the importance of television’s economic, ideological, and
sociological influence and staying power in these debates (Schatz 2011). However, as
Holt and Perren note, “Changes in the industries, the texts they produce, and the ways
these texts are consumed make media-specific formulations increasingly problematic”
(Holt and Perren 2009, 4). Therefore, it is crucial to understand how television is
changing and evolving in the current climate, particularly because the convergence of the
media industries has obscured the boundaries between the television, film, publishing,
internet, and telecommunication industries.

Youth Television Industry
Given the widespread development of neoliberalism, conglomeration, and
convergence sketched above, it almost goes without saying that as the media industry
moves into the 2010s it’s in an era of uncertainty, instability, and change. However, the
youth television industry, in particular, is on the cusp of a new transition as it learns how
to compete with and predict the success or failure of new media distribution models like
Netflix and YouTube as well as different forms of media interaction and consumption
popular with youths, including video games, online virtual communities, and social
media. With the success of user-generated content and expansive content options spread
34
across a plethora of new media outlets, industry insiders are particularly concerned that
young people will stop pushing their parents to pay for lucrative cable subscriptions in
favor of personal computers and smart phone devices with more personalization,
interactivity, and mobility, but less stable profit guarantees. Viacom even attempted to
collect more than $1 billion in damages for the alleged copyright abuses of Google's
popular YouTube service, which many felt symbolized the media company’s fear of its
digital competition (Liedtke 2010). The ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in
New York favored YouTube and embraces Google’s interpretation of a 12-year-old law
that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as they
promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation (Liedtke 2010). According
to Jesse Cleverly of KidScreen, producers of television programming for children,
tweens, and teenagers are particularly worried about how they will transition into the age
of new media. She writes, “some have bosses so terrified of new media they have to
pretend to be certain about their digital plans to placate their superiors. Others exist in a
state of what can only be deemed as enlightened confusion and are hesitant to wade into
the fray” (Cleverly 2010).
The youth media industry is often thought to be at the forefront of industry
changes and concerns, because contemporary youths are part of what’s being called the
Millennial Y generation. They are described in popular discourse as a new generation of
“digital-savvy” youngsters who grow up with a cell phone in their hand and an almost
innate predilection to understand and use digital media. Even though not all youths have
access to newer digital technologies nor do they all use media in the same way once they
have it, and family income continues to be a barrier for many youths owning technology,
35
this younger generation has nevertheless become the symbol for how digital media has
impacted the media industry. The media industry tends to direct its fears about the effect
these changes will have on their profits towards the Y generation, who become targets of
anti-piracy lawsuits and scapegoats for leading the change, when in fact their digital
media use is not all that different from adults. Even though the youth television industry
has become one of the most crowded and competitive markets in the entertainment
industry, despite a few notable exceptions, media scholars have paid relatively little
attention to either the growth or convergence of this market and even fewer have
examined the consequences of regulatory decisions.
Nonetheless given these fears of “generation digital,” Tara McPherson (2007) has
drawn attention to the many popular books and articles that have “explored the
emergence of the ‘net’ or ‘digital’ generation, describing in great detail the media-
saturated environments that young people inhabit,” including Dan Tapscott’s Growing
Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (2008) and Neil Howe and William Strauss’
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000). In many ways this dissertation
explores how certain myths and assumptions about how youths’ media use are impacting
the youth media industry and products for them. The fact that many kids have supposedly
grown up with computers, cell phones, and other digital media devices has lead to a
popular “generation gap caricature,” where “youth are portrayed as either technologically
adept compared to adults or as utterly vulnerable and defenseless” (Flanagin and Metzger
2010, 4). More often than not, the Millennial generation are considered experts and early
adopters of new media technologies and “adults who stand on the other side of a
generation gap” find the new media practices of kids “mystifying and, at times,
36
threatening” (Ito et al. 2008, 36). As Eszter Hargittai notes, “People who have grown up
with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and
communication technologies.” Yet, significantly she adds, “Such assumptions are rarely
grounded in empirical evidence” (Hargittai 2010, 92). In her interrogation of the U.S.’s
conception of the digital divide as a problem only of access, Hargittati concludes that
although age and generation play a role Internet usage, numerous differences remain
among them when it comes to how they incorporate the Internet into their lives and
understand various aspects of Internet use (2010). She adds, “These differences are not
randomly distributed. Students of lower socioeconomic status, women, students of
Hispanic origin, and African Americans exhibit lower levels of Web know-how than
others” (Hargittai 2010, 108). Ellen Seiter documents some of these differences in her
book Internet Playground (2005), where she shows how students in two different after
school journalism classes had vastly different cultural understandings of computers,
particularly gendered understandings, depending on their parents class level and use of
computers.
Furthermore, in Mimi Ito’s et al’s meticulous and expansive ethnographic study
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New
Media, they argue against sweeping generalizations about how the millennial generation
“is overthrowing culture and knowledge as we know it and that its members are engaging
in new media in ways radically different from those of older generations” (Ito et al. 2008,
8). In a summary of their findings they concluded that youths are using and adopting new
media technologies into their lives, but that “the underlying practices of sociability,
learning, play, and self-expression are undergoing a slower evolution, growing out of
37
resilient social and cultural structures that youth inhabit in diverse ways in their everyday
lives” (8). As part of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on
Digital Media and Learning, Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam Metzger found “Children in
the study reported that they use the Internet (not including email), for an average of 13.53
hours per week, although there was quite a lot of variation in the amount of time they
spent online (standard deviation = 12.44). This means that the majority of kids (nearly 70
percent) spent anywhere from 1 to 26 hours a week online” (2010, 24). So, ultimately,
even though it is true that youths are using technology and new media devices, both their
difference from adults and their universality of use and skill is often significantly
oversimplified and overblown.
Nonetheless, the youth media industry, including marketers, advertisers, and
content producers, tends to reinforce the mythology of tweens and teens as enigmatic
technophiles. “They reinforce the conflation of generational identity with technology
identity with the hopes of capitalizing on this close identification” (Ito et al. 2008). For
example, at “The Trend School” a brainstorming conference hosting over 50 marketers
from studios, major game developers, cellphone operators and toy companies, the biggest
concern was the “wages of technology” on contemporary youth consumer culture.
According to Jane Buckingham, the keynote speaker and founder and chief of the
Intelligence Group, a youth-focused consumer insights company, the use and
incorporation of technology into everyday life is a dividing factor between generation x
and generation y. She talks about how, “generation y wants more interactivity and rely so
heavily on technology that they don’t even notice it (Abramowitz 2007). The Discovery
Research Consultancy proclaimed that “Today's children are a generation that expects
38
instant access to entertainment and friends, uses digital media to convey its identity, turns
to YouTube as its preferred search channel, and eschews email for more immediate
communication with friends” (Anonymous 2011). Articles flood the trade publications
with titles like “Media Habits: Kids Talk,” “Uncovering Kids Digital Habits,” and “If
Your Children Are Awake, Then They're Probably Online,” which perpetuate these
overarching assumptions about youth media use, while, of course, justifying the need for
new and improved marketing strategies they can provide. Marketers often describe first
hand accounts of idealized media consumers: upper middle class white children who text
all day, play video games, listen to music, peruse YouTube, blog, and update their
Facebook page while streaming TV shows, which nonetheless reflects a multi-tasking
interactivity that frightens a lot of teen media producers. As a result, industry producers
have become overly paranoid about how they can reach the eyes of these multi-tasking
youths, which they believe are constantly changing their consuming and viewing habits
and they turn to the marketing experts for help. Therefore, marketing experts tend to
spout self-fulfilling prophecies that justify their worth, while shaping and influencing
trends as much as tracking them.
Regardless of accuracy, these anxious industry perspectives greatly affect industry
strategy and product as media makers scramble for the advice of “experts.” For example,
this understanding and mythology of contemporary tween and teen consuming and
buying habits is fairly consistent across many industry websites. Alloy
Media+Marketing, the media buying, data-mining, and tarket-marketing division of the
leading media conglomerate Alloy Inc. that also produces programming for young people
(Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars) and develops innovative integrated marketing
39
campaigns (see chapter 4) describes teens/tweens on their webpage as “exceptionally
hard to target”, because they “require unconventional tools and expertise.” They
propagate this industry understanding of teens/tweens by suggesting that they are
“bombarded by choices, demanding of speed and response, savvy in the face of
marketing messages, and ‘Wired’ throughout the day via multiple forms of interpersonal
communication like e-mail, IM, cell phones and text messaging” (Alloy M+M 2011). In
response to these increasing challenges, Alloy describes itself as offering “the industry’s
widest array of tools and deepest breadth of teen-centric insight,” by “targeting teens in
their places, on their terms, 24/7” (Alloy M+M 2011). As discussed more in chapter 4,
Alloy has built its reputation as an innovator in convergence marketing and media
production based on its ability to shape industry understandings of girls as especially
savvy with digital media.
As a result of these over-determined beliefs about teen media use and
consumption, the Internet, social media, mobile smart phones, and other forms of digital
distribution are the hot topic of conversation among television industry insiders as they
develop strategies to compete with new media. However, despite the industry hyperbole
and anxiety about the “digital generation” abandoning it, television has been and
continues to be the center of kids’ media consumption. According to the 2009 Nielsen
Company’s A2/M2 Three Screen Report analyzing television, Internet and mobile usage
in the US, television is still the dominant choice for Americans who watch video. Almost
99% of the video watched in the U.S. is still done on television, and traditional TV usage
in the U.S. remains at an all-time high—approximately 153 hours a month (The Nielsen
Company 2009). In fact many studies have pointed to increased multi-tasking and
40
simultaneous screen usage among children and tweens, but “even as technology evolves
and young children increasingly turn to games and mobile media, they still love
television the best” (Gutnick et al. 2010, 4). In their report summarizing the digital media
habits of children in comparison to television, Gutnick et al. write, “Today, children ages
8 to 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media, but they’re actually exposed to
almost 8 hours of media, because they use multiple media simultaneously. Most of that
time, more than 3.5 hours per day, is spent with television. Among children ages 2 to 11,
about 36% use the TV and Internet simultaneously” (16). With similar findings, Victoria
Rideout at Common Sense Media writes, that seventy-two percent of 5- to 8-year-olds
watch television at least once a day, forty-two percent have a TV in their bedroom, and
spend an average of 1:44 hours watching TV or videos in a typical day, compared to :29
reading, :29 listening to music, and :25 playing computer or video games” (Rideout
2011). And, while many industry folk worry that the time spent watching television is
actually done on alternate platforms, according to a Horowitz study, “of all the hours
Internet users say they spend watching TV programs, about 4% of TV time is on a
platform other than a TV set — 2% on a PC/laptop and 2% on a handheld — with the
vast majority (96%) still consumed via the traditional television platform” (Horowitz
2010). Moreover, “More than one-third of children over age 5 say their favorite Web sites
are those tied to television networks. By large measure, the sources of the Web sites
children are browsing are TV shows and networks (57%) and TV commercials (36%)”
(Gutnick et al. 2010).
Television viewing is still important to the profit margins of the media
conglomerates, especially in an era where the profits of one division (cable) are making
41
up for losses or sometimes completely funding another (film) (Holt 2003). At a 2011
industry lunch at Warner Bros., Bruce Rosenblum, the President of Warner Bros.
Television group, said that even though he spends the majority of his meetings discussing
the impact of new media, television ad revenue still makes up over 80% of the major
networks profits, and cable networks are still the major moneymakers for the
conglomerates overall (Rosenblum 2011). He is echoed by News Corp. Chief Operating
Officer Chase Carey: “[Cable networks represent] more than half our profits, and that
percentage will continue to increase among our existing businesses” (Wilkerson 2010).
David B. Wilkerson, of the Wall Street Journal’s “Market Watch” illustrates this fact:
At Time Warner, the home of TNT, TBS Superstation, HBO, CNN, CNN
Headline News and Cartoon Network, second-quarter operating profit rose
14% to $981 million, as revenue improved by 11% to $3.2 billion. Ad
revenue jumped 14% on strong demand for commercials. Higher affiliate
fees pushed subscription revenue to a 9% gain, while greater sales of HBO
programming such as True Blood led to a 10% increase in content revenue
(Wilkerson 2010).
Similarly, Viacom reported roughly the same amount of revenue for the quarter ending in
June—$3.3 billion—as it did in the quarter a year earlier, yet its profit rose almost 52
percent to $420 million from $277 million last year. Notably, their profit growth comes
specifically from their cable channels, which had the major hit shows iCarly on
Nickelodeon and 16 and Pregnant on MTV (Stelter 2010). The New York Times
supported the trend in July of 2011: “Despite worries of a possible double-dip recession,
so far companies are not pulling back from their television ad spending plans,
42
demonstrating the resiliency of the medium even when faced with a downturn and the
persistent threat of the Internet to steal viewers” (Stelter and Vega 2011). Therefore, the
industry anxiety about new media is significantly overblown when considering these
facts.
Yet, given this tension between wanting to hold on to the profitable model of
television production and adapting to the increasing competition and threat of new media,
the youth media industry has been in a precarious position as it tries to stay ahead of the
trends or at least keep up with it’s target consumer base, which has been the case for three
dominant youth media brands: Nickelodeon, The CW, and Alloy. Together these three
brands illustrate the changing yet resilient role of television in the contemporary youth
media industry. They reveal specific trends and tendencies in the industry overall, which
are tied to the various ways they have handled and strategized the competition and
convergence with new media with varying degrees of success.

Chapter Breakdown:
Together my chapters provide a snapshot of the media industry during the
transition into the second decade of the twenty-first century, drawing attention to the
tenuous industrial climate out of which representations of post-feminist technological
girlhood emerge. Focusing on the widespread development of neoliberalism,
conglomeration, and convergence, which frames the contemporary political economy of
the girls media industry, I theorize the changing role of television in the convergent
media landscape. Taking on claims that television is dead or dying, I sketch the shifting
yet substantial role of television in both the media industry overall and in the lives of
43
girls. I outline how Nickelodeon, The CW, and Alloy have handled and strategized this
transition with varying degrees of success. In defining this transition, I narrow in on what
Amanda Lotz defines as “the post-network era” of television history, from the 2000s-
2010s, in which the television industry faces the challenges of digitalization in terms of
distribution, transmission, and what she calls “interoperability between television and the
other technologies that came to define the contemporary media world” (Lotz 2007).
Concentrating on the discursive formations around each media brand and their
targeted texts for girl audiences, the textual analyses and production contexts of
television shows like iCarly (Nickelodeon) and Gossip Girl (The CW) as well as web
shows Pubertina (ShutUp! Cartoons), and First Day (Alloy Digital) illustrate how
constructions of contemporary technological girlhood are complex products at the nexus
of cultural, political, and economic interests. Each of the three case studies represent how
different networks and companies use particular genres (situation comedy, soap opera,
and web series respectively) to frame new media technologies to coincide with their
evolving business models in the post network convergent era. Despite an increasingly
diverse and niche-based media environment, all three brands are invested in promoting
and even creating a post-feminist subject position through their transmedia properties,
which encourages an idealized form of gendered engagement and consumption during a
time of industry instability. The post-feminist subject becomes a means for these brands
to create and expand the profitable markets of older media like television and magazines
onto the web without radically altering their core business strategies, but it also limits the
potential diversity and unique opportunities that new media can offer especially for girls.
44
As traced above, critics argue that new communication technologies expose girls
to risky experiences outside of the safe domestic space, allowing them access to
information away from the watchful eyes of parents, while leaving them open to
exploitation and harm by strangers. They also argue that the increasing
commercialization of these technologies seduces them away from both more traditional
domestic labor production and the potential for more politically or socially democratic
action. Advocates on the other hand see new media technologies as a gateway into the
public sphere that helps young girls breakdown traditional gendered hierarchies of power,
allowing them to forge unlikely relationships and providing them access to new kinds of
knowledge, while also giving them the capabilities to be producers of culture instead of
only consumers.
Situated in the middle of these debates, “The Virtual Big Sister” conceptualizes
girls’ media culture at the center of industry changes and as a frequent target of industry
concerns. As people, and particularly girls, around the world move online, with
unprecedented access to information, modes of communication, and means of production
and distribution, the established industrial relationships between producers, advertisers
and audiences are being eroded, which destabilizes many entrenched business models in
the media industry. With the focus on change and hypothesizing about progress versus
decline, critics, academics and consumers have been distracted from how much has
actually stayed the same, especially in relation to industry strategy and gender. In
contrast, my work presents a critical interrogation of the contemporary media industries
by mapping a political economy of girls’ television industry and paying special attention
to historical representational consistencies.
45
In my second chapter I look at Nickelodeon’s hit situation comedy iCarly as a
strategic attempt by the network to incorporate new media technologies into the
traditional sitcom narrative in order to encourage corporate synergy and to appeal to
teenage use of other media without adjusting their reliance on the traditional business
models of the television industry. Comparing the show to previous tween girl sitcoms and
the overall Nickelodeon ethos, this chapter argues that while empowerment and
citizenship continue to be key to Nickelodeon’s brand, even extending into the network’s
digital assets, the iCarly sitcom presents a contradictory understanding of a gendered
digital citizenship that tends to undermine the network’s more prosocial initiatives.
In my third chapter, I trace the development of Gossip Girl in conjuncture with
the CW network as well as its bumpy tenure in order to trace some of the emerging
programming strategies in the convergent media industry and theorize where they may be
heading. I situate Gossip Girl in relation to the history of soap operas, particularly in
terms of the genre’s serial storytelling, economic models, and gendered audience address.
The show reflects how the contemporary media industry continues to rely on traditional
genre characteristics and stable gender scripts that have served corporate culture well
historically despite other innovations and experimentation with programming strategies. I
argue that there is an important correlation between the representations of post-feminist
technological girlhood tied to the soap opera genre—where characters perform a
femininity tied to the maintenance and control of their bodies under the surveillance
encouraged and allowed by new media devices—and the motives of The CW and its
partner Alloy Entertainment to try to control and track the way their audiences are
consuming media.
46
Then, as a telling example of some of the changing definitions of television today,
chapter four traces the role of Alloy Inc. in shaping core assumptions about the emerging
media systems of the twenty first century. This analysis ultimately reflects Alloy’s
participation in the ongoing technological redefinition of television as opposed to an
abandonment of it. In particular the chapter focuses on the development of Alloy Digital
during the past twenty years of the company’s tenure, narrowing in on its most recent
acquisitions and web series productions to map the way television and young female
audiences are being reimagined for the digital age. In order to explore Alloy’s position in
the current media environment, this chapter focuses on the web series as an emergent
media genre and explores several different web series produced by Alloy Digital.
Together these web series, not only point to some of the ways that media content for girls
and young women is evolving online, but also the way television is influencing the
development of web content.
In focusing on these three case studies, this dissertation maps the ways that gender
conventions and economic motives continue to circumscribe media consumption for girls
in the contemporary convergent media landscape. In particular, it offers a critical reading
of the gendered structuring logics of program creation, advertising models, and
representation within contemporary girls’ media. Seen together, these industrial
components reflect trends in the way that youth media outlets are attempting to monetize
content in this era of technological and industrial change, and the vital role that specific
gendered subject positions continue to play in the media environment. Ultimately, these
three case studies draw attention to the changing relationships between and
47
understandings of media content production, distribution, sponsorship, and audience
address in the contemporary media environment.
Throughout these chapters, I move away from questions about reception or media
effects in order to concentrate on production and distribution contexts that shape industry
understandings of girl audiences and the representations made for them. This allows me
to map cultural anxieties about privacy, visibility, gender roles, and power visible within
the text onto emerging industrial concerns about the media industry’s instability in an era
of convergence. Each of the chapters unpacks some of the gendered dimensions of online
adolescent media, the shifting and gendered nature of transmedia storytelling, and
important issues around privacy and consumption. They explore concepts of corporate
walled gardens, data-mining, immaterial labor and gendered forms of audience address
that underwrite so many transmedia properties for girls today. In the course of my
chapters, I historicize the social discourses that continue to denigrate girl audiences,
examine the industrial strategies that constitute and control them, and explore how young
girls themselves might navigate the mediated worlds in which they are heavily policed.
By questioning contradictions between the social devaluation of girl taste and the
financial value assigned to girls (and their mothers and sisters) in the marketplace, I
excavate the crucial intersection of gender, institution, and power at stake in the
technological and industrial convergences of the contemporary media industry.

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conglomerates-2010-08-16.

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Chapter Two:
iConverge With iCarly:
Television, New Media, & Gender in the Tween Sitcom

In the pilot episode of Nickelodeon’s cable sitcom iCarly (2007-2012), the main
protagonist Carly Shay (Miranda Cosgrove) gets frustrated when her adult teacher
doesn’t respect her choice of participants for the school’s talent competition, which
includes a boy who can squirt milk from his eyeballs. As she explains to her best friends
Sam Puckett (Jennette McCurdy) and Freddie Benson (Nathan Kress), “I hate when
adults like Miss Briggs can control what kids can do and see.” So, in an act of rebellion
and gumption she purposes they create their own online web show, telling Sam and
Freddie, “Let’s give [our kid fans] what they want, online, every week. It can be
whatever we want it to be. No adults to say, ‘You can do that, you can’t do that.’ We can
do or say whatever we want” (“iPilot”). Thereafter, the sitcom centers on the adventures
of Carly, Sam, and Freddie as they make a weekly web show, iCarly.com balancing the
perks and problems of being an Internet celebrity with the normal issues of adolescence.
The show was one of the first television series for kids to converge the television and
computer screen, both aesthetically and thematically, with the goal of creating an
immersive transmedia property appealing to kids’ increased use of digital and social
media. As Ethan Thompson (2008) notes, the series integrates a “Web 2.0 sensibility”
into the traditional sitcom format, by soliciting viewer-generated content and altering the
“look” of the sitcom. This creates a unique televisual aesthetic that separates it from
traditional sitcoms and visually links the television show with user-generated content
popular on video streaming sites like YouTube.
56
Using a cultural approach to television genre theory (Mittell 2008) the goal of this
chapter is to contextualize iCarly within the industrial imperatives of Nickelodeon at the
time of its development and to explore how the show’s narrative, aesthetic, and
representational strategies adhere to Nickelodeon’s well-established branding initiatives.
Specifically, I focus on the show’s generic framework and illustrate how the show
adheres to some of the classic conventions of the sitcom, particularly in terms of gender
conventions. I situate iCarly within Nickelodeon’s reliance on the situation comedy at a
time when the genre was seemingly in decline across the television industry and explore
how the show creates an immersive transmedia experience around the property through
its use of particular visual and narrative devices. I then consider the role of intertextuality
in the show’s humor and explore the show’s use of parody to poke fun at the discourses
of the sitcom genre and new media technologies. By comparing iCarly to Jonathan
Gray’s (2006) understanding of The Simpsons as participating in critical intertextuality
(37), I contemplate what iCarly’s parody and reliance on intertextual references offers in
relation to Nickelodeon’s brand? Gray suggests “parody has great power and potential to
write back to and even write over other texts and genres, to contextualize and
recontextualize other media offerings, and thus to teach and engender a media literacy of
sorts” (2). Since iCarly’s parody and intertextuality often takes new media technologies
and devices as its topic, this chapter contemplates whether it can engender a type of new
media literacy for its viewers?
In Sarah Banet-Weiser’s thorough examination of Nickelodeon in her book Kids
Rule! (2007), she argues that a key aspect of the cable network’s success lies in its
construction of children as empowered citizens within the “Nickelodeon Nation.” By
57
tapping into ideologies of community and belonging, she argues that certain
programming themes were key to the channel’s claim to empower and respect kids,
including the channel’s commitment to producing a type of “girl power politics” and
developing all around more diverse representations. Kevin Sandler argues, “promoting
specific prosocial elements such as diversity, nonviolent action, appropriate levels of
humor and guidelines for success—all without ever talking down to kids—characterizes
the brand attitude of Nickelodeon” (Sandler 2004, 45). During the multi-channel
transition in which Nickelodeon was established, the distinctive branding of cable
channels was incredibly important to their eventual success (Lotz 2007). So,
Nickelodeon’s empowerment discourse was as much about business strategies during this
time as it was about “respecting kids.” As Banet-Weiser notes in her conclusion to Kids
Rule!, however, the media landscape has dramatically changed since the 1990s: “The
rebellious, upstart network is not so much an alternative to the multimedia conglomerates
as it is the primary media source for U.S. youth. Indeed, the programming, industry
practices, and rhetoric of the channel do not pose a challenge to the ‘system’—for
Nickelodeon is the system in the current media environment” (217). As Nickelodeon has
become the dominant space for kids, its branding strategies and motives have altered, and
its themes around empowerment are arguably less explicit or even muddled.
While citizenship continues to be key to Nickelodeon’s brand, extending into the
network’s digital assets, iCarly’s parody and intertextuality in the sitcom genre presents a
rather contradictory understanding of digital citizenship that tends to undermine the
networks’ more prosocial initiatives. This is particularly apparent when looking at the
highly gendered representations of technology on the show, which are discussed below.
58
Overall, in examining how the show represents new media technologies particularly in
relation to contemporary post-feminist girlhood and the history of girls in the sitcom, this
chapter conceptualizes iCarly as an example of how the contemporary media industry is
promoting youths’ increasing use of digital communication technologies, while working
diligently to control the ways they use them. iCarly is a strategic attempt by Nickelodeon
to incorporate new media technologies into the traditional sitcom narrative in order to
encourage corporate synergy and to appeal to teenage use of other media, but ultimately
with the hopes of keeping them consuming within the Nickelodeon brand above all else.

iSave TV: Nickelodeon’s Bright Idea
In the episode of iCarly titled “iCarly Saves TV,” Nickelodeon’s highly
successful live action sitcom spoofs its own origin story. The episode begins with a
young girl sitting in the large executive office of the fictional TVS television studios.
Instead of the big flat screen television on the wall, the girl sits with her eyes transfixed to
her laptop as she steadily laughs out loud to the goofy antics of the iCarly.com web show,
which is the show-within-a-show at the center of the cable sitcom iCarly on Nickelodeon.
Soon, her television executive dad enters and with more than a little annoyance, sits
down, closes the laptop, and reminds his daughter, “If Dadddy doesn’t come up with TV
shows that people your age like, Daddy’s going to get fired and have no more money;
then you’ll starve.” With the canned laughter playing in the background, he leads her
over to the television and asks her to watch his latest sitcom development. Reluctantly the
daughter agrees.
59
The prospective television pilot is strikingly out-of-touch with the tween
demographic that the fictional TVS network is supposedly targeting. In contrast to the
colorful sets and consumer-friendly fantasy apartments that viewers of Nickelodeon have
come to expect from the upper middle class norm of the network’s aesthetic, its
production design is more akin to working-class class sitcoms All in the Family or
Roseanne. This dull aesthetic acts as a strategic marker for the savvy tween audience of
its “difference” from the cool and hip norm of other TV shows they are used to, where
they may fantasize over the consumer products littering the fictional homes of the stars
1
.
In this setting, the first scene of the potential pilot begins with a rather “square” dad
asking his tween daughter “But Michelle, why would you accept two dates to the prom,
but not tell either boy about the other?” The pretentious young actress responds with a
slight roll of the eyes and an exuberant, “Because Dad, Luke is so sweet, but Brandon is
SO hot!” In this playful nod to the characters of the long-running teen soap Beverly Hills:
90210, the pilot is associated with the tired and conventional teen stories that revolved
only around heterosexual courtship, dating, and parent approval, which Nickelodeon has
worked hard to distance itself from in an effort to respect kids’ taste (Sandler 2004). The
dad responds by animatedly slapping his forehead and yelling the catchphrase “Oh
noodles!” This is all the savvy tween viewer needs to see before she rolls her eyes, turns
off the prospective pilot, and resumes watching her web show
2
.
The iCarly.com web show fits better with the Nickelodeon brand tweens have
grown to recognize over the twenty years of the network’s existence: with a colorful hip
set, flashy costumes, and slapstick, the web show is a comedy akin to “stupid human
tricks” or America’s Funniest Home Videos for kids, which celebrates their goofiness in
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contrast to what former Nickelodeon President Geraldine Laybourne called “green
vegetable television” or adult-approved educational programming (Jenkins 2004, 135).
On the iCarly.com web show, Carly and Sam prove silly obvious things like “ice is cold”
by having someone sit in a tub of ice or “what happens when you pump air into a
watermelon.” They pause for “random dance breaks,” and feature actual as well as
network-produced user-generated videos of stupid human tricks, gags, or pranks
submitted by (and sometimes starring) Nickelodeon viewers. As Heather Hendershot
observes, “Nick gives kids the fun they want by gently violating adult ideas of propriety,
and it satisfies adults by conforming to their vision of “quality” children’s programming”
(Hendershot 2004, 3). Despite the young girls’ obvious enthusiasm for the iCarly.com
website in the episode, exemplified by her animated laughter and engaged posture, the
young fan’s dad is disappointed when he returns with his boss and catches her enjoying
the web show again. The frustrated boss summarizes what we are all supposed to be
thinking: “If you want to make something good, why don’t you make a show like that
one on the internet. You know, the one that’s making your daughter laugh,” which is
exactly what the executive attempts to do in the rest of the “iCarly Saves TV” episode.
As this brief opening scene spoofs, the premise and development of iCarly is a
direct response to industrial anxieties about the Internet and other digital communication
technologies competing with television programming for viewers and the resultant ad
rates. The television show was designed both aesthetically and narratively to appeal to
tweens who might be beginning to explore the Internet and other digital media platforms
in supplement to television. iCarly was also intended to be Nickelodeon’s answer to the
Disney tween franchise successes of Hannah Montana, the live action sitcom about a
61
teenage pop star who wants to remain an ordinary kid in school, and High School
Musical, the blockbuster cable movie about two teens who fall in love through music.
With these two franchises, which both spun off musical releases that climbed to the top of
the pop charts as well as sell-out concerts, feature films, and millions of dollars in
licensing opportunities, Disney had a stronghold on the highly coveted youth
demographic. Disney estimated, for example, that retail sales related to the tween
franchises to hit $400 million worldwide in 2007 (LaMonica 2007). As Disney’s main
rival, Nickelodeon hoped to replicate a similar cross-platform franchise with iCarly by
building on the trend of performer-centered media like American Idol, Hannah Montana
and High School Musical that were dominating the television landscape for kids and
tweens. In order to tackle such a project, Nickelodeon turned to Dan Schneider, an
industry vet of kids television with proven success on three of Nickelodeon’s biggest
tween hits Drake and Josh, Zoey 101, and The Amanda Show. A former child television
star himself, playing Dennis on the 80’s sitcom Head of the Class, Schneider attempted to
reconceptualize the show-within-a-show format for the digital age—a concept that is key
to iCarly's multiplatform success (Shields 2008). iCarly was designed to be the Hannah
Montana of cyberspace—a self-made celebrity of the digital era that would appeal to a
whole generation of perceived “digital natives” and could be at the center of a franchise
extending across multiple media platforms.
By both old and new media standards, the show turned out to be a major success
for Nickelodeon. The debut episode in September 2007 garnered 3.5 million viewers at 8
p.m, with another episode and encore airings the same weekend increasing those
numbers. The show’s website generated 270,000 unique visitors and 1.1 million streams
62
during the week of the premiere (Nordyke and Andreeva 2007). Two thousand viewer-
produced videos were reportedly uploaded to the site its first weekend as well (Young
2007). And, by its second season, iCarly had overtaken Hannah Montana as television’s
number one series among kids 2 to 11 and tweens 9 to 14 (Villarreal 2012). Throughout
the 2010-2011 television season iCarly was the number one show on television among
children 2 to 11, as measured by new episodes and not repeats, according to Nielsen
Media Research (Barnes 2010). Its highest-rated episode drew 12 million viewers,
millions more than most broadcast network sitcoms (Weinman 2011). And, in April
2011, TV By The Numbers ranked iCarly as basic cable’s top entertainment program with
total viewers and the month’s top series on broadcast and basic cable with kids 2-11, kids
6-11 and tweens 9-14 (Gorman 2011).
Although, in many ways iCarly is an innovative and contemporary show, its
cross-promotional success and strategies for multimedia tween franchising can be traced
back to Disney, who used almost the exact same cross-promotional strategies sixty years
ago when they launched Annette Funicello’s career on The Mickey Mouse Club (Wasko
2001; Kidman 2010). With Annette, and later Ricky Nelson, Davy Jones, David Cassidy
and eventually Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana, Disney hoped to target tweens just as they
transitioned from television viewers and toy consumers into music consumers and movie
viewers, guiding their consuming habits towards Disney artists and products, while
keeping them in the corporate brand family even as they transitioned out of the original
target demographic. Janet Wasko argues that its ability to maintain a brand integrity built
on fantasy, while innovating strategic multi-media, multi-product, multi-experience cross
promotions was key to the historical expansion of the Disney empire (Wasko 2001).
63
Similarly, Nickelodeon targets the tween or pre-tween audience with iCarly, and rather
than just music, the show acts as an introduction to various types of digital media
technologies, with the hopes that kids will stay within the brand family of Nickelodeon
and even Viacom more broadly as they get older and transition from television
consumption to online consumption. With the interactive and cross-over potential of
iCarly, “Nick is betting that allowing kids to showcase their own content and shape the
direction of the show will create a deep brand connection and sense of empowerment,
hopefully resulting in ratings magic” (Burgess 2007). The show was a strategic attempt to
compete with the rising popularity of YouTube by keeping those tweens consuming the
Nick brand as they moved online.

iHave Seen This Before: Sitcom Gender Conventions
Although the premise of iCarly seems very specific to the millennial generation
and symbolic of the early twenty-first century, when web 2.0 technologies and other new
media formats are dominating popular culture, the show’s generic properties are about as
old as television itself. Just like some of the most famous sitcoms in television’s history,
iCarly is filmed on a stage with a three-camera setup and a laugh track. It focuses on a
small group of characters and follows a half-hour narrative structure based on the
escalation of tightly scripted jokes. Creator and executive producer Dan Schneider has
explicitly mentioned how he created iCarly with the traditional formats, narratives, and
structures of some of the great network sitcoms of the past in mind like, The Brady
Bunch, Roseanne, or All in the Family (Dimeo 2009; Dee 2007; Steinberg 2007). The
show, despite being centered on the creation of a web series, follows the classic sitcom
64
structure described by television scholar Horace Newcomb: “A problem arises as a threat
to the situation, the group, or a character within it. The characters attempt to deal with it,
and the problem is resolved by the end of the episode, returning the situation to
“normalcy” (Newcomb 1974, 40-41). This resolution and return to normalcy has been
extremely appealing to networks and advertisers over the years as it promises a new
beginning for the next show, but with the same humor and reliable characters, which will
in turn bring audiences back week after week to experience the new episode and a new
situation. The quick and easy resolution to problems, usually through the purchase of
commodities, also creates an ideal environment for promoting consumption, which
satisfies advertisers as well.
In many ways, iCarly resembles I Love Lucy’s focus on characters preparing for a
performance. Just as the plot of a typical I Love Lucy episode revolves around one of
Desi’s performances and Lucy’s attempt to break into his act, many of iCarly’s episodes
revolve around Carly and her best friends Sam and Freddie producing or performing for
their web show. The pilot episode of the show even plays on the common I Love Lucy
trope, where Lucy would “accidentally” become the star of one of Desi’s performances.
In “iPilot” we are introduced to Carly as she is being reprimanded by her principal for
photoshopping the head of one of her teachers onto the body of a rhinoceros. Soon we
learn she’s taking the blame for her always-in-trouble best friend Sam. Her punishment is
to sit through and film the tryouts for the school talent show, so that the teacher in
question can have her Saturday off. Enlisting her lovesick geeky neighbor Freddy as
their videographer, Sam and Carly’s narrative banter proves to be more entertaining than
the majority of the kids trying out for the show. When Freddy accidentally posts videos
65
of their act online, they’re an instant hit, leading to Carly’s idea to start their own web
series, which features stuff that “kids find cool.”
Similar to classic sitcom narratives, in iCarly the situation typically involves an
interpersonal disagreement, for example, when Carly and Sam get in a fight over a
birthday gift (“iDon’t Want to Fight”) or when they face a particular challenge filming
their web show. In the episode “iGive Away a Car,” a car-giveaway contest on the web
show turns into a problem because the dealership supplying the vehicle expresses no
knowledge of the contest. As a result, the kids struggle to find a comparable prize to
replace it. The structure of the three-camera sitcom allows Nickelodeon to rely on basic
television storytelling conventions, while easily updating certain subject matter about
technology in the process. For example, computers and other technological gadgets are
often highlighted in the episode as opposed to other consumer products of the past. And,
typical bully plotlines of tween sitcoms past are given a cyber-update when the bully
(Nevel) is a prominent blogger. And, while a lot of the representations of the show are
updated to reflect the cultural changes of the early 21
st
century, the show nevertheless
relies heavily on the classic gender conventions of the sitcom.
With its roots in vaudeville and radio programming featuring husband and wife
comedy duos and its pinnacle of success with Lucille Ball’s portrayal of the restless
domestic housewife in I Love Lucy, throughout its run the sitcom has been linked to the
interpretation of women’s role in society. As Lucy attempted to escape being a
housewife, week after week for six years, only to be reinstated in the role by the end of
each episode, the sitcom became entrenched in discourses about the representations of
women. The sitcom emerged in the postwar era of social reconstruction, when women
66
were told to leave the factories and return back to the home and correspondingly
television became an important site for the propagation of gendered discourses (Spigel
2001). As a medium dependent on advertising contracts for profit, however, the
television industry was also particularly invested in representations of women that would
appeal to female customers, because women purchase nearly eighty percent of all
advertised goods. Therefore the sitcom has played a major role in the “mainstreaming of
feminism” to appeal to female viewers, but it has, at the same time, played a major role in
“containing feminism’s” political critique (Dow 1996; Spangler 2003). And, as Kristen
Pike notes, sitcoms were also often the first places girls would be introduced to themes of
feminist liberation (2009).
Early network programming directed at mass audiences was particularly
straightforward in its enforcement of normative gender roles. Shows like Father Knows
Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet depicted “smiling,
benevolent, self-effacing, pearl-clad moms, who loved to vacuum in high heels” and
storylines involved teaching daughters to give up their tomboy ways and stop competing
with men for jobs in lieu of their rightful place in the home and as a man’s “queen”
(Douglas 1995, 36–37). As the feminist liberation movement spread throughout the
1960s, and the decade quickly became one of the most important eras in American
history for the advancement of women’s social and political rights, feminist themes and
characters became more common on television. The shows that featured girl characters,
however, were fraught with contradictions and tensions as they, like the films of the era,
reflected the patriarchal anxiety about the threat of feminism that young girls’ sexuality
and power seemed to symbolize. For instance, Susan Douglas, Moya Luckett, and Ilana
67
Nash have thoughtfully analyzed the tensions, contradictions, and pleasures offered in the
girl-centered narratives and teen girl performances on such series as The Patty Duke
Show (ABC, 1963-1966) and Gidget (ABC, 1965-1966).
In comparison to other domestic sitcoms centered on the patriarchal family iCarly
offered a unique premise in that Carly’s parents were never around, and Carly didn’t have
to answer to a patriarchal authority figure. Instead, Carly lives with her older brother
Spencer (Jerry Trainor), a twenty-six year-old man-child. Schneider says that with
writing out the parents, he wanted to evoke a feeling of kid freedom. And, even though
the network reportedly had a concern that the audience might perceive it as unusual that
there was not parental supervision present at all times (Villarreal 2012), the choice fits
with Nickelodeon’s overall branding strategy that tries to construct a space where kids
are empowered and beyond the reach of adult authority (Banet-Weiser 2007).
Nonetheless, despite the lack of parental authority, and like many situation comedies with
a setting outside the domestic sphere, the characters recreate the family structure (Taylor
1991). In many episodes, Carly and Spenser take on the parental roles, whereas Sam and
Freddie take on the roles of bickering brother and sister. Carly is consistently the
levelheaded and organized mother figure to Spenser’s more immature and pathetic father
figure. Carly tends to make dinner for Spenser and her friends; she’s usually the voice of
reason, and Sam continually harasses Carly for “never doing anything bad.” In “iStage
an Intervention” Carly, like a mother nagging her son to do his homework or her husband
to do his chores, has to manipulate Spenser into finishing a sculpture that he’s been
commissioned to build because he’s become addicted to playing a retro arcade game and
can’t prioritize his own actions. In the episode “iThink They Kissed,” the two are explicit
68
about their dual roles when Carly is upset and aggressively venting her feelings to
Spenser about Sam and Freddie kissing and not telling her. Spenser responds by
reminding Carly, “You know, most guys have to get married to suffer this kind of abuse.”
Johnathon Dee observes, “Carly is living out two adolescent fantasies at once: she gets to
elude her caregiver’s restrictions and do whatever she wants, and she also gets to be the
caregiver, for Spencer is an adult in dire need of looking after” (Dee 2007, 3). Dee
doesn’t acknowledge, however, that “being a care giver” is usually a socially conditioned
female “fantasy” and Carly is, in many ways, a typical representation of hegemonic
femininity.
Having the girl protagonist take on the role of a mother figure is a narrative
device that has been used quite often in sitcoms featuring young female characters
(Kidman 2010). As many scholars of girls’ media have pointed out, throughout
television’s history girls’ shows and characters continually reflect a negotiation between
girls’ independence, power, and sexuality on the one hand and society’s general
preoccupation with, and attempt to control, female sexuality and power on the other
(McRobbie 1991; Douglas 1995). Media producers want to exploit girls’ sexual appeal,
but keep it under control; they want to please younger viewers who are more progressive,
but also older viewers, who want to protect their girls from growing up too quickly or
being sexualized too early (Kidman 2010). One consistent trope is the absence of a
mother figure that allows the girl’s energy to be directed towards the adult male and the
romantic storyline that evokes a young girl’s sexual potential gets diverted.
Another one of the main ways most television producers have grappled with a
tween’s duality and the anxiety surrounding her emerging sexuality, though, is to literally
69
split her into two people. The tween heroine could be two people instead of one,
simultaneously occupying the tensions of girly innocence and adult sexuality or
masculine authority and feminine restraint (Kidman 2010). This trope, or what Moya
Luckett (1997) calls “doubling,” can be seen as early as in The Patty Duke Show, when
the child actress Patty Duke played two physically identical cousins, one traditional and
proper and the other outrageous and boy crazy. And, it was used again in Gidget. At
home she’s girly, gossiping on the phone all the time, and doing housework for her
college professor father, whereas while she’s at the beach she surfs, she’s independent,
and “one of the guys” (Kidman 2010). In Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All, Secret
Life of Alex Max, and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, the girls all had a type of secret
life or special power, which allowed them to negotiate this tension. Doubling is also a
main part of Hannah Montana. Not only is Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) both a celebrity
and a “normal” girl, but she is also the feminine side to her best friend Lilly’s more
tomboy side (Blue 2012).
Similarly, on iCarly, Sam and Carly represent the standard split identity or
doubling convention of girls on sitcoms. In one telling episode, the girls jokingly
introduce themselves on their web show by saying, “I’m the sweet brunette (Carly), and
I’m the dirty blonde (Sam).” With her gender-neutral name, Sam is the crass, disobedient
tomboy, whose crudeness, propensity to always crave meat and solve problems with
extreme violence make her a cliché of excessive masculinity trapped in the body of petite
blonde girl. In the pilot episode, we meet Sam as she slams a boy into a locker for calling
her aggressive. Raised by a vain, neglectful, and sex-crazed single mom (played in a
cameo by Jane Lynch), Sam is a miniature masculine parody more akin to Al Bundy than
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even her tomboy predecessors. Carly, on the other hand, is overly sweet, the
quintessential object of male desire. She’s introduced in the pilot as the object of
Freddie’s crush and by the end of the episode, after reading several comments about how
“hot” she is, she shyly agrees to keep the first iCarly.com video up. Carly can’t even kill
a pestering fly, plays the constant care-giver role, and flees, screaming, from a potential
physical fight in “iFight Shelby Marx.” Although socially mature and keenly aware of
her friends and family’s feelings, Carly comes off as timid and naïve despite the fact that
she usually comes out on top at the end of each episode. Together, Carly and Sam
represent the ultimate split identity: masculine/feminine, child/adult, sexualized
object/one-of-the-boys.
Doubling in the tween sitcom often privileges overt femininity. For example,
throughout the series, Sam’s character is reflective of the common “tomboy taming”
narrative device, where girls who resemble the strength, power, and demeanor of boys
were sexualized or made over to assure audiences that they were in fact “girls” (See Pike
2009, 130–192). For example, Sam is subjected to this in the episode “iMake Sam
Girlier,” when Carly gives Sam a makeover after Sam develops a crush on a boy at
school who supposedly only likes girly-girls. Yet, Sam’s more masculine aggression is
privileged in several episodes through her wielding of a “butter sock” to intimidate or
assert power over others. In “iRescue Carly” she takes down a whole party of delinquent
teenagers to rescue Carly from their bullying. While the show tends to privilege Carly’s
femininity over Sam’s masculinity, by continually associating Sam with delinquency and
laziness, the girls continually come together and support each other despite their
differences, showing that the use of doubling also emphasizes the importance of same sex
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friendships in girl culture (Luckett 1997, 101).
These representations can be seen as strategic on the part of Nickelodeon to
appeal to the largest audience. This dual appeal works well in attracting both male and
female audiences to the show, allowing for a broad tween appeal beyond just girls,
including parents who see the polite, hard-working, and caring Carly as an excellent role
model and the aggressive, over-wrought Sam as so extreme that she’s unrealistic and
therefore non-threatening. Overall, as Morgan Blue (2012) describes,
Doubling can offer multiple identifications and an expanded, unfixed notion of
identity, much in the same way that calling attention to gender performativity
might. But doubling as a way of complicating subjectivity can also further
individualize characters and the dilemmas they face, foreclosing some
identificatory possibilities. Just as doubling allows for girls’ power as subjects to
multiply and become visible in productive ways, within and perhaps beyond the
confines of this narrative, it also presents parameters within which performances
of girlhood must circulate (13).
Because both are extremes, but they are also best friends, co-hosts, and dual heroines of
the show, they balance the tensions and marry the two distinct personalities, producing
the perfect contradictory tween girl representation. In following the tropes of
conventional sitcom, particularly those related to girl characters, the show links itself to
the long history of circulating normative representations of girlhood despite its web 2.0
update.

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Why iRely on the Sitcom:
Given iCarly’s reliance on the conventions of the classic sitcom traced above, it
may seem surprising that the show was as successful as it was. Even though the sitcom
has been one of television’s most reliable and popular genres throughout its history, it
was considered to be in a slump during the mid 2000s when iCarly was developed, which
was the result of changing industry economics, the rise of reality shows, and audiences
becoming bored by a tired sitcom format (Carter 2004). The 1990s had witnessed “the
decade of the sitcom,” largely due to NBC’s “Must-See TV” line-up and the long-running
success of Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld, and Will and Grace among others. When the must-
see lineup went off the air during in the 2000s, however, the sitcom faced an identity
crisis across the television landscape and it waned in popularity. Nate Diemo of NPR also
suggests, “The success of Seinfeld and Friends in the 1990s bred too many pale
imitations. Viewers burned out on schlubby husbands with improbably hot wives and
wacky neighbors” (Dimeo 2009). Doug Herzog, president of the Comedy Central cable
channel, citing The Chappelle Show and Nickelodeon’s own Rugrats as examples, argues
that traditional sitcoms waned in popularity because “younger viewers had been exposed
to fresher, less traditional comedy in so many other arenas that they could no longer
respond to regular network comedy.” He added that “For young people [traditional
sitcoms] play like television for Mom and Dad. It's like black-and-white movies for
them” (Carter 2004). Moreover, while the sitcom format became more and more tired,
cable dramas like The Sopranos (HBO), Six Feet Under (HBO), and The Shield (FX)
started “picking up audiences far beyond what cable was once able to attract against first-
run network series” (Carter 2002).
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Along with a general exhaustion with the network sitcom, the genre was also
being squeezed out by the surge in reality programs, which had risen in popularity after
the surprise success of Survivor, Big Brother and The Apprentice in the early 2000s. As
viewers developed a growing taste for reality shows, they became a financial necessity as
well. As Carter notes, “scripted shows, which cost an average of $850,000 to $1.2 million
to produce, almost always need to be repeated before they can recoup. With networks
avoiding repeats, they must have lower-cost alternatives. The average reality show costs
about $500,000” (Carter 2004). Because of the lower production costs associated with a
lack of unionized labor, reality shows became the most cost-effective programming.
Moreover, at the same time, television networks were increasingly owned by the newly
emerging major media conglomerates. Therefore, creating mutually beneficial
relationships between different media holdings became an industry priority. As a result,
when thinking about producing scripted programming, networks briefly neglected the
sitcom in favor of big budget dramas like Heroes and Lost that they hoped would
recapture the attention of television audiences, while also providing large “transmedia”
worlds that could span across the internet and other media platforms. Yet, despite the
standout success of Lost, most of these transmedia ventures proved financially unviable
as they demanded sizable upfront production costs and their popularity was more difficult
to predict and maintain as television competed for viewers with the Internet. Their
development also unfortunately coincided with a writer’s strike and the economic
recession, which added to their development challenges. In February of 2012 on a press
tour leading up to the release of his mid-season series, Alcatraz, producer JJ Abrams
discussed the pressure to have huge numbers when a serialized show premiers and the
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challenges of gaining viewers over a season (Radish 2012). He added that he faces
pressure from the networks to make his series more episodic as a result (Radish 2012).
Significantly, these high concept dramas also weren’t as viable for kid or tween
programming, which has historically been episodic because of perceived limitations in
youths’ abilities to remember and comprehend narrative information over an extended
period of time without repetition (Fisch 2004).
In the 2000s, broadcast television saw the surprise success of some single camera
sitcoms like The Office, 30 Rock, and Modern Family, which Ethan Thompson (2007)
associates with their incorporation of “comedy verité,” a televisual mode of production
that allowed for efficiency, visual complexity and semiotic clout that reinvigorated the
tired genre. Nevertheless, “the days when each of the broadcast networks programmed
multiple nights of old-school multi-camera sitcoms are long gone” (Dimeo 2009). Yet,
children’s programming on cable networks like Nickelodeon and Disney is participating
in what’s considered a “golden age of tween sitcoms” (Dimeo 2009). Disney Channel
programming executive Adam Bonnett believes that they remain so popular because
contemporary tweens are part of a generation that didn’t experience a lot of bad post-90s
sitcoms and therefore “they come in with open eyes and embrace the format” (Dimeo
2009). More centrally though, Nickelodeon and Disney produce sitcoms because they are
logistically easier to manage than dramas, since they’re usually shot in studio and can be
shot on a lower budget. They also have the greatest return on investment if/when they
move into syndication because the episodic format of the sitcom plays much better in
repeats than the serial nature of most television dramas. Their broad-based appeal allows
them to capture a larger segment of the audience than much of the other niche-based
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programming across the television landscape, which is becoming increasingly important
as children and parents are starting to watch television together again; their online habits
are more independent (Chozick 2010).
In fact, sitcoms were integral to the development of Nickelodeon’s brand and its
ability to simultaneously cater to kids’ sensibility and parent notions of “quality”
programming. According to Susan Murray, when Nickelodeon decided to extend its
schedule into prime-time and late night hours, executives strategically decided to air
“classic” television sitcoms (Murray 2004, 71). She argues that “classic” sitcoms were
able to draw in adult audiences without alienating Nickelodeon’s core audience because
they were originally designed for the whole family to watch and because censors were
tougher, the shows were pretty wholesome overall (71). As a result, parents felt
comfortable with their kids watching them, and they were able to “nostalgically revisit
their youth via baby-boomer shows such as The Donna Reed Show, while at the same
time ironically, and pleasurably, distancing themselves from such frivolous, youthful
diversions” (Murray 2004). She points out how Nickelodeon worked to frame an ironic or
distanced viewing of the sitcoms in their promotional materials. By extension, though
kids become accustomed to watching the sitcom format.
Moreover, Heather Hendershot notes how Nickelodeon, in contrast to a lot of the
fleeting, toy-based, cheap programming of the 1980s, worked to develop higher quality
programming that “would not only serve kids, but it would also have staying power.” So
unlike the general move to reality programing enacted by the rest of the television
landscape, “Nickelodeon would create a library of programs that could, in theory, be
repeated indefinitely” (Hendershot, 9). So, despite the fact that broadcast networks were
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abandoning the sitcom during the period of iCarly’s development, there are a variety of
industrial reasons why Nickelodeon continues to rely on the genre. Because each episode
is self-contained, viewers can watch the series out of order and still get a fully satisfying
narrative arch with a beginning, middle, and end with each viewing. Viewers also need
less set up to enter the story because the series revolves around the same setting, the same
set of characters with the same reliable set of characteristics. Importantly, sitcoms have
also traditionally incorporated a lot of visual humor and slapstick, which appeals to
children who may be less interested in or unable to completely follow plot developments,
narrative arcs, or psychological humor. On iCarly, for example, Carly’s older brother
Spencer provides a great deal of visual humor and slapstick as he is particularly clumsy
and has a propensity for accidentally lighting things on fire.
With shorter attention spans, the segmented nature of sitcoms—in the way that
each joke escalates in increments—allows children to enjoy jokes or physical gags
independent from the plot or narrative. In repeats children can find equal pleasure in the
anticipation of gags they found funny before or by being presently surprised by gags they
forgot. Therefore the generic makeup of sitcoms is particularly appealing for a kid’s
cable channel like Nickelodeon and have contributed to the fact that Nickelodeon only
has to produce a limited amount of new episodes of each of its sitcoms, which cycle
through over and over creating a reliable programming foundation
3
. Geraldine Laybourne
discusses the importance of this in an interview with Henry Jenkins when she discusses
how they rebranded and restructured programming in the early years of the company:
“Part of the reason kids weren’t watching us (we had a .5 rating) was they never knew
what was on. They couldn’t count on us. So we went for a more series-based approach”
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(Jenkins 2004, 138). The series approach allows viewers to know what’s on without the
pressure of developing new programming at an accelerated pace.
Given these various industrial motives, Nickelodeon built the iCarly franchise
around a traditional three-camera sitcom, but as mentioned above they gave it a “web 2.0
sensibility” (Thompson 2008) that was key to making the format feel fresh and help it
converge with the online extensions. The following section explores the show’s visual
style, focusing on the ways in which it blends notions of comedy verité with the tropes of
web 2.0 interactivity and the visual conventions of the sitcom. The visual tropes connect
directly to the web extension and the two platforms feed back into each other. This
combination works to create what Jason LaTouche (2011) calls a “hyperreal universe”
where viewers are encouraged to see the fictional characters on the show as real kids
producing an actual web show. He argues the visual style acts as a new way of building
not just viewer investment in a set of characters, but the idea that viewers themselves are
a character with a part to play. While I agree with some of LaTouche’s observations
about the show’s blending of reality and fictional tropes, I argue rather that the visual
style works to help create a branded immersive transmedia experience that encourages
both a limited understanding of digital media technologies and specific uses of them
toward the consumption of more Nickelodeon branded content.

iPromote Nickelodeon: iCarly & a New Synergy Strategy
When describing the genesis of iCarly, Marjorie Cohn, Nickelodeon's EVP of
original programming and development said, “Schneider came up an innovative idea of
including user-generated content in the body of the show. The pitch and catch between
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TV and the net seemed fun” (A. Burgess 2007). More than just fun, iCarly represents a
strategic move on the part of Nickelodeon to appeal to the digital generation at a time
when the network was being criticized for its lack of focus developing digital assets—the
hype around its investment in the online gaming world, Neopets, had faded (Barnes
2010). At the time of iCarly’s development, Viacom, Nickelodeon’s parent company, had
lost out in a bidding war with News Corp for the social networking site MySpace and as a
result it was seemingly mounting a disjointed effort to buy “Web leftovers” that didn’t
seem to reflect a coherent strategy for investors (Shields 2006). Many, including
Viacom’s Chairman Sumner Redstone, criticized the company’s approach to the “digital
revolution,” saying it had not been “aggressive” enough (Becker 2006). Viacom was also
in the process of suing YouTube, the massively popular video-sharing site owned by
Google, alleging that YouTube had engaged in “brazen” and “massive” copyright
infringement by allowing users to upload and view hundreds of thousands of videos
owned by Viacom without permission. The premise of having a television show that
encourages viewers to upload content to a Viacom owned website, can therefore not be
seen as a coincidence. Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara comments on
the thinly veiled motives: “You can almost hear the pitch: Let's wrangle those future
YouTubers and make them Nick kids. How? By creating a show about a girl who starts
her own website devoted to the ‘talents’ of everyday kids. With, of course, a website
through which they can interact with the show, even apparently providing content for the
broadcast” (McNamara 2007).
At the time, Nickelodeon was the highest rated kid’s channel in the United States,
with close to 98% penetration of U.S. households. Given its reach, it made sense for
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Nickelodeon to further monetize the brand by offering derivative consumer products that
relate in some form to their popular shows, movies, and characters. Moreover, as cable ad
rates were dropping, networks like Nickelodeon were able to sell advertising in bundles
that included both cable and internet ads to make up for declining advertising profits in
cable alone. For example, AT&T was particularly interested in buying ad space in the
iCarly bundle. Their ads, spanning both the television show and website, encouraged fans
to use their services to interact with the iCarly brand across various media platforms. The
ads highlight how smartphones let iCarly viewers be part of the show, while also helping
them connect with friends (Crupi 2008). Building off one of iCarly's popular interactive
segments, young actors in one ad use their Samsung Palm Centro phones to watch, shoot,
and share “Random Dancing” snippets. A callout then directs viewers to an AT&T
microsite hosted by Nick.com (Crupi 2008). The microsite was designed with the same
design as iCarly.com and users can reach it seamlessly through a short series of click-
through links. This strategic branding synergy connects AT&T directly to the iCarly and
Nickelodeon brands, while also encouraging tweens to share their own branded content
with other viewers and their friends through their use of AT&T devices and services.
In the early 2000s tweens represented a vast untapped market for carriers wishing
to expand their reach, and usage rates among iCarly’s tween demographic have been
increasing dramatically since. According to AT&T's youth marketing expert Mimi Chan,
“Of the 20 million in the 8-12 demo, nearly one-third own mobile devices” (Crupi 2008).
Accordingly, along with the typical lifestyle merchandising of clothes, room décor,
stationery, and music, iCarly merchandise also includes “training phones” like the iCarly
Wireless Text Messenger/Organizer/FM Player or the iCarly mobile walkie-talkies,
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which introduce the idea of text messaging or mobile communication to a set of kids that
aren’t allowed to have cell phones yet. According to Jim Perry, executive VP of 360
brand sales for Nickelodeon: “[Ads on iCarly are] big because they’re targeting the tween
market directly.” He reported that the deal with AT&T represented a “seven-digit
commitment,” and was part of the $300 million upfront pact Nickelodeon closed with
GroupM to take advantage of these key bundle deals (Crupi 2008). iCarly represented
the perfect merging of classic, reliable spot advertisements on television, and newly
emerging interactive ad campaigns in online environments, which in the messy era of the
post-network television industry uncertainty paid off immensely.
The goal of iCarly was to cash in on the financial benefits of television ad
revenues with the minimal production costs associated with the sitcom genre, while
appealing to kids’ sustained interaction with television as their dominant media choice.
The show served as a platform to gradually introduce tweens to particular integrated
forms of digital media use. “We feel like the digital generation of kids has really sort of
emerged, and we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to seamlessly connect
that to what we’re doing with all of our content on all of our platforms,” said Cyma
Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group, noting that the
convergence of television and online interaction will hopefully deliver a richer emotional
bond with the audience (Mayberry and Nordyke 2007). Key to their success, though, was
being able to create an immersive experience that visually and narratively connected the
website to the television show.
One of the main ways that iCarly creates its immersive experience is by carefully
constructing the fictional worlds of the television show and web show with a visual
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authenticity associated with actual web 2.0 interactivity found on user-generated sites like
YouTube. While in many ways the show looks like a traditional multi-camera sitcom, the
show also incorporates handheld camerawork and what Ethan Thompson calls “comedy
verité,” a very televisual mode of production that incorporates elements of observational
documentaries in order to give the show an aura of authenticity. When the main
characters are producing their web show, particularly when Freddie films the girls
hosting or performing skits, the visual style switches from a multi-camera omniscient
point of view of Freddie holding a camera to Freddie’s handheld subjective camera point
of view. The camera is shaky and the POV image often includes framing guides, a red
REC button indicating the show is being “recorded,” and a battery strength indicator, just
like when one looks through a camcorder. Even though the production of certain aspects
of the web show—like the use of rigging to make their sidekick Gibby fly and the
elaborate lighting and set constructions—are masked like most fictional narratives that
want viewers to suspend their disbelief, the purpose of selectively choosing to use this
visual style is to reinforce the idea that iCarly is a “real” web show made by the actual
kids depicted on the television show. The web show’s authenticity is further reinforced
throughout the series when Freddy confirms the web show’s live feed on his computer.
The online website and the website shown on the television show are exact matches down
to graphics and the placement of the web show’s video on the home page.
The web show’s authenticity is also reinforced visually by the fact that after each
episode of the television show, the scenes “filmed” in the television narrative are
repurposed and embedded on an actual iCarly.com website, without the framing guides
and battery indicators seen on the television show. On the website, viewers can watch the
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web show segments, separate from the sitcom narrative, as their own unique show, but
under the guise that Carly, Sam, and Freddie produced the show as opposed to
Nickelodeon’s writers. Thompson suggests, that the observational aesthetic is “adopted as
a method of telling the ‘truth’ about television production or claiming the real through
documentary style” (67) Here, iCarly is claiming to tell the “truth” about making a web
show when in fact the web show is as highly constructed as the sitcom itself.
Significantly, as Thompson notes comedy verité is not just a visual alternative, but also a
semiotic strategy, “a self-conscious televisual simulation of the real” (68).
This semiotic strategy is key to convincing viewers to engage on iCarly.com. It
makes the web show appear “real” or authentic, as an actual place where they could have
their videos featured. It’s similar to the strategy used by Disney in marketing Hannah
Montana prior to the show’s debut. In marketing materials, well before viewers could
have known whom either Miley Cyrus or Hannah Montana were, Disney constructed
Hannah Montana as an established and already popular rock star. Disney featured music
videos of the singer performing in front of hundreds of adoring fans, which prepped
viewers for not only embracing the premise of the television show but also for becoming
invested in Hannah as an actual rock star they could be a fan of (and buy music by). In
promoting a similar “constructed reality,” Jason LaTouche argues that iCarly, like
Hannah Montana before it, represents want Jean Baudrillard coined hyperreality, or “the
generation by models of a real without origin or reality” and the “substituting of the signs
of the real for the real” (Cited in LaTouche 2011). He argues that on iCarly,
The television show points towards the reality of the construction of a web show
product and the online web show product points towards its real authenticity as
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resulting from the work depicted on the television show. Hence, the television
show and the online web show use differing elements of the “real” to work in
harmony to create a blended hyperreal space that connects these disparate
constructions into a seamless unity.
Like Hannah Montana, iCarly also creates a form of hyperreality by continually
constructing Carly, Sam, and Freddy as actual Internet celebrities within the show’s
narrative. They have crazy super fans (“iStill Psycho”), attend web industry award shows
and conventions (“iStart a Fan War”), get hired to produce a music video for a famous
pop star (“iFix a Pop Star”), catch the attention of First Lady Michelle Obama (“iMeet
the first Lady”), and go on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (“iShock America”). The
construction of them as Internet celebrities contributes to the web show’s authenticity,
but like Hannah Montana, the semiotic strategy mainly works to encourage synergy and
consumption of the brand across various media platforms.
As a result of creating this immersive property, where the television show acts as
an advertisement for the online content and vice versus, Nickelodeon successfully
increased traffic on its web properties, driving television viewers to the website. After the
debut of iCarly, iCarly.com accounted for 20 percent of Nick.com’s traffic in February
2008, when the site drew 2.7 million unique users, up 24 percent versus January,
according to Nickelodeon’s numbers (Shields 2008). This increase in traffic doesn’t even
include the over 100,000 videos uploaded to the site as of May 2008. This traffic leads to
increases in online ad sales, but also to increased viewer engagement with those ads and
the brands, which is a bankable quality. The more time someone spends on a site or with
a brand, especially if she’s engaging as a fan, the more likely she is to support the
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advertisement sponsoring it (Green and Jenkins 2009).
Moreover, the semiotic strategy of comedy verité helps construct iCarly as the
center of a branded walled garden, which as Joseph Turow (2005) describes, “is an online
environment where consumers go for information, communications, and commerce
services and that discourages them from leaving for the larger digital world” (116). He
adds, “The concept initially referred in the late 1990s to a safe place for children on the
Web; parents would set their computers so that the kids could visit only those areas.
Quickly, however, the concept morphed to mean an area where content providers could
induce targeted consumers to enter (sometimes even have them pay for entry) and then
track their activities while surrounding them with ads appropriate to their demographic
characteristics and actions” (116).
Illustrating how iCarly acted as a hub for Nickelodeon’s walled garden,
iCarly.com might be one of the first websites a tween discovers on her own; before going
to YouTube, she would check out all the videos on iCarly.com, maybe even submitting
one herself. But once she gets to the site, she remains within the larger Viacom garden.
On iCarly.com branded content visually overwhelms the site and various tabs seamlessly
link to Nick.com and other Nickelodeon or Viacom digital assets. The banner ads that
flank the sides of the iCarly website content also link back to Nickelodeon or Viacom
games and movies, and sometimes to cross-promotional sites, like when one banner ad
was for a special Yoplait Kids Yogurt featuring Dora the Explorer on the container. With
these various strategies, Nickelodeon works to corral young tween viewers into their
branded “walled garden” around the iCarly TV show, discouraging young viewers from
exploring the wide expanse of the worldwide web beyond. Media scholar Jennifer Holt
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has described these strategies as the “Habitrails of conglomerate media culture” (Holt
2009). With this tongue-and-cheek metaphor she is alluding to plastic mazes of tubes
designed for hamsters, where the pets think they are running free, making independent
decisions of where to turn, when, in fact, they are being structured and guided through the
tubes. In this logic the idea of push media is veiled in the logic of pull media, and media
consumers are the hamsters unaware of the underlying maze created by media
conglomerates guiding their consumption habits, which they may conceive as
autonomous.
As mentioned in the first chapter of this dissertation, the “habitrail” (Holt 2009)
websites of TV shows are often the first places that kids and tweens go to as they start
using the Internet and other new media platforms on their own. On the one hand, this is
seen as a good thing: parents who are worried about the vast amount of information on
the web or other perceived dangers see this as a safer “training ground” for kids that
protects them from exposure to a lot of new media’s uncertainties. Parents trust
Nickelodeon’s commitment to “quality” and they know what they are getting when they
allow their children on the site. However, on the other hand, iCarly.com conditions young
users to see the Internet primarily as a place of consumption and interaction with
corporate brands and products. While kids undoubtedly find pleasure on the site, playing
games and immersing themselves in the world of iCarly beyond the television show with
extra clips and supplemental information, the site is mainly a promotion vehicle. For
example, although fan videos and pictures are available on the site, there’s a space to
upload videos, and users are allowed to comment on the material, these options are buried
underneath tabs and links to Nickelodeon produced content. It’s rather difficult to get to
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these places. What’s more, videos and pictures go through an extensive vetting process in
order to be uploaded to the site, and the very few that make it to the site are almost
indistinguishable from the Nickelodeon produced content. For example, many fan
pictures were given a “Christmas makeover” by Nickelodeon content producers with
Santa hats and snowmen bodies drawn on top of the fans’ pictures. And, fans are
encouraged to upload videos and pictures under pre-designed topics structured by
Nickelodeon content managers, as opposed to videos conceived of and produced by the
kids themselves. Moreover, while there are hundreds of promotional videos, user videos
are limited to about eight videos per “topic,” with only about nine topics available at any
one time. User videos are rarely updated and fan interaction is severely limited and
controlled on the site.
It’s obviously not in the best interest of a company like Nickelodeon to encourage
kids to leave their walled garden, but they also don’t encourage much fan production
within that garden, despite the original premise of the show. Being active producers of
media as opposed to passive consumers of media is said to encourage kids’ learning and
critical thinking, making them feel more “empowered” as they participate in the making
of their own culture. Yet, for a series about a tween who makes her own web show, there
is surprisingly little “how to” instruction on the page. So despite the oft-touted
democratic potential of new media technologies to revolutionize communications and
allow for more viewer control and interactivity (Jenkins 2008), iCarly shows how the
corporate media industry is working diligently to curb that unpredictable potential and to
reinforce the technologies’ commercial goals of passive viewership, consumerism, and
brand loyalty. Furthermore, even though the show, with its comedy verité style, purports
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to tell the truth about making a web show and claims some sort of authenticity about new
media literacy for kids to encourage their online participation, the following section
examines the show’s use of intertextuality and the limits of its digital media literacy
within the confines of the sitcom genre.

iAm a Digital Citizen: Representations of Digital Media
In John Hartley’s Uses of Television (1999), he contemplates why television has
been so widely denigrated and in its defense argues that television creates a form of
cultural teaching vital to contemporary citizenship. In a series of premises, he proposes to
re-conceptualize television—often derided as a “vast wasteland” of consumer dribble or
the vehicle for propagating low cultural values—through the concept of teaching. He
seeks to move away from an understanding television as invested in forms of ideology
and propaganda, favoring what he calls “a much less coercive, sinister and negative
version based on teaching; ‘loving to influence others’, in Richard Hoggart’s throwaway
phrase” (43). As Banet-Weiser et al. (2007) and Thomas Streeter (1997) point out, the
public debate about the rise in cable television, in particular, reflected some of these
utopian ideals about the potential for television to be interactive, more diverse, more
democratic, and even the cure of many social ills around inequality. Television could
improve citizenship and play a role in strengthening democracy. As Sarah Banet-Weiser
argues, by positioning itself as the “anti-broadcast,” a kind of “cable rebel in a conformist
broadcast landscape,” Nickelodeon built on these utopian ideals by developing an
“empowerment” discourse around citizenship that was in contrast to the “protectionist”
rhetoric used by a lot of broadcast channels at the time (Banet-Weiser 2007, 40). Central
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to Nickelodeon’s empowerment branding was a form of teaching about citizenship that
tapped into ideologies of community, belonging, and prosocial messages of respect and
diversity. Banet-Weiser discusses how the network’s success in creating a “Nickelodeon
Nation” and viewers as citizens demands us to reconsider the role of television in kids’
lives and the relationship between consumption and citizenship, because the network
constructs kids as citizens based on their particular consuming habits around the
Nickelodeon brand. She makes an argument about the importance of seeing these
concepts not as at odds, but rather as mutually constitutive particularly for youth when
“consumerism and consumption habits inform and shape their dominant notions of
citizenship” (212).
Like Banet-Weiser does with Kids Rule!, crucial to Hartley’s argument is using
the “If TV is teaching” premise to rethink our understanding of television’s markets and
consumers as well as the “uses of television.” Specifically, Hartley argues two
compelling premises that this chapter explores when examining the prosocial motives and
the potential for a form of new media literacy on iCarly: “If TV is teaching we need to re-
interrogate the concept of the text: textual features are not seeking power over audiences
but they are trying to influence…[and] to create a literacy shared among users of the
textual system”; and “If TV is teaching, then the questions of what is being taught, to
whom, with what outcomes, are interesting to investigate” (Hartley 1999, 135). While
Banet-Weiser explores the relationship between citizenship and consumerism on
Nickelodeon, I seek to explore its potential for media literacy through intertextuality and
self-reflexivity.
As evidenced by the opening scene described at the beginning of this chapter,
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iCarly participates in a sustained form of self-reflexivity and intertextuality. The episode
“iCarly Saves TV” presents a self-reflexive awareness of not only its origin story, but
also the making of a television show, as the rest of the episode’s plot centers around the
iCarly.com web show getting picked up to be a “real” TV show. As Thompson (2008)
notes, the episode takes “broad strokes at the television industry and particularly the out-
of-touch male executive and nerdy male writers who seem determined to ruin the show.”
In particular, the show satirizes television executives’ over-reliance on “market research,”
“focus groups,” and “industry trends,” when within the episode the executive producer
uses them to justify the addition of Zeebo, a costumed dinosaur, and a spoiled child-
actress to the cast, which effectively ruins the formula that made the web show so
popular. As Thompson (2008) summarizes, “If this episode has a satiric target, it’s the
generational differences which manifest themselves in their grossly misguided attempts
to cater to her audience’s tastes.” This self-reflexivity, however, is often paired with
intertextual references as well, which have the potential to offer a form of media literacy
for the young viewers of iCarly.
Jonathan Gray in his analysis of The Simpsons describes intertextuality as “the
fundamental and inescapable interdependence of all textual meaning upon the structures
of meaning proposed by other texts” (Gray 2006, 3–4). Like The Simpson’s, iCarly
laughs at and plays with discourses of the sitcom genre, making references to previous
formulas and character types, while parodying other media forms as well. In the episode,
“iToe Fat Cakes” for example the subplot involves Carly taking a bath and getting her toe
stuck in the faucet after seeing a scene from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966),
where Mary Tyler Moore gets her foot stuck in a faucet. Rolling her eyes at the gimmick,
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and turning off her television, Carly says, “Sitcoms are so much better now,” which
becomes ironic, when iCarly uses the same gimmick for the rest of the episode. Before
flipping to The Dick Van Dyke Show, Carly also flips through a promotional video for an
episode of Twinjas about two performing twin ninjas, which airs on the Dingo Channel, a
parody of the Disney Channel, featured in the episode of “iTake on Dingo” discussed
more below. The parody highlights the ridiculously overwrought concepts of some kids’
television shows. And, Carly’s channel surfing provides another intertextual reference
when she flips through to a clip of herself playing the little sister on Dan Schneider’s
previous sitcom Drake and Josh, to which she comments knowingly, “Seen it.” Mimi
White (1986) argues that this type of inter-program referentality reflects television’s
“dispersed mechanisms of continuity” and the importance of self-promotion as a regular
function of the medium. In making this reference, Schneider acknowledges how, like
Norman Lear before him, his own success has been predicated on his ability use one
series as a platform to spawn another
4
. It is a form of intertextuality that rewards viewers
with the pleasurable sensation of their own knowingness and media savvy, which is
played with a lot on the show.
The main plot of “iToe Fat Cakes” also depends on popular cultural
intertextuality, when Spenser and Freddy give Sam a ticket for a tour of the Fat Cakes
World Headquarters in Canada. Within the narrative Sam wants to travel all the way to
Canada to taste Canadian Fat Cakes (a type of pink twinkie), which are said to taste better
because, they are made with “Cane Fat,” unlike American Fat Cakes, which are made
with “Corn Fat.” This is a reference to soda companies, especially Coca-Cola, who in the
1980s switched their sweetener from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup, which is
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associated with lesser quality taste, and although not proven, adverse health affects,
which inadvertently created a cult following of Mexican Coke. In general, the series
parodies much of consumer goods, such as the “Build A Bra” store in reference to the
popular mall store Build-A-Bear, or most pervasively with the series’ use of the pear to
parody Macintosh’s Apple products. The fictional Pear Company makes most of the
electronics seen on iCarly including software, phones, computers, tablets, and MP3
players and most are an exaggeration in shape and size parodying the extensive branding
around Macintosh’s design and products. In his fun facts for “iPity The Nevel,” Dan
Schneider said that only good guys on his shows own Pear technology, playing into the
extremely successful “Get a Mac” campaign that associated Macs with smarter, more laid
back, and cooler heroes and PCs with stuffy, boring work-a-holics. iCarly’s parody here,
is what Jonathan Gray describes as “tributary and loving, serving as homage and flattery”
(Gray 2006, 45) and contrasts with the critical intertextuality described Gray.
When describing the use of parody and intertextuality in The Simpsons, Gray
points out how the series uses these devices in order to transgress and subvert meaning,
particularly about the sitcom genre but also about various media forms: “The sitcom
genre is mocked at multiple turns, as the excessive cheerfulness of sitcom families is
toyed with, the seething anger that one might imagine the sitcom mother to harbor is
suggested, and the genre’s remarkable ability to end exactly where it started is playfully
highlighted” (2). Grey defines the type of parody on The Simpsons as a form of critical
intertextuality that is used “to attack a text, to subvert its preferred meanings and to
propose unofficial and unsanctioned readings.” In particular he argues that the series uses
parody to “destabilize and ridicule the traditional American family sitcom’s solitary and
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[its] peculiar version of the way a family should look” (61). Through humor it offers a
critique and a form of media literacy of the sitcom’s generic tendencies and its
ideological functions. This is a form of “television as teaching.” In contrast, although
iCarly’s aesthetic style connotes an “authenticity” about new media literacy for kids,
often parodying issues related to digital technology, it nevertheless presents a mode of
intertextuality that is more self-promotional or self-congratulatory than critical or
educational. iCarly’s use of parody and intertextuality ultimately serves the economic
interests of Nickelodeon and rewards viewers for their knowledge of consumer goods and
other Nickelodeon properties above some of the empowerment and prosocial branding
initiatives associated with and promoted by the network overall.
In fact, while empowerment and citizenship continue to be key to Nickelodeon’s
brand, extending into the network’s digital assets, the iCarly sitcom presents a rather
contradictory understanding of digital citizenship that tends to undermine the networks’
more prosocial initiatives. For example as part of Nickelodoen’s prosocial initiative, “The
Big Help,” Nickelodeon teamed up with Common Sense Media to create the digital
citizen hub tied to nick.com, with the goal of “teaching kids how to be cyber savvy.”
With a series of quizzes, videos, and other games, including a virtual world where kids
can earn points for participating in various forms of service, the initiative aims to help
kids “harness the power of the Internet and learn how to be a good digital citizens”
(Viacom Inc. 2012). On the home page of the digital citizen hub it includes a top ten list
of “rules” including “guard your privacy,” “protect your reputation,” “think before you
post,” “assume everyone is watching,” “post mindfully,” “watch the clock,” “choose
wisely,” “stand behind your actions,” “think about what you see,” and “be smart, be safe”
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(Viacom Inc. 2012). In February 2012, themes focused on cyberbullying, with a scrolling
list of definitions that defined what constitutes cyberbullying, and what behaviors one
should be aware of in online communication. There was even a “become cyberbully
savvy” quiz and videos from Nick News segments on bullying. Significantly, the page
also includes an embedded video of Miranda Cosgrove and Nathan Kress from iCarly
going over the ten rules of Internet privacy and digital citizenship as well as a section
called “Miranda’s Tips” which together suggest that iCarly is intended to have a useful
didactic about the internet.
Because of iCarly’s adherence to the standard conventions of the sitcom,
however, it propagates a very narrow understanding of digital technologies that limits
viewers’ education of their breadth, depth, and complexity. “With flashy graphics and
plenty of talk about uplinks, iCarly has a high-tech feel. But for all his affection for his
iPod and iPhone, Mr. Schneider said he was careful to make sure that the show was not
swallowed up by its obvious geekiness. ‘We embrace technology, but the show also
makes fun of getting too into it,’ he said” (Steinberg 2007). This avoidance of “getting
too into” technology is arguably a strategic move on the part of Nickelodeon to appeal to
kids’ turning to new media, but not encouraging them to abandon television all together.
The avoidance of dealing with the complexities of new media is apparent in the episode,
“iPromote Tech-Foots” (Season 1, episode 19) when the kids meet with the fictional shoe
company Daka to discuss a business relationship with the iCarly web show. This episode
touches on a lot of pressing issues involving tween use of digital technologies, and
particularly those about tweens seeking compensation for producing online content;
however, the episode masks more than it reveals.
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The episode begins by suggesting that the kids can handle the negotiations with
Daka themselves, and while this move is inline with the Nickelodeon brand and ethos,
which as Banet-Weiser notes represents kids as smarter and more capable than adults, it’s
also implausible (2007, 84-93). Children cannot enter into legal agreements without
parental consent. And, upon entering the office we are made readily aware of why they
shouldn’t be able to enter into legal agreements—they show little understanding of the
capital at stake behind online content production and its associated advertising revenue.
Freddie suggests they should get at least $50 from Daka and Sam suggests that because
they have 350,000 viewers they should ask for no less than $100. Carly worries if this is
too pushy. The group reflects the common understanding of tween content production
online: because the tweens just make content for “fun,” they see financial compensation
as a bonus and not a guiding principle. This is an outlook that corporate media culture
wants to maintain in order to protect its revenue stream. When fans upload videos to the
iCarly.com website for a chance to be featured on iCarly, for example, they are uploading
their videos to a site where Nickelodeon reaps the ad revenue from viewers looking at fan
videos—and they want it to stay that way, rather than going to the ad revenue profit-
sharing model that YouTube has implemented, because of the associated labor and
financial costs.
In their comprehensive overview of YouTube, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
point to the way that the site is central to struggles for authority and control in the new
media environment, but they draw particular attention to the way that mainstream and
corporate media tend to “filter the uses and meanings of YouTube” through their own
ideological lenses, which tend to ignore vernacular meanings, uses, and forms of
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legitimacy in favor of more traditional commercial meanings (J. Burgess and Green
2009). Mainstream media “impose[s] broadcast-era understandings of how the media
operates onto a service at the forefront of defining post-broadcast media logics” (35).
Similar to the discourses around YouTube, iCarly.com is an example of the media
industry’s ambivalence about what web 2.0 video uploading sites are and what they’re
for. By relying on the narrative conventions of the sitcom, which have traditionally
simplified social problems to issues that can be solved by hard work, good will, a
supportive family and the purchase of commodities (Dow, 1996), iCarly tends to simplify
those problems associated with tweens use of new media technologies. This
simplification discourages viewers from exploring the breadth, complexity, and often
controversial reality of new media technologies in their lives, allowing Nickelodeon to
guide young viewers towards sponsored digital assets under their brand.
The writers of iCarly frequently show how individuals can solve the problems
associated with the use of new media, even though in reality these problems are often
much bigger than actions of one individual. For example, in the episode “iTake on
Dingo” Carly and her friends are confronted with the complex issues of copyright and
intellectual property in the virtual world. The rise of the Internet and other digital
communication devices that have allowed for the easy recording, distribution, and even
pirating of copyrighted material has lead to many challenges confronting the regulation
and use of those technologies. Usually children, tweens, and teens are the culprits of
illegal downloading and distribution and face threatening cease and desist orders from
major media conglomerates. In this episode, however, the group discovers that the writers
of a television show on the fictional major kids channel Dingo are stealing ideas from
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their web show. Most children, tweens, or teenagers would not have the knowledge of
copyright law or the financial resources to challenge a network or corporation who is
stealing their intellectual property. In fact most teens and tweens freely offer up their
labor on corporate sites by creating original branded content in contests or even by freely
marketing the brand through their social media campaigns in exchange for meager prize
winnings or the slim chance at a job opportunity.
In contrast, iCarly presents a kid’s fantasy of “empowerment” when Carly easily
convinces her brother to take the group down to Dingo’s Los Angeles studios to confront
the writers. Freddy makes them all fake security badges that “he downloaded off the
web,” which allow them access to behind-the-scenes at the studio. The kids instantly find
proof all over the writer’s room of the writers knowingly copying from the show, which
is necessary to file suit and also a fact that’s usually incredibly difficult to prove,
especially because people are strategically denied access to these spaces. At first, the
writer’s stand behind their security teams, using the legal and financial resources of the
company to intimidate the tweens, which initially works and reflects how most people
feel when posed with taking on a big corporation for intellectual property violations.
Because of the narrative conventions of the situation comedy, however, the team ends up
coming out on top. Spenser and Freddie discover the mythical frozen head of the original
Dingo creator locked in a basement, and the team blackmails the writers to stop copying
them with the threat that they will tell the world that the writer’s are the ones who found
the head, took pictures of it, and blew the cover of the studio (who’s supposedly denying
that the head exists). Even though the show incorporates many realistic narrative and
aesthetic markers, not only is their solution to this problem absurd, but the actual
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situation obscures more about these problems than it reveals, especially because lawyers
or the legal institution never come up, nor is the fact that this is a system-wide problem.
Instead, the situation is presented as an individual ethical problem that can be easily fixed
through individual actions. While all sitcoms have implausible plots where complaints
about social injustice are vaguely/regularly solved, iCarly is troubling because it pretends
to have useful didactic about the Internet, but evades representing or supporting certain
forms of digital media literacy that would be beneficial for kids.
Furthermore, the uses and representations of technology on the show often
contradict the advice of the digital citizen hub on The Big Help. In particular, Sam can be
seen as a bully who uses her web show as a platform to mock and ridicule everyone from
the “geeky” cameraman Freddy, the quirky Gibby, to the group’s explicit enemy Nevel.
A majority of Sam’s humor stems from insults lauded at these characters, even causing
one reviewer to say that the show “displays a lack of sentimentality that rivals Seinfeld”
(Weinman 2011). I wouldn’t go as far as to say that show promotes cyberbullying, but it
doesn’t encourage the same prosocial digital citizenship as its website portends.
iCarly also purports a commitment to promoting an empowered digital
citizenship through the show’s representation of gender in relation to tween knowledge,
use, and proficiency with computers. When I first heard about the show, I thought it had a
potential to show how, as Mary Celeste Kearney has acknowledged, “more girls are
engaged in cultural production today than at any other point in U.S. history, largely as a
result of the development of entrepreneurial youth cultures, a renewed focus on young
people’s media education, and, perhaps most significantly, the increased availability of
inexpensive, user-friendly media technologies for amateurs” (Kearney 2006). I was
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hoping that Nickelodeon would be a trailblazer in their representations of girls and
technology much like they were in the 90s when they produced a variety of shows with
girl leads during a time when industry assumptions thought to target a general youth
audience you had to have boy leads, because girls would relate to boys, but boys
wouldn’t relate to girls. I was quickly disappointed, however, by the fact that the show
trades in cultural stereotypes and normative discourses about girls and their uses and
knowledge of computers. While Carly and Sam are depicted on the show as having a
proficient knowledge of web search engines and social media, whenever their escapades
demand more advance computer gadgetry, knowledge of technical specifications, or film
production language the girls are rather clueless and consistently turn to Freddie for help.
Freddie shows them how to track audience numbers, how to use a green screen, how to
manipulate editing, mix sound, and manage the website.
This happens throughout the series, but manifests particularly on the episode
“iWant to Date Freddie” (Season 1, episode 8). In the episode, Valerie, a girl from the
group’s school wants to create a rival web show to be more popular than iCarly.com.
Depicted as a tween femme fatal, at first she disguises her motives to steal Freddie away
from the show by asking him on a date. She flatters him as he talks technical details about
camera and sound equipment he uses on the show: “I’ve never met someone whose so
funny and knows so much about audio video.” Flattered and uncharacteristically
confident Freddie responds with, “No one knows audio/video like Fredio.” Later at
school, Valerie is more explicit about her desire to steal Freddie, “I really need you to
help me. I, like, know nothing about all the techy stuff.” Like a damsel in distress,
Valerie plays on the common stereotype and culturally reinforced assumption that girls
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are inevitably less technically able than boys. Partly out of desire for a girlfriend and
partly because he’s tired of Sam calling him a “button-pushing monkey”—her effort to
lash out against her lack of knowledge of technical things—Freddie decides to quit the
web show. Although we never see how Carly and Sam would function on the show
without Freddie’s help, because Sam concedes to tell Freddie how important he is to
iCarly.com, we do see Valerie make a fool of herself as she fails miserably to produce
and upload her own show to her website. In another example, during the episode “iSaw
Him First,” Carly demonstrates an especially outrageous lack of technical understanding,
when in an effort to seduce the technical wiz Shane, she pretends that the power is out in
order to create a more romantic atmosphere, but yet turns on the stereo, which confounds
Shane and leads to multiple laughs.
Moreover, although the girls play a large part in writing, hosting, and performing
on the show, they adhere to the common trope of girls working in front of the camera as
opposed to behind it. In a time when the amount of women working in the media industry
is still significantly lower than the amount of men, this is particularly troubling. Because
women have been culturally and socially conditioned to think that their worth depends on
their looks and their ability to land a husband, with the same logic they’ve been excluded
from media production facing comments about “their physical talents being far better
suited in front of the camera than behind it.” Drawing attention to the historical origins of
these gender scripts, Sue Curry Jansen has connected the cultural discourses about
gendered technical ability to gendered assumptions about the worth of certain types of
labor:
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The constitution of the terms “woman” and “technology” are not separate
practices; they are related terms in a vocabulary of power relations that
defines the objects men make and manipulate and the work they do as
“technical”; conversely, this vocabulary treats the objects women make
and manipulate and the work they do as “nontechnical.” … This practice
is also, of course, congruent with theoretical conventions in economics,
sociology, and history, which consider men’s paid labor as productive and
part of a nation’s economy, and women’s unpaid labor as reproductive and
outside calculations of gross national products. As a result of these
constitutive practices, histories of Western technology have been histories
of male activities (Curry Jansen 1989).
Carly and Sam’s labor on iCarly is continually framed in these gendered ways, partly
because it relies on gender conventions from the tween sitcoms of the past, but also
because the show is designed as a potential model for how viewers should understand the
way to use new media. Nickelodeon doesn’t want viewers to be “Freddies,” but rather it
wants them to be “Carlys” or “Sams,” who don’t geek out about technology, but rather
use it to consume other aspects of the Nickelodeon brand.
In her ethnographic studies of two after-school computer clubs in different socio-
economic environments, Ellen Seiter draws attention to the way that gender, class, and
social or parental modeling impacts youths’ understanding and use of computers, and like
parents, television acts as important model for kids’ understanding of computers. One of
the telling observations Seiter points to is the fact that the boys who were resistant to
focused work on computers had fathers who worked as mechanics, plumbers,
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construction workers, and security guards, so the sight of men typing was rare. This was
in contrast to the children whose parents worked as white-collar professionals and the
sight of men typing was much more common (Seiter 2005, 45). Her conclusions show
how youths pick up on social cues about “appropriate” gendered uses of technologies.
And, while Stuart Hall and other media scholars have pointed out how audiences can read
against the dominant meaning of the text, iCarly definitely participates the circulation of
particular gender scripts about girls in technology.
Significantly, Seiter found that despite discrepancies in boys’ proclivity towards
typing and certain types of computer use, she found that overall boys were much more
confident in their general computer competency. Boys were more likely to demonstrate
their expertise, whereas, girl students, despite similar competencies, where much more
hesitant about taking on leadership positions (60-61). Similar to these real world
examples, iCarly reinforces parallel gendered understandings of technology. As a white,
middle-class boy, Freddie regularly takes on what Seiter (borrowing from Cuban 2001)
calls the “tech god.” Freddie relishes his empowerment gained by being a “computer
geek.” Despite Sam’s constant harassment of him being “lame, boring, or uncool,”
Freddy understands how computer knowledge and expertise functions as cultural capital
in their media environment.
In contrast to Freddy, Sam sees computers like many girls are socialized to see
computers, as avenues for downloading fan material, songs and music videos from the
Internet, or for playing music, and gleaning information about her favorite pop or sports
stars (Seiter 2005). She sees them as tools for consumption—one of the main ways
Nickelodeon and advertisers want to frame new technologies. Carly shows a little more
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penchant for doing research for the web show or school-related activities, which reflects
the contemporary trend of girls being socialized with more self-discipline and therefore
are better students, but she really gravitates towards technology when it used towards
heterosexual courtship. In the pilot episode, Carly is unsure if she wants to continue
doing the web show because she gets the first taste of the burden of celebrity; however, at
the end of the episode, when two attractive boys tell her that they liked her on the show,
she says, “I think I’m going to like this.” Similarly, on the iCarly crossover episode with
Schneider’s Victorious, about a singer in an arts school attempting to be pop star, entitled
“iParty with Victorious,” Carly and Victoria are dating the same boy. Carly discovers the
double-cross while “cyber-stalking” him—or doing recon online to get to know him
better. She searches pictures of him and finds a picture of him “tagged” with his arm
around another girl. The cross-over narrative happens when Carly and her friends travel
to Los Angeles to confront her beau and catch him in the act of betrayal. Here Carly’s
“Girl Power” agency is asserted as she uses technologies to aid her in finding the right
mate, while they also help in solidifying a female friendship between Carly and Victoria
in the process. Furthermore, in an hour-long special last year, the characters go to a
convention where instead of talking about the creative process of making a web show, a
“fan war” breaks out over which characters were meant to be romantically together. Like
the Hermoine, Harry, Ron love triangle, Carly, Sam, and Freddie provide perfect fodder
for fan intrigue, and the gendering of technology here is based on iCarly’s adherence to
another tried and true formula of the situation comedy. As Weinman observes,
“Schneider has found a junior version of the strategy shows like Friends used to hook
adult viewers: make them laugh, but also torment them with endless drawn-out romantic
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complications” (Weinman 2011).
Overall, even though iCarly displays promise to overturn traditional gender roles
for young girls by focusing on two “digital savvy” female leads, because of
Nickelodeon’s reliance on both the tropes of previous tween sitcoms and traditional
gender scripts about girls in relation to technology, it fails to live up to that promise.
iCarly addresses a variety of issues related to children’s and tweens use of digital
technologies, like privacy, copyright, compensation, and increased visibility; however,
the conventions of the sitcom, particularly the reliance on individual choice and the need
for quick resolution as well as Nickelodeon’s absurdist and fun branding tend to over-
simplify, cloud, or obscure those issues. Despite the incorporation of a “web 2.0
sensibility” or aesthetic markers of technology and realism and its parody and
intertextuality, iCarly’s reliance on the narrative and representational conventions of the
sitcom leads to problematic representations of technological girlhood. Regardless of the
industrial and economic advantages of centering a “new media” franchise around a
television sitcom for Nickelodeon, the sticom’s reliance on entrenched assumptions about
gender and particularly tween girls delimits the feminist potential of its lead characters
and fails to overturn traditional gender roles for young girls in relation to new
technology.

iConclude:
What this feminist industrial analysis of iCarly shows us is that these
representations may appear new and innovative, but in reality they are actually the result
of traditional corporate strategies used to attract less predictable teen audiences when
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tween media consumption and use migrates towards new interactive media forms. By
incorporating the use of these new media technologies into the more traditional narrative
of the show, while also supporting its parent company’s efforts to maximize profits in the
21
st
century’s synergistic, convergent, and rapidly changing media industry, iCarly tries
to appeal to tweens who are interacting with entertainment in different ways through their
use of social media and other online and mobile technologies. As youth media
consumption changes in the early 21
st
century with the advancement of new media
technologies that allow for arguably more accessibility, more interactivity, more
personalization, and more choices in “the long tail,” the major producers of girls’ media
culture have confronted this inherently dynamic and unpredictable youth market by
clinging tightly to more stable gender scripts and mythologies that have served corporate
culture well historically. Even as new technologies present the potential to blur
traditional gender categories related to media use and consumption, corporate culture
pushes in the opposite direction, working to reify the boundaries of certain youth
demographics. They corral various audiences, largely defined by sex, into profitable and
dependable categories, while at the same time repurposing old genres, representations,
and gender scripts for those purposes.
As both Heather Hendershot and Sarah Banet-Weiser note about the development
of Nickelodeon, the network originally attempted to challenge many conventions of
children’s television when it launched by providing children with a network of their own,
and appealing to both parents and children, even while emphasizing the differences
between them (Hendershot 2004, 5; Banet-Weiser 2007, 215). However, as Nickelodeon
has become the dominant media outlet for tweens, its motives are more geared towards
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maintaining that dominance by focusing on brand integration and cross-platform
promotion as opposed to the themes of empowerment, gender parity, and equality that at
one time defined the network. iCarly in many ways relies on the reputation of Clarissa,
Alex Mack and Shelby Woo and appears hip and innovative with its new media aesthetic
and contemporary themes, but it is mainly designed to get tweens invested in traditional
television formats and traditional gendered forms of media use. In fact, Nickelodeon’s
reliance on the sitcom genre to introduce new technologies to tween viewers also leads to
traditional rather than innovative representations of technological girlhood, because the
writers reinforce traditional gender scripts and make gendered assumptions about girls on
TV that are tied to a long history of girls in sitcoms. This is troubling because, just as
television shows in the 1960s were some of the first places that girls would learn about
feminism and women’s liberation, during the 2010s, sitcoms are one of the first places
that girls may learn about new digital media technologies and their potential uses.
Television is one of many sites of learning and interacting with culture, but mainstream
media plays a critical part in girls’ understanding of the world and their place in it; it’s
vital for them as well as the adults that care about them to recognize the motives and
agendas shaping that understanding. At its heart, this chapter makes explicit the gains and
losses at stake in promoting different representations of tween television audiences and
their uses of new media, while drawing attention to the various industrial motives behind
those representations.

Notes
1
In June 2008, leading up to this episode, which was described as a television special,
Nickelodeon announced a licensing deal with tween retailers Limited Too and Justice to
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sell iCarly “t-shirts, sporty clothing, home décor, stationary and other accessories” related
to the brand, helping to establish iCarly as a “lifestyle property” for viewers to consume
(Stanley 2008).
2
Similar to The Simpsons, the writers of iCarly deliberately reference other media texts
and popular brand names—for example the use of the pear or pearpad to stand in for the
apple/macintosh products. They structure cues for its media savvy viewers to understand
these references and intertextual moments. For more on this concept see Jonathan Gray’s
book Watching The Simpsons (2006), which draws from primary audience research to
examine the role of parody, intertextuality, and referentiality in the text. See also John
Caldwell’s work on televisuality, which uses the television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse to
illustrate intertexuality and self-reflexivity in a children’s show, which he argues is a
common practice in programming of the post-network era.
3
For example, in iCarly’s fourth season, they only produced eleven new episodes and
episodes from the first three seasons were repeated and cycled through to fill out the
schedule.
4
iCarly was fashioned as a star vehicle for Ms. Cosgrove, who played the little sister to
Schneider’s Drake and Josh (Steinberg 2007). Before that both Drake Bell and Josh Peck
got their start on another Nick series, The Amanda Show, which propelled Amanda Bynes
to stardom after getting her start on All That, another Schneider show (A. Burgess 2007).

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Chapter Three:
That’s a Secret I’ll Never Tell:
Gossip Girl, The CW, and the Franchise Teen Soap Opera

When Warner Bros. and CBS, owner of UPN, joined forces in 2006 to create the
television broadcast network the CW, they had high hopes despite skeptical industry
chatter over what was considered a rather risky business venture. The CW was the result
of a merger between Warner Bros.’ teen-centered The WB and its main competitor
Paramount/CBS’s UPN. Despite growing concern about the loss of the broadcast network
audience, executives at both networks displayed a maverick confidence based on their
prior success targeting the highly elusive 18-34 year old demographic when unveiling the
joint venture. Executives at both networks said they expected the CW to be profitable
from the start and become a “fifth great broadcast network” (Grego 2010). When the CW
launched, it brought over some of the more successful shows from both UPN and the WB,
including reality programming like America’s Top Model (2003- ) and WWE
SmackDown! (1999- ) from the former, and teen soap operas like Gilmore Girls (2000-
2007), 7
th
Heaven (1996-2007), and One Tree Hill (2003- ) from the latter. Together
theses shows helped the new network target a general 18-34 year-old audience
demographic.
In addition to this already vetted lineup, the network worked with the media
conglomerate Alloy Inc.’s entertainment division and producers Josh Schwartz and
Stephanie Savage to develop a television series based on Alloy’s successful book series
Gossip Girl, about a group of NYC prep school students profiled on a blog of the same
name. Together they hoped to turn the property into a transmedia franchise spanning
books, television, and new media. Gossip Girl (2007-2012), which debuted in the
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network’s sophomore season, was key to the rebranding of The WB and UPN as a joint
network. It also showed the network’s attempts to revitalize the teen soap opera for a new
convergent media era and reflected fluctuating transmedia franchising strategies of the
media conglomerates during a time of industry instability.
The goal of this chapter is to trace the development of Gossip Girl as a transmedia
teen soap opera in order to draw attention to some of the emerging programming
strategies in the convergent media industry and theorize where they may be heading. It
examines the Gossip Girl transmedia property through a cultural approach to genre as
defined by Jason Mittell (2008), by looking beyond the text as the locus for genre.
Instead it locates Gossip Girl and the contemporary teen soap opera within the complex
interrelations among various texts, industrial practices, cultural hierarchies, and modes of
audience address (43). I argue that the teen soap opera is at the nexus of a number of
crucial discourses and practices in an era of convergence: transmedia expansion,
television instability, and post-feminism. Specifically, this case study illustrates how
gendered discourses of the soap opera genre were mobilized to develop Gossip Girl as a
transmedia text and how certain gendered industrial practices work to define the property
and guide how audiences should engage with the show and new media technologies in
general. Looking beyond just the representations within the television text and to the
transmedia property as a whole, this chapter reveals the way Alloy and The CW imagines,
structures, and hails a post-feminist subjectivity tied to surveillance, data-mining, and
hegemonic femininity in order to fulfill particular monetary goals in the current media
environment.

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New Measures of Success in the Post-Network Era
The CW poured millions of dollars into the promotional campaign for Gossip Girl
and by extension the network itself, which led to the series being one of the most hotly
anticipated fall shows in 2007 according to OTX, a global media research and consulting
firm. However, the series premiere was watched by a relatively minuscule 3.50 million
viewers and achieved only a 1.6 rating with adults 18-49, coming in last place in its
9:00pm timeslot on Wednesday nights (Calabria 2007). This was a disappointment for
the new network, since both UPN and the WB averaged about the same amount of
viewers the season prior in 2006 (Dana 2008). Although at the time other broadcast
networks were losing viewers in comparison to previous years, the top broadcast shows
of the time like Grey’s Anatomy and CSI could still attract around 15-20 million viewers.
As Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS put it, over the course of the first season, “It
seemed like I was hearing from more people personally who were fans of Gossip Girl
than seemed to be watching it, according to the ratings we were getting” (Carter 2008).
According to Gossip Girl’s executive producer Josh Schwartz: “It's sort of become the
first show that has managed to achieve some level of cultural permeation and success in
the new world order where ratings don't really seem to apply” (Gold 2008). Given that
the newly launched CW made Gossip Girl the centerpiece of its promotional campaign,
and the broadcast network relied almost entirely on advertising revenue to make a profit,
ratings still mattered very much. The network’s president Dawn Ostroff said that when
viewers watch on different platforms, “we don't make the kind of money we make when
it's on the air.” She added that Gossip Girl was at the center of them trying to “figure out
how [they] can take advantage of viewership shifting to different places” (Gold 2008). As
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of 2013, three million viewers is considered a decent rating, but mainly because networks
have figured out how to make money on other platforms like Hulu and other online
streaming sites. But, Gossip Girl was one of the early examples mobilized in the mid
2000s that forced the industry to rethink how they measured success in the convergent era.
Gossip Girl launched right as spot advertising, the financial backbone of the
television industry, was becoming less and less viable due to both increased competition
and the development of new technologies that allow viewers to fast-forward through
commercials. In her article “From Sponsorship to Spots,” Cynthia B. Meyers points out
that both networks and advertisers have been scrambling to restructure the way they
reach, measure, value, buy, and sell audiences as new media devices change the impact of
TV ad spots (Meyers 2009). For example, Brad Adgate, research director of the
advertising agency Horizon Media, says, “Part of the reason why advertisers buy
television is because of its immediacy” (Stelter 2008b). Many movie studios, for instance,
buy television ad space on the “must-watch” teen shows on CW, Nickelodeon, or MTV
so they can air trailers for their latest teen films or blockbusters during the week before
their release with the hopes of luring teen movie-goers to the theater for a big opening
weekend boost. The “immediacy” or timing leading up to opening weekend is what
makes them more appealing than other forms of advertising. Because of audiences’
increased mobility, resulting from their ability to time and place-shift their viewing on
other new media devices Adgate suggests, “there becomes less of a difference between
ads in magazines and ads on television” (Stelter 2008a). Stelter adds, “even though
broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion
upfront market in 2008 attests, prime-time mass audiences are gradually shrinking.” He
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contends, “being able to track time-shifting numbers has cushioned the declines, but in
ways that are trickier to conclusively measure and pitch to marketers” (Stelter 2008b).
It’s not just the speed with which things are changing, but also the complexity.
Despite the fact that technology plays a central role in the Gossip Girl television
program, with its teen characters constantly texting and surfing the web on both phones
and computers, the confusion surrounding the disappointing premier suggested that
television content may have been out pacing the television industry’s ability to adjust to
or track media consumption related to those new technologies. During the show’s first
season, there were some methods of nascent supplemental tracking that suggested the
show was performing better than it appeared. When factoring in DVR playback, it was
projected that ratings for the premiere episode jumped 9% in young women when
comparing “live plus same day” viewing against “live plus seven day” audience (Adalian
2007). But, these weren’t as valued because viewers were presumably scanning through
the commercials, which defeated the purpose for advertisers.
The show was also popular on iTunes, with two episodes of the show ranking
among the service’s five most downloaded TV episodes in its first season and continuing
to be the service’s most downloaded show throughout its 6 seasons, but this revenue
paled in comparison for what they could charge advertisers. Drawing attention to this
tension, Metea Gold of the Los Angeles Times writes: “Despite the program’s online
popularity, the network hasn’t been able to translate the Web buzz into substantial TV
ratings” (Gold 2008). Throughout its tenure the CW experimented with offering the show
on different distribution platforms, including the CW website, Hulu, and Netflix. At
several points the network suspended viewing on online platforms and extended the wait
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for new episodes in an effort to drive online viewers back to their television sets, but
most of these strategies blew up in their face, leading to a backlash of angry viewers who
had become used to consuming Gossip Girl through online platforms. In many ways
Gossip Girl represented a very particular moment in the history of the television industry
that forced networks to rethink the long-held axioms of network schedulers and
advertisers. For example, in a January 2008 address to television executives in Las Vegas,
Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, noted “Our challenge with all these
ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars
for digital pennies.” He called it “the No. 1 challenge for the industry” (Stelter 2008a).
Some viewers, mainly older viewers, are still watching television in the same way
they have always watched; not everyone is changing. Yet the Gossip Girl moment
showed that the industry was evolving, particularly for younger viewers that the CW and
its advertisers are trying to reach. Media scholar Joseph Turow insists, it is the
windowing strategy of classic media distribution that is less and less viable. Because
networks cannot control or dictate the time in which viewers get content, they cannot
monetize it through various outlets across a carefully constructed time span. Turow
quipped, “The food chains of media revenue are getting longer” implying that different
distribution platforms were each taking a piece of the television revenue pie usually
reserved for the studio and network after their sizable upfront investment in programming
(Turow 2011). The CW and Gossip Girl emerged just as those food chains were growing
longer and longer. Therefore, the show illustrates several experimental monetizing
strategies implemented by the teen television industry to make up for these longer food
chains, and particularly the less bankable ad revenue coming from television spot
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advertisements.
Retrospectively, the CW network executives admit that they were naïve to assume
the network could be so successful right out of the gate, given the changing television
industry. As Leslie Moonves said, “I didn’t think putting the two networks together
would necessarily mean that one plus one would equal three. But I may have expected
two and a half” (Carter 2008). Two years into the network’s young life, critics jested that
it was adding up to more like “seven-tenths” of a network as it was losing millions of
dollars and showing no signs of growth (Carter 2008). In response to these struggles,
Ostroff finally admitted to the challenges of launching a broadcast network in what
Amanda Lotz (2007) has described as the post-network era: “The marketplace is cluttered
and we are in the middle of a digital revolution. Here a new network came along that had
to change its entire TV station affiliate body…It was a very big undertaking, much larger
than what everybody realized. It is probably the last broadcast network that will ever be
built” (James 2010). By 2009 rumors circulated in the trades that the media
conglomerates would pull the plug on the company.
Yet, in response to these rumors the executives at Warner Bros., CBS, and the
CW drafted a letter squashing the idea that they were giving up on the struggling network.
“We support the network, believe in it, and are committed to its future,” the executives
wrote. “All of us must continue to work hard and push every day to aggressively compete
in this marketplace. Our success will be born of focused and sustained effort over the
course of the next few years” (Adalian 2008). At the time of the letter, the network was
already adjusting its business model. By the fall 2008 season, the CW had elected to stop
airing wrestling on Friday nights—an admission that chasing a young male audience was
120
no longer part of the network’s mission (Dana 2008). Wrestling had drawn high ratings,
but advertising rates were lower because it draws an audience less desirable to
advertisers—mainly lower income minority viewers, several of which were older than the
network’s original target demographic (Seiter 2007). Instead the CW began modeling its
programming strategy more like the successful cable channels, which had narrower target
demographics. At its upfront presentation in fall 2008, the CW redefined its target
audience as exclusively 18- to 34-year-old women, reflecting both the rise of network
narrowcasting and the importance of the young female demographic, and its buying
habits.
Nevertheless, even though the network created some significant revenue for its
parent companies through international distribution, syndication and DVD sales of CW
shows, and despite these adjustments to the network’s target demographic, the CW
remained unprofitable. The CW wasn’t performing nearly as well as either their
broadcast or cable network competitors. As discussed in chapter 2, cable networks
Nickelodeon, MTV, HBO, and USA were the major moneymakers for the conglomerates
in general, and the CW was and continues to underperform in comparison. In fact, the
network has consistently been in the red since 2008. Melissa Grego of Broadcasting &
Cable suggests that in 2009 “The CW lost tens of millions of dollars. Bernstein Research
estimates the loss at $25 million to $50 million, and one source indicates that the loss is
closer to the high end.” She adds, “What's more, the network's ratings are routinely and
firmly in fifth place among the English-language broadcast networks in many key demos”
(Grego, 2010).
Considering these struggles, it may be surprising that Gossip Girl made it to a
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sixth season in fall of 2012. Yet, CBS and Warner Bros. executives in charge of The CW
and its programming comment, “The actual network’s red ink is just part of the
picture…the profitable programming assets created by the venture overall are a big win”
(Grego, 2010). Head of Warner Television Group, Bruce Rosenblum concurs, “So long
as the economic model is consistent or better than it is today, we see no reason not to be
fully invested and supportive of The CW as a brand, as a broadcast network and whatever
ancillary businesses are developed as a result of this investment” (Grego, 2010).
Somehow, the CW’s economic model was and continues to still be profitable for Time
Warner, despite losses at the network level, and this has to do with some of the integrated
marketing campaigns and synergies it developed around an idealized post-feminist
viewer/consumer that supplement the declines of traditional spot advertising. The CW’s
flagship series, Gossip Girl, remained on air for six seasons despite relatively low ratings
because of some of the specific ways that television, music, fashion, celebrity branding,
and online content all converge in specific gendered franchising strategies. These
franchising strategies not only complicate traditional understandings of broadcast channel
business models and audiences in the contemporary convergent media landscape, but also
suggest new ways for thinking about television’s evolving role in the media industries
overall.
As discussed in the introduction of this dissertation, the contemporary convergent
media industries, dominated by an oligopoly of deregulated media conglomerates, have
shown a penchant for franchise properties that are deployable across multiple media
outlets (Jenkins 2008). According to media industries scholar Derek Johnson, “Conceived
as a set of institutional practices, media franchising can describe ongoing, multiplied
122
production in which parallel or successive production contexts creatively share and
economically extend intellectual property resources” (Johnson 2011). Media franchising
is often discussed in terms of a property extending across media with versions produced
in film, television, videogame, online, and licensing contexts, like Gossip Girl; or it is
discussed within media like spin-offs, prequels, and sequels of a television or film
property, like CSI, CSI: Miami, etc. In a 2012 Flow piece, Kayti Lausch draws attention
to the CW’s continued reliance on franchise properties highlighting how The Carrie
Diaries, a 2012 hour-long teen drama based on Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City
prequel of the same name will replace Gossip Girl after the series’ final truncated sixth
season, joining a long line of remakes and reboots like 90210, Nikita, and Melrose Place
on the CW. Lausch argues that “The CW’s reliance on 1990s reboots/remakes/spin-offs
reveals its ambivalence about the state of television for young women today…The
network is nostalgic for a time when they ‘understood’ young female viewers and could
give them what they thought they wanted” (Lausch 2012). Lausch is right to identify the
CW’s copycat programming. Choosing to develop Alloy Entertainment’s stagnant 10
year-old property The Vampire Diaries in order to jump on the Twilight bandwagon
suggests the network is struggling to develop its own original series, especially compared
to the success that the WB had in creating innovative original series in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Understanding the role that Gossip Girl played in shaping the network
during its early years, however, explains The CW’s subsequent focus on franchise
properties less in terms of nostalgia or ambivalence about their audience and more in
terms of strategic maneuvering. Teen soap opera franchises are the ideal genre for
transmedia storytelling and have the ability to extend television monetizing models
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across a variety of platforms. Through the construction of an idealized post-feminist
subjection position that embraces femininity and comfortably uses technologies for the
purposes of peer- and self-surveillance, teen soap opera franchises, like Gossip Girl,
promote gendered forms of consumption and online interaction that support what Sandra
Lee Bartky (1993) calls the “fashion-beauty complex” as well as data-mining or what
Mark Andrejevic (2003) calls “the work of being watched”—two important markets for
the contemporary media industries that are currently being pursued by Alloy Inc. the
developer of the Gossip Girl property.

Gossip Girl’s Early Development:
The first Gossip Girl book was published in 2002, and was written by Cecily von
Ziegesar, who at the time was an editor for Alloy Entertainment, an arm of the large
media and marketing conglomerate Alloy Inc. The conglomerate began as a website,
Alloy.com, and a direct mail clothing company in 1996, but it grew into one of the
leading producers of contemporary girl’s media culture by the 2010s through the
acquisition of a number of youth-centered media companies popular with the Y
generation, including clothing companies like Delia*s, in school television services like
Channel One, and more recently a slue of websites like teen.com and gURL.com,
including top YouTube channels like smosh.com (see chapter four). Significantly, the
Alloy Entertainment division of the larger conglomerate was formed when Alloy Inc.
acquired 17
th
Street Productions, run by Leslie Morgenstein and Ann Brashares, in 2000.
Prior to Alloy’s acquisition, 17
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Street Productions was a book packager best known for
the Sweet Valley High (SVH) property, which dominated the teen-girl publishing world
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for over 20 years. Its author Francine Pascal, known as a “one woman publishing
industry,” came to the book packaging company to help her develop the series’ multiple
spin-off releases: Sweet Valley Kids, Sweet Valley Twins, Team Sweet Valley, The
Unicorn Club, and Sweet Valley University, as well as later books within the Sweet Valley
High series. Along with Disney’s unique form of media franchising that dominated the
children’s media industry throughout the twentieth century (Wasko 2001), the youth
publishing industry, spanning as far back as Edward Stratemeyer’s development of the
“Hardy Boys” series and the “Nancy Drew” mysteries in 1880s, established the model
and precedents for contemporary media franchising both within and beyond children’s
and youth media. Children’s books and stories were some of the first transmedia
properties.
Exemplifying many of the collectively written precedents in youth media
franchises, Cecily von Ziegesar had been a ghostwriter on Pascal’s SVH series. And,
Gossip Girl was developed with the same author-by-committee model and assembly line
production that had made Pascal’s SVH a successful series. The name for Gossip Girl
was suggested by an Alloy intern, and like many Alloy properties, although Von Ziegasar
would be credited as the author, the property’s genesis actually happened by committee
in a development meeting in early 2000. During these meetings, Alloy editors are known
for deliberately pulling from the headlines to create its properties and they often
brainstorm how adult properties can be adapted for teen girls (Mead 2009). This was a
common practice in prime time television production. Executive producer and creator of
the Law And Order franchise, Dick Wolf, has said numerous times that “The New York
Post is our bible for the show.” Gossip Girl is narrated with the witty voice of an
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anonymous blogger who chronicles the antics of students at an elite New York private
school. Because of this and the fact that it focuses on the affluent female characters, Blair
and Serena, searching for love in the upper east side while they fawn over designer
clothing, the series is frequently compared to the popular HBO television show Sex and
the City, which covered similar subjects. In brainstorming Gossip Girl, 17
th
Street Studios
borrowed from Sex and the City its frank discussion of sex, alcohol, and an overall less
innocent representation of contemporary female existence and used it as a way to rebrand
and update the production company as they merged with Alloy Inc. Pascal’s suburban
utopia of “Sweet Valley” and her “facile depiction of high school life and teenage
romance” had defined the company. But, as the company moved into the 21
st
century,
their approach to girlhood was appearing increasingly tired and out of date (Pattee 2008).
The CW similarly used the property to help rebrand the network in contrast to the
WB. Gossip Girl represented a break from both the WB’s and 17
th
Street’s brand of
innocent girl culture. In her work on teen media, Valerie Wee explains that a “WB show”
was one that featured morally idealistic teenage characters coming-of-age “with an
appealing blend of intelligence, sensitivity, and knowing sarcasm” (Wee 2008). In
contrast Gossip Girl was decidedly less sensitive and even cynical or cruel in its elitist
tone. As discussed in more detail below, it was designed to build on the sexy, flashy,
lifestyle branding of Josh Schwartz’s previously successful teen soap The O.C. (FOX,
2003-2007). The Gossip Girl property was also seen to be in the same vein of the snarky
satire of the popular breakout teen comedy film Mean Girls (2004) written by Tina Fey
and based in part on the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes (2003) by Rosalind
Wiseman, which describes how female high school social cliques operate. As opposed to
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celebrating the virtues of the “good girl,” the “mean girl” would become the star.
Moving away from the idealized girlhood symbolized by the sweet, innocent,
chaste, middle-class whiteness that typified girl culture from the 1950s-1990s, Gossip
Girl contributes to what Rosalind Gill (2007) describes as the circulation of a
contemporary post-feminist sensibility. As discussed in the introduction, post-feminism
reflects a female existence in the stage after (or in some cases a reaction to) second wave
feminism when a limited understanding of gender equality has been achieved (McRobbie
2004). The term has been hotly debated over the past twenty years as to whether it is a
result of conflicts within the global feminist movement (Brooks 1997, Lotz 2001), a
historical shift in the movement as part of a third-wave (Dow 1996, McRobbie 2004,
Rabinovitz 1999) a backlash against feminism (Levy 2006, Faludi 1991) or the product of
feminism grappling with a general cultural shift towards neo-liberalism (Gill and Scharff
2011). Nevertheless, Gill presents a compelling understanding of post-feminism as a
sensibility defined in a series of specific discourses. She argues:
These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from
objectification to subjectification; the emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring
and discipline; a focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment; the
dominance of a makeover paradigm; a resurgence in the ideas of natural sexual
difference; a marked sexualization of culture; and an emphasis upon consumerism
and the commodification of difference (2007, 149).
Gossip Girl, showing several similarities to Sex and the City, which has dominated
discussions of post-feminism (Arthurs 2003; Negra 2004; Hermes 2006), illustrates many
of these qualities. Like the main characters on Sex and the City, the main female
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protagonists on Gossip Girl “define femininity as a bodily property rather than a social,
structural or psychological one” (Gill 2007, 149). In the pilot episode of the show, Blair’s
mother tells her, “You’ll never be more beautiful, thin, or happy than you are right now”
equating her feminine body with her overall happiness. Their sex appeal, heightened
through feminine fashions, is a key marker of their identity. Blair Waldorf, in particular,
essentializes a particular form of femininity tied to the traditional private school girl
outfit and class-based definitions of taste. On the show markers of sexual objectification
transition to self-sexual subjectifcation, meaning they choose to dress sexually for
“themselves” not for others. Clothing in the Bourdieuian sense is specifically linked to
their status in school. For example, in the first episode Jenny Humphrey shops in the
designer stores well outside her budget in order to do recon to make her own designer
dress knock off, which to her is a key symbol of her new identity as part of the “in crowd”
at school. While the girls dress to impress the male love interests on the show, traditional
notions of male sexual objectification become self-subjectification particularly through
the girls’ fetishization of clothing and competition with each other for power and
distinction.
Significantly, the girls of Gossip Girl are portrayed as individuals, free to make
their own choices and empower themselves as they display independence from their
parents and operate rather autonomously from their family structures. In the episode
“Dare Devil” Serena merely announces to her mom that she has a date with a boy whom
her mother doesn’t approve, rejecting the idea that she would need her mother’s approval
to do anything. The only advice she takes from her mother is on the appropriateness of
her purse for the evening, agreeing that the sleek black channel purse goes much better
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than the brown fringed purse she was carrying. In the same episode, in the absence of her
mother, Blair throws an elaborate sleepover that leads to a game of “truth or dare” in an
upscale bar, where Blair confidently goes up to a stranger and kisses him passionately
while swiping his phone. This individualization is a key aspect of post-feminist discourse.
Yet, like Sex and the City many of these choices are tied to consumption and only
available to women of a certain economic status, illustrating a key element of post-
feminist discourse that marks a shift in notions of female empowerment from the
collective consciousness of previous feminisms to “the centralization of an affluent elite”
and an individualism that “elevates consumption” as a strategy to heal most social,
economic or political dissatisfactions (Tasker and Negra 2007). Although the brand
identity of the property was seen as very hip and contemporary and is often described as
“giving teen girls what they want” by creating a “Sex and The City for girls,” the show
contributes to discourses of post-feminism that tend to entangle elements of feminist and
antifeminist discourses (Gill 2007, 163). Representing contradictions of empowering
“can-do” girlhood (Harris 2004) on the one hand and the reinscription of their bodies as
sexual objects on the other, the show celebrates the pleasures of a traditional femininity
and in the words of Angela McRobbie “takes feminism into account” in order to undo it
(McRobbie 2004).
In many ways Gossip Girl’s adherence to the discourses of post-feminism
reaffirms how widespread and normalized these discourses have become. Yet,
understanding post-feminist discourses of technological girlhood in Gossip Girl as a
deliberate construction inextricably bound up with the teen commodity production
associated with Alloy Inc (Pattee 2006) and the television franchising strategies tied to
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the CW’s network illuminates strategic parallels between the post-feminist themes and
representations within the show and particular motives of the media industry in an era of
uncertainty and convergence. Gossip Girl is the product of two companies mobilizing
particular forms of post-feminist subjectivities and representations in order to promote
consumerism and particular types of gendered interactions with new media devices.
When 17
th
Street Studios, newly branded as Alloy Entertainment, developed the
Gossip Girl property, its president Leslie Morgenstein wanted a property that could
explicitly make up for the declining magazine industry. “In the years leading up to 17
th

Street Productions being bought by Alloy, nearly all magazines aimed at teenage girls
had been scaled down or axed, including Time Warner Inc.'s Teen People, Hachette
Filipacchi Media's Elle Girl, Hearst's Cosmo Girl and Condé Nast's YM” (Steel 2009).
The role that women’s magazines and teen magazines have played in circulating
discourses of normative femininity tied to consumption, heterosexuality, and strict ideals
of beauty in an effort to serve capitalism is well documented within feminist media
studies. And, it is important to understand that Morgenstein was strategizing Alloy
Entertainment’s new role within the conglomerate as the girls magazine industry and
book publishing were facing increasing challenges. “I do fundamentally believe that
publishing is not an expanding business,” he says. “It is contracting—even our corner of
it, which has been very vibrant in the past few years. I don't think long term there's going
to be sustainable growth there” (Mead 2009). As a result, the executives began spending
as much time thinking about ideas for television and movies as they did for books, and
began considering their book ideas in terms of their viability as television and film
franchises that could also tie into other assets of the conglomerate, particularly those
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supported by the beauty industry’s advertising dollars (Mead 2009). As Jim Milliot points
out from Publisher’s Weekly, “The creation of original material that is not part of an
existing series—but which could be developed into films, online content, and TV
programs—became an increasingly important aspect of Morgenstein's strategy” (Milliot
2000a). Alloy Entertainment’s executive vice-president Josh Bank says, “Nowadays,
we’re trying to think of ourselves more as a think tank. We’re not just the book guys.
Really what we’re doing in that development room is generating properties. If they’re
books, great. If they're TV show or movies, great. We’re even thinking of the Internet”
(Rosen 2008). This movement towards a “think tank” occurred simultaneously during the
development of the Gossip Girl property into a transmedia franchise.
Amy Pattee notes that the Gossip Girl literary property underscores a theme of
consumption that parallels the consumption prerogative advocated by Alloy Inc. (Pattee
2006). The conglomerate had built its success around the cross promotion of its website
and direct mail clothing catalog which launched simultaneously in 1996. Alloy.com
offered young visitors free e-mail and acted like an interactive teen magazine with
sections covering celebrity gossip, horoscopes, and other teen-oriented news items. But,
it also offered a shopping channel to buy clothing and other merchandise offered in their
direct mail catalog, a chat channel, and a number of other features designed to attract
girls (Covell 2003). Johnson says that Alloy.com was explicitly designed to mimic the
experience of a mall. “Teenagers go to malls. They’re there to shop, but also to talk to
friends, look at magazines, and generally hang around. We thought if we could keep them
hanging around the Alloy site, we could sell to them” (Girard 2000). According to
Diamond by 2001, at least 20% of online visitors had made at least one purchase and the
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average order on the website was $80-$100 (Cotlier et al. 2001). Alloy also gained
revenue with banner ads on the site of other brands targeting the teen girl demographic.
In effect, alloy.com is a “walled garden,” or “an online environment where consumers go
for information, communications, and commerce services and that discourages them from
leaving for the larger digital world” (Turow 2005, 116). Much like Alloy.com, the Gossip
Girl property was created as a world appealing to both young viewers and the advertisers
wishing to reach those young viewers. In Gossip Girl it’s impossible to separate the plot
from the consumer activities happening within and alongside it. But Gossip Girl, like the
website, was also designed with themes that made viewers comfortable and even excited
about the idea of data-mining, target-marketing, and online surveillance. Just as the
website asked girls to register, answer survey questions, and take “quizzes” in exchange
for discounts and access to email and discussion boards in order to build up it’s database
of social profiles that it used to develop target-marketing campaigns for companies like
Kmart, Pantene, and Covergirl, Gossip Girl features thematic material that normalizes
and glamourizes surveillance through the representation of the Gossip Girl blog and the
characters’ various uses of it towards peer- and self-surveillance.
The concept of Gossip Girl being centered on a blog figures prominently in the
Alloy Entertainment’s conception of it as a franchise. Before the Gossip Girl concept was
bought by Little, Brown and Company as a literary development, Morgenstein shopped
the property around with the pitch that it could take a variety of media forms; from an e
book, to an interactive blog, or a traditional paperback with online tie-ins, Morganstien
said that part of the Gossip Girl package would include the establishment of an
anonymous advice column on the Alloy Website that would address teen issues and
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“eventually be tied into the books” (Milliot 2000b). Consequently, however, when Alloy
launched a website, gossipgirl.net, along with the literary property in 2004, at the time its
integration with other Alloy properties and its sponsors was relatively limited. As Pattee
describes,
Unlike the Gossip Girl Web site featured in the novels, the “real” site does not
include archived observations of the series characters’ actions; instead, the “real”
site delivers more information about the series as a literary product and includes
opportunities to purchase installments of the series online…Because the “real”
site does not contain information that would be considered “new” to the fictional
characters of the series—in fact, not much of the content is “new” to the regular
series readers—the site’s function seems representative rather than informative
(2006, 169).
The gossip girl books evinced a world and cast of characters in a serial narrative that
could be expanded and developed with an accompanying website to further engage fans
and increase consumption of the property; however, despite Morgenstein’s ambition, the
original gossipgirl.net site did nothing to add to the fictional narrative or character
backstories that was supplemental to the books. In fact, it acted as little more than an
online bookstore with descriptions of the characters. Arguably, it wasn’t until Alloy
teamed up with Schwartz and the CW that the property was developed to become a true
transmedia franchise that in the words of Henry Jenkins, “represents a process where
integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery
channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience”
(Jenkins 2003). Although in this time period all kinds of properties were wildly jumping
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in the water with various web tie-ins, part of Gossip Girl’s success is dependent on the
television soap opera genre characteristics and their potential for transmedia storytelling,
particularly for industry conceptions of idealized female audiences.

Bringing on Schwartz: Revitalizing the Teen Soap Opera
Before the CW acquired the property, the Gossip Girl books were being shopped
around for a film adaptation starring Lindsay Lohan with the creator of Gilmore Girls,
Amy Sherman-Palladino (“Gossip Girl Movie Preview” 2012). Eventually Morgenstein
teamed with Warner Television Group to develop it into a television property instead.
Producer Josh Schwartz was brought on to develop the Gossip Girl property for TV in
January 2007, riding on the coattails of his success with The O.C. (FOX, 2003-2007), a
teen soap opera based in the affluent Orange County, California city of Newport Beach.
Schwartz had become the youngest showrunner in Hollywood when he sold The O.C.
pilot to Warner Television Group to be distributed by Fox in 2003 at the age of 26. The
O.C. quickly caught fire in its first season as the top-rated drama among teens, securing a
total audience of nearly 10 million (Associated Press 2007). The narrative of the show
revolved around the blue-collar teen, Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), who is, in the
words of Schwartz, “lucky enough to be arrested and assigned Sandy Cohen (Peter
Gallagher) as his defense attorney” (Schwartz 2004). Cohen eventually takes Atwood
into his family, and his son Seth (Adam Brody), a different kind of misfit, bonds with the
rebel as they traverse the drama of teenage wealth and privilege with an ironic and self-
aware tone.
With The O.C. Schwartz was credited with revitalizing the primetime teen soap
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opera, a genre which originally came into prominence in the early 1990s with the
popularity of the series Beverly Hills, 90210 (FOX 1990-2000) created by Darren Star
and produced by Aaron Spelling, the prolific primetime soap producer of Dynasty (1981-
1989). Schwartz’s The O.C. builds on the primetime soap tradition of Beverly Hills,
90210 and Dynasty, both of which found success documenting the fictional lives of the
wealthy from the perspective of a relative outsider, allowing viewers the pleasures of
experiencing a life of fantasy and escapism. The O.C. also shares with Beverly Hills,
90210 several soap opera elements, including a focus on ongoing story arcs spanning
several episodes, an emphasis on family life, personal relationships, sexual dramas,
emotional and moral conflicts, and the representation of topical issues like addiction,
depression, rape, and sexuality. As discussed more below, these generic qualities of the
soap opera provide narrative worlds particularly suited for transmedia storytelling,
particularly for a young female audience that as Henry Jenkins notes, has not been the
primary focus for many transmedia storytelling properties (Jenkins 2008, 23).
Although soap operas have been one of the most enduring and influential
television genres and they have inspired some of the liveliest and sustained debates in
feminist television studies, the genre continues to be considered one of the most derided
and “low” forms of popular culture. This derision stems in part from the genre’s
historically gendered address, its focus on domestic and familial issues, and its
heightened melodramatic emotions. It’s part of the long gendered history that
undervalues female domestic labor in the home in comparison to masculine labor
performed outside of the home, and by extension the gendered hobbies, representations,
and activities associated with that labor. But this derision is also applied to the genre’s
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commercial sponsorship and mass production—the genre derives its name because
daytime serials were primarily an advertising vehicle for laundry detergents and
household cleaning products produced by companies like Proctor and Gamble. Soaps
were seen as a poorly made, mass-produced commodities.
Soap operas typified the theory put forth by Andreas Huyssen that modernist
ideologies often persist in gendering popular forms, industries, and audiences as feminine
in problematic opposition to a more legitimate and authentic masculinized high culture,
ultimately leading to the universalizing ascription of femininity to the lower mass culture
(Huyssen 1986, 48). Although the post-modernism of the 1980s and 1990s celebrated
popular and traditionally low culture, blurring established boundaries such as these, it
also witnessed an increasing amount of self-reflexivity, self-awareness, and parody,
which lead, among other things, to the lampooning of soap operas and their often-stilted
acting, low production design, implausible plotlines, reliance on consequence, and
melodrama. Teen soap operas like Beverly Hills: 90210, despite their longevity and
popularity, were mocked and ridiculed on shows like Saturday Night Live and The
Simpsons, so by the time of Beverly Hills: 90210’s cancellation the genre was considered
quite tired.
Nevertheless, in the late 1990s The WB was able to distance itself somewhat from
these discourses with its higher production values, commitment to a form of emotional
realism, intelligent dialogue, and cultural awareness in shows like Dawson’s Creek and
Felicity. And, as Ellen Seiter and Mary Jeanne Wilson argue in their chapter “Soap Opera
Survival Tactics,” The O.C. was so popular, especially with younger viewers, because it
was also able to “establish an ironic distance from some of the trashier elements of
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daytime soaps” (2005, 149). They argue that the show was able to separate itself from its
generic forebears with its high production values, which included a focus on outdoor
locations instead of studio sets and film instead of video, but also by injecting elements of
screwball comedy and wit, while highlighting irony over melodrama. But, Seiter and
Wilson also argue that by giving prominence to male characters over female characters,
The O.C. was less appealing to its core demographic of female viewers.
Still, on both The O.C. and Gossip Girl Schwartz was able to update the formula
of primetime soap opera that had been popular since Peyton Place (1964–1966) by
adding style and gloss, or as John Caldwell would call it “televisuality,” to make it appear
new (Caldwell 1995). Schwartz said that despite its references to famous teen media texts
like Rebel Without a Cause, Beverly Hills: 90210, Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life
and the oeuvres of Cameron Crowe and John Hughes, The O.C.’s flashy visuals, beautiful
actors, and slick production design made the series appear fresh and stand out in a
television environment dominated by reality television and a slue of cheap copycat
programming (Schwartz 2004). Even though Schwartz got credit for these “new” kinds of
production value, they are nevertheless a hallmark of the classic primetime soaps like
Dallas and Dynasty.
When Schwartz came on to the Gossip Girl property, he stuck very close to Von
Zeigasar’s original book in terms of plot and character, which focused on the lives of the
five wealthy and privileged teenage characters attending the NYC prep school Constance
Billard. The pilot begins as former Constance “It girl” Serena van der Woodsen (Blake
Lively) returns from a mysterious absence to find her former best-friend-turned-enemy
Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) residing on the top of the Met’s steps as the school’s
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“Queen Bee.” There, Blair rules over a legion of headband-wearing and designer handbag
toting “mignons” who follow her every command. The anonymous and never-before-
seen blogger, known by the whole school as Gossip Girl, is the first to document Serena’s
unexpected return to the delight of Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), an “outsider” from
Brooklyn who despite living in a posh Brooklyn loft, is the “poor kid” attending
Constance on scholarship. “Golden Boy” Nate Archibald (Chase Crawford) and resident
bad boy/hotel heir Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) are also invested in Serena’s return as they
seem to be hiding some knowledge surrounding Serena’s departure the year before.
Despite his allegiance to the original source material, Schwartz gave the series a
posh televisual aesthetic by borrowing the sweeping helicopter shots and saturated color
palate used on The O.C. and applied it to fast-forward establishing shots of a bustling
New York to create a similar glamorous appeal. He also combined his playful tongue-
and-cheek self-awareness to Von Zeigasar’s celebrated satire. Together, these aesthetic
markers were as important to establishing the CW brand as the less innocent post-
feminist representations mentioned above. Unlike the overwhelming critical support for
The O.C. when it debuted, the first season of Gossip Girl received mixed reviews, many
calling it a “forgettable guilty pleasure,” or tamer than books, which were appreciated for
their somewhat candid display of teenage sex, drug, and alcohol use (Goodman 2007;
Maynard 2007). Others, like the Parents Television Counsel notoriously called the show
“mind-blowingly inappropriate” and deemed the show one of its “worst shows of the
week” for its “careless portrayal of teen drinking, sexual conduct, and drug use” and
because it simply reinforces “the hedonistic irresponsible lifestyle that is captivating our
country through pseudo-celebrities like Paris Hilton” (Schulenberg 2008).
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Similar critiques lobbed at Beverly Hills: 90210, Melrose Place and countless
other teen dramas in the past, including the network defining Dawson’s Creek, had done
nothing to squelch the success of previous teen soap operas, so Alloy Entertainment and
The CW were not worried that they would impact the show. The promotional campaign
for Gossip Girl’s second season even famously incorporated these critiques into sexy ads
for the show that featured the texting language “OMFG!” and generated a lot of publicity.
Despite the relatively low ratings for the show mentioned above, the good news for the
network was that the program was the number-one new broadcast show that season
among female teens. And its audience—with a median age of 26.2—was the youngest
watching broadcast television (Gold 2008). Despite the overall disappointingly low
ratings, the high concentration of young viewers peaked advertiser interest. During the
first season, Verizon Wireless snagged the exclusive technology sponsorship deal—
meaning all the phones used by the characters on the show would be carrying Verizon
phones—and Victoria's Secret, Vitamin Water, and a slue of other companies lobbied for
product integration deals (Gold 2008).
The fashion conscious upper east side milieu, the decadent parties that are usually
sponsored by companies wanting publicity, and the life of leisure affording these teens to
eat and drink anywhere in town provides the perfect fodder for product placement,
creating a lifestyle brand of music, fashion, and tourism that extended far beyond the
television text or a spot advertisement. Product integration practices like shopping at
Vera Wang for a wedding dress, attending a charity party sponsored by Vitamin Water,
planning an event for InStyle Magazine, eating yogurt at PinkBerry, using the Bing
search engine to find the nearest Chanel for a last-minute party dress, or Interning at W
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magazine (which all happen on the show) seem organic to the label-citing teens living in
the media center of NYC. There’s a celebrated lack of subtlety in name-dropping
products on the show, delivered in a self-aware tone, which both adds to and supports the
show’s heightened satirical reality. The show needs to be understood as camp, which as
Susan Sontag (1964) famously described is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and
exaggeration.” Through camp, the show is able to integrate products seamlessly into the
narrative, while at the same time balancing the glamorization of these brands and
products by poking fun at the practices of a culture that celebrates such blatant
commercialism.
It’s an ideal tone to strike and partially explains why Gossip Girl remained on the
air for so long—it was the ideal environment for commercial sponsorship. In contrast, the
CW’s most popular show in terms of ratings, Vampire Diaries, has tried to integrate
product placement, but the show’s rural, small town environment, and its focus on 19
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century history and exploration of supernatural mythologies, along with its more earnest
and emotional tone, make the same product integrations jump out awkwardly. For
example, in season 2, episodes 18 “The Last Dance” of The Vampire Diaries the writers
essentially write a small scene completely around an AT&T MiFi mobile wireless
internet router. In the scene, the talented witch Bonnie has just faked her death to fool the
murderous super-villain vampire Klaus and she and her boyfriend Jeremy are hiding out
in an old deserted mansion where the spirits of past witches ward off unwanted visitors.
Lit only by candlelight and surrounded by dusty antiques, the “money-shot” of Jeremy’s
MiFi router is particularly jarring, especially as they are discussing life and death
scenarios and accessing the internet is a leisure activity to pass the time. It’s not only the
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environment that is key to a show being conducive to product placement, but also the
genre, tone and style, which is important for product integration.
Given its ideal environment for product integration, Gossip Girl has had a broad
impact in the retail marketplace for Alloy, The CW, and its slue of enthusiastic sponsors.
Especially leading up to its second season the television show was having a huge
influence on how young women spend their money. Gossip Girl “may well be the biggest
influence in the youth culture market,” said Stephanie Meyerson, a trend spotter for
Stylesight, a trend forecasting company (Ferla 2008) and the designer Tory Burch found
that having an item on the show “translates to sales” (Ferla 2008). Significantly on both
the Alloy entertainment produced website featuring Gossip Girl, and The CW created
gossipgirl.com (which link between each other seamlessly in click through streams)
viewers are able to identify the brand of the clothes and accessories in each episode and
click through to buy them. Arguably because of the seamless product integration, Gossip
Girl’s e-commerce connections were about 50 percent more successful than other e-
commerce tie-ins to other programming, even the reality television show America’s Next
Top Model (Ferla 2008).
The Gossip Girl television show was designed similarly to alloy.com: as an
entertaining space that can attract a lot of teen girls and hopefully convince them to buy
products associated with the content through e-commerce connections. “A lot of young
women watch our shows the way they read magazines. They come to learn about fashion,
music, technology,” says Ostroff. “It's one-stop shopping. They are getting satisfaction
from being entertained, while they are learning something culturally” (Albiniak, Paige
2011). Even though on a certain level, Ostroff’s comments are true in that teen girls
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consume a great deal of Gossip Girl’s “lifestyle” merchandise, her comments nonetheless
perpetuate common discriminatory discourses about girls’ media behaviors and taste.
While Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal presented a prepared testimony
at the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee “Future of Video” Hearing on May 10,
2007 lamenting how product integration hinders the creative expression of media
producers and exploits viewer’s emotional connection to characters in order to sell
products, girl viewers are usually excluded from these taste distinctions. In contrast, girls
are usually discussed as “wanting” product integration and only watching programming
for the products. Writing in the New York Times about Gossip Girl’s fashion product
integration, Ruth La Ferla says “Its primary viewership of teenagers and young women
[are] tuning in not only for the plots, but also to render judgment on the clothes” (Ferla
2008). These discourses, which are extremely common and part of the publicity
circulated by Alloy and The CW about the show, naturalize a definition of girls being tied
to consumerism, openly reassert a specific form of gendered socialization around
consumption, and reinforce shopping as explicitly linked to female television viewing—
goals that appeal to many television advertisers and are major features of how the CW
continues to construct its target demographic.
Nevertheless, given the success of the soap’s product integration, Dawn Ostroff
remained positive about Gossip Girl, brushing off the low ratings. “We did very well
with teens, and that’s where a lot of these shows all start,” Ostroff said. “At the end of the
day, this show is getting the network so much buzz. You feel the groundswell. You know
it’s out there in the zeitgeist” (Gold 2008). In fact, Time Warner and Alloy Inc. worked
their combined horizontal integration to flood the marketplace with Gossip Girl
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promotions and publicity about the show’s cast. The actors appeared on countless
magazine covers, while banner advertisements and strategic “celebrity gossip” articles
featuring Lively, Meester, and Crawford lined the content of Alloy Inc.’s web properties
teen.com, gURL.com, and alloy.com. In fact, the Gossip Girl promotional campaign
illustrates how TV Soap operas have been and continue to be the feeder for the celebrity
system. As Graeme Turner notes, “Cross-promotion between television programs and
mass-market magazines is routine, and promotional and publicity campaigns can be
organized virtually within the one corporate identity to include appearances on television
and radio and in the print media” (Turner 2005, p.418). The levels of celebrity structured
within and beyond the diegesis of Gossip Girl allow multiple opportunities for
promotional campaigns within and beyond the show’s narrative constraints. For example,
Serena is often discussed as an “It Girl” on the show, acting as a spokesperson for
multiple brands within the diegesis, but Blake Lively is also one of the most googled
young celebrities who makes appearance at many sponsored parties donning designer
brands. Moreover, as Turner adds, “Youth audiences are high consumers of celebrity,”
(418). As a result, together the conglomerates were able to shape and manufacture the
“zeitgeist” that Ostroff mentions through their promotion of teen celebrity, all the while
generating income from products wanting their advertisements alongside these gossip
articles and promos.
As Ostroff remained confident about the show’s environment for product
placement it was also clear that beyond revitalizing the teen soap opera and structuring
the property within strategic celebrity promotional campaigns, the network was going to
have to expand on Alloy’s original vision for the property and develop its online presence
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if it was going to attempt to lure its viewers back to the main television text or get them
invested in the brand and franchise in other ways that would integrate the CW network
and its partner Alloy. More than just a promotional arm for the show and network, the
horizontal integration of both Alloy.com and Time Warner also reflects how transmedia
expansion is an economic imperative in the convergent media environment. Both
companies wanted to work together to expand the potential market for Gossip Girl by
creating different points of entry for different audience segments as well as multiple ways
in which to consume the property (Jenkins 2003).

Gossip Girl Enters Digital Transmedia
As many scholars have noted, although there has been a spike in academic
scholarship exploring the way media expands and spreads across mediums and platforms
in the past 10 years with the rise of media production on the internet and across major
media conglomerates, transmedia is actually not a new phenomenon. As Jason Mittell
notes, “even if the term is new, the strategy of expanding a narrative into other media is
as old as media themselves” (Mittell 2012, ¶ 4). Mittell points out how 19th century
biblical paintings and literary characters like Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein can be
seen as early precursors to transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins suggests, there were
many historical antecedents prefiguring transmedia practices, including L. Frank Baum
(in his focus on world building), Walt Disney (in his focus on transmedia branding) and
J.R.R. Tolkien (with his experiments in radical intertextuality) (Jenkins 2011). Other
scholars have discussed the licensing of comic book characters like Superman and
Batman throughout the 20th century (Santo 2010). Nevertheless, the proliferation of
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digital distribution and platforms has led to transmedia techniques that build off of these
strategies and differ altogether.
As discussed above, Morgenstein originally conceived of Gossip Girl as a digital
transmedia property and not just a television adaptation with an extensive multimedia
branding strategy. Nevertheless, Gossip Girl is what Jason Mittell would call an
“unbalanced transmedia” property, “with a clearly identifiable core text and a number of
peripheral transmedia extensions that might be more or less integrated into the narrative
whole” as opposed to Henry Jenkins notion of a balanced transmedia text where no one
medium or text serves a primary role over others (Mittell 2012, ¶ 9). The television
property is considered the “Mothership,” and all of the extensions feed back to the main
television text. However, the television teen soap opera genre provides an ideal
structuring logic for the rest of the property’s transmedia extensions, particularly in the
way it hails a certain type of post-feminist consuming subject.
One of the main ways if provides an ideal structuring logic is through its serial
narrative structure. The genre has been the center of serial storytelling since its
beginnings in radio. Each episode concludes with cliffhangers or moments of dramatic
tension that will only be resolved with the next installment. “The pregnant pause—and
the close-up on a character’s face as we wait to see how they react to a dramatic moment
at the beginning of the next episode—is a stalwart tool in the visual arsenal of soaps”
(Ford 2012). The serial nature of soap opera allows new installments to expand across
platforms and media, while providing key moments of necessary narrative repetition to
help clarify the often complicated and convoluted storylines. But, soap operas also have a
large ensemble cast of characters that can provide a backlog of endless possibilities to be
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explored in other media representations. For example, one of the supporting characters of
Gossip Girl, Blair Waldorf's Polish maid Dorota, a fan favorite who does not get a lot of
story time on the show, was given her own short-lived web series sponsored by Verizon,
that followed her interactions with other maids and housekeepers. Moreover, because of
these large ensemble casts, the genre operates on a fragmented narrative that picks up and
drops off story arcs with different characters, sometimes abandoning a story for long
periods of time, only to pick it up as the main focus of an episode or arch months later.
Narrative pleasure in many ways is dependent on the soap’s ability to sustain long-term
continuity between stories that have dropped off and then been picked back up again—
the way it can when fans or viewers stumble upon an iteration of the transmedia
extension without worrying about some specific aspect of narrative continuity.
This type of continuity is pleasurable within soap operas because the genre also
provides a sense of permanence—soaps have frequently been called “worlds without
end.” The sense of unending stories drives viewer commitment to return to the story day
after day in the case of daytime soaps and week after week in primetime soaps. These
forms of narrative engagement are key to the notions of transmedia storytelling that
encourages sustained viewer interactivity, defined by Henry Jenkins as fans “hunting and
gathering dispersed pieces of information and figuring out how they all fit together to
form a meaningful whole” (Jenkins 2003). However, while scholars of transmedia
storytelling have touched on the “soapy” elements of media franchises like Lost (Mittell
2006), most sustained discussions of transmedia tend to focus on more masculine-
identified genres like science fiction, comic books, or action adventure properties,
suggesting that the modes of narrative engagement, which transmedia storytelling fosters,
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skew toward male audience members. In his discussion of the way gender is mobilized in
discourses of media franchising Derek Johnson shows how the economic success of
media franchising is coded in terms of masculinity and the seriality in terms of
femininity, which together simultaneously works to value and devalue franchising as an
industrial practice (Johnson 2011). As discussed below Gossip Girl’s modes of narrative
engagement are gendered feminine and they reveal the ties between the soap opera’s
generic traits, specific post-feminist discourses, and transmedia storytelling strategies.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The WB experimented with early forms of
digital transmedia storytelling with its hit teen soap opera, Dawson’s Creek. Will Brooker
discusses the ways in which The WB used online platforms to expand the television show
beyond regular weekly episodes into a lifestyle experience. He observes “the show is
apparently intended to serve as the starting point for further activity rather than as an
isolated, self-contained cultural artifact. Instead of waiting for the next installment, the
fan is invited to extend the show’s pleasures, to allow the show into her everyday life
beyond the scheduling framework” (Brooker 2001, 460). He describes the show’s
website Capeside.net as “a virtual theme park built around the show. In short, the
Dawson’s Creek fan may still find her key pleasures in the developing television
narrative, but the TV show is clearly being marketed within a far wider multimedia
context” (460). Building off of Morgenstein’s ideas for the property and their experience
with Dawson’s Creek, the CW designed Gossip Girl to have a similar multimedia context
built around the show that could extend back into both Alloy and the CW’s other
corporate assets. The conglomerates worked incredibly hard to structure the property
within a web of sponsored media convergence. Drawing an important distinction between
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cultural convergence—the practice of fans using numerous media at the same time—and
media convergence—the practice of producers marketing a text across various media
platforms—in general, viewers are encouraged to engage with Gossip Girl through a
gendered consumerism structured by the CW rather than the creativity of “hunting and
gathering” material on their own (See Jenkins 2008).
When originally conceiving of the new gossipgirl.com website, the second of the
property’s digital transmedia extensions after Alloy’s limited site attached to the books, it
was connected to the CW’s main network page. The CW team designed it to look like the
blog described at the center of the original literary property, with a map tracking where
all the main characters were on the island of Manhattan. For example, a November 6,
2007 entry accompanying the map read:
Spotted: S and D at the Angelika seeing that Ryan Gosling and doll movie. They
shared a bucket of popcorn and he had his arm around her the whole time. Funny
how time changes things. A few months ago, Dan’s life seemed eerily similar to
that movie: Dan and the real Cabbage Patch. J on her hands and knees, crawling
up and down the streets of Williamsburg. Seemed like she was looking for
something. C getting out of a limo outside of Victrola, an old Burlesque club. He
was carrying a notebook and pen. Kind of weird. N walking around Central Park
alone. He was listening to his mp3 player and looked sooo sad. Cry me a river. B
with K and I shopping at Barney’s. B seemed distressed. Problems with N? Ah,
nothing like some retail therapy to make a girl feel better (Gossip Girl Blog).
It’s hard to know whether the products, brands and locations mentioned in this blog entry
were part of the CW or Alloy’s integration deals, but they definitely exemplify the
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potential for sponsored transmedia extensions. Nevertheless, using specific transmedia
storytelling strategies, the blog post acts as a promotional device encouraging viewers to
tune into the next television episodes, while creating jokes based on information learned
in previous week’s episodes (Dan’s love a Cabbage Patch Doll comes out in the second
episode of the series “The Wild Brunch”). It offers viewers hints and theories to play on
the genre’s tendencies for long-term continuity particularly about relationships. Here it is
alluding to problems in N (Nate) and B (Blair’s) relationship, which would be a subject
of the next week’s episode “Victor/Victoria,” but not come into play until weeks later.
Unfortunately for the CW, even though the blog had some significant traffic--becoming
among the top 10 most visited television show websites--the blog’s traffic died down as
the season went on and user interactivity in the comments section was minimal signifying
a lack on interest on the part of viewers in the extension. This lack of appeal stems
mainly from the fact that viewers were flocking to the site to watch the episodes as
opposed to looking for additional content and also because for the first two seasons of the
show, the blog was updated sporadically: sometimes every week, but sometimes after
long two-month lapses of inactivity. The blog’s lack of success stems in part from the
fact that it developed before the industry understood the importance of refreshing online
content on a daily or at least reliable schedule.
In addition to the CW’s site, Alloy Entertainment developed an integrated website
www.gossipgirl.com that links directly to http://gossipgirl.alloyentertainment.com/ and
structures a very gendered interaction with the site. The site gives episode summaries,
cast bios, photo galleries, and forums for fan discussion along with featured fashions for
purchase and music downloads from the show. In many ways, Alloy’s
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www.gossipgirl.com page served as a microcosm of alloy.com, which as described above
functions much like an online magazine as opposed to an extension of the story world or
narrative. The site includes an advice column by Gossip Girl written in the same tone and
style as the novels, voiceover narration on the TV show, and the “spotted map” of the
CW’s site; however, the similarities in tone act more like a consistent brand identity
rather than an extension of the narrative or the immersive world of the main television
show. Much like traditional teen fashion magazines, the advice blog gives guidance on
what to wear on your first day of school, what to do when your best guy friend is in love
with you, or what you should do when your best friends are feuding. Each entry is
accompanied by a still from the television series depicting a similar problem that came up
in the show’s narrative. Significantly, there is a lack of interaction encouraged by the site
as fans ask Gossip Girl questions in the comment section that remain unanswered and
inquire how to submit questions, only to be ignored by the website’s content creators.
The site focuses on editorial content that encourages consumption, as opposed to
interaction illustrating its investment in circulating certain post-feminist discourses tied to
individualism and a focus on consumption mentioned above.
In their discussion of the alloy.com website, Sharon R. Mazzarella and Allison
Atkins illustrate how alloy.com also promotes products on their website “by celebrating a
female identity grounded in normative or idealized femininity” (Mazzarella and Atkins
2010), which is extended to the gossip girl site as well. They suggest that alloy.com
constructs an idealized version of the teen girl based on a type of “commodity
femininity,” where girls are both pop culture savvy and “boy crazy” which supports the
definition of girls that advertisers are interested in (269-275). As extensively documented
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by feminist media scholars like Susan Brownmiller (1983) and Naomi Wolf (1991),
advertisers have historically designed advertisements with idealized and highly
unattainable images of feminine beauty tied to heterosexual romance in order to play on
the insecurities of young readers who will presumably buy the products being advertised
with the notion that the products will help them attain that ideal. In summary of the
alloy.com site, Mazzarella and Atkins point out that even though the site serves as a
“place for girls to express their thoughts and relate to one and other,” (279) it also
circulates normative discourses of femininity tied to heterosexuality, consumption, and
the importance of physical beauty for happiness. Similarly, Alloy Entertainment’s Gossip
Girl site offers ways for fans of the show to extend their experience with the narrative,
but more in terms of style, tone, and consumption, as opposed to the hunting and
gathering of narrative information. In fact, just as the Gossip Girl brand remains
consistent across these different transmedia extensions, so to does its focus on
consumption over creativity, production, or other narrative pleasures.
In her discussion of Gossip Girl’s portal in Second Life, Lousia Stein (2009)
discusses the limited creativity allowed within certain media convergences centered on
teen television properties. She points to the ways in which Gossip Girl’s transmedia
experience differs from those connected to The Matrix or Lost, as described by Henry
Jenkins (2008) and Jason Mittell (2006) in terms of its gender address (Stein 2009, 117).
Stein argues that it encourages gendered interaction with the site based on fashion and
consumption. She discusses the ways in which fashion figures prominently in interactions
between Gossip Girl’s second life users and argues that despite the potential of some
users to experiment with gender play and performance through gender-bending avatars,
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the Gossip Girl Second life portal reflects what Mia Consalvo argues: the Internet has
been (re)framed as a space for gendered consumerism, with females entreated to go
online and experience the web primarily as a space for shopping (Consalvo 2002). Stein
concludes though that the Gossip Girl Second Life portal is “a valuable site for inquiry
into the shifting terrain of audience agency, as the industry experiments with the
commercial possibilities of convergence, and media users experiment with the new
possibilities of engagement being offered to them” (121). Nevertheless, the limits of
gendered interaction encouraged in this extension and several of the property’s other
transmedia extensions reflects how, according to Henry Jenkins, when companies create
online properties they tend to create communities around products, services and their
understanding of the target demographic rather than “recognizing that they are more often
courting existing communities with their own histories, agendas, hierarchies, traditions,
and practices” (Jenkins 2009).
Suzanne Scott (2009), writing about the website features that accompanied the
Battlestar Galactica transmedia experience, draws attention to the ways in which online
features are gendered in a way that leaves out a huge subsection of fans at the expense of
constructing an idealized male consumer/user. Describing the Battlestar Galactica
Videomaker Toolkit, which launched in 2007 when fans were offered raw downloadable
audiovisual files from the series to create their own fan videos, she observes:
“Importantly, the raw material offered to fans was primarily composed of clips of gun
battles, Centurion robots, and ships careening through space—fodder that certainly
targeted male fan filmmakers over members of the (predominantly female) vidding
community” who tend to create videos around character relationships and interactions
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instead (Scott 2009). Scott’s specific example illustrates the ways in which gender is
structured into certain interactive features of transmedia properties in ways that aren’t
always explicit. Scott’s observations as well as those of Stein’s in the Gossip Girl Second
Life Portal illustrate the ways in which an ideal gendered consumer/user is constructed
within transmedia extensions in service of companies targeting a particular consumer
subset. This form of target marketing is a form of discrimination that shapes, controls and
produces consumers as much as it caters to them.
In a related study analyzing the stylistic features of media-making gear for girls,
Mary Celeste Kearney points out how “gender is inscribed in the structural design
features of many video camcorders for girls” (Kearney 2010, 13). Kearny suggests that
the gendered structuring logics found within the stylistic features of camera technologies
work to discipline young girls into restricted uses of them. For example, she talks about
how certain design features make it difficult to bring camcorders outside, reinforcing the
common assumption about girls’ domestic play and other leisure activities being
incompatible with the outdoors. While Kearney draws attention to how particular gender
scripts are used in the creation of product packaging and structural designs of media-
making hardware, the rest of this chapter points out the ways in which content,
representation, and programming strategies of Gossip Girl transmedia property are tied to
the soap opera genre and use particular gender scripts when they integrate new media
technologies into the show and the transmedia text.
On the surface, Gossip Girl appears to be a conventional transmedia text meant to
open up the narrative world and provide multiple points of entry and engagement for
viewers and fans, all while expanding the promotional reach of the show and its slue of
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enthusiastic advertisers. But understanding the structuring logic of soap opera underlining
the property actually reveals a broader understanding of transmedia and what its
functions are, especially in terms of normalizing gendered discourses about audiences. In
particular, the transmedia property constitutes a powerful ideological instrument
circulating post-feminist discourses in relation to contemporary technological girlhood,
and the soap opera genre is a key element of the show's transmedia structure, naturalizing
Gossip Girl's ties to a post-feminist culture based on consumption, cultural and economic
capital, and surveillance.

Gossip Girl and Gendered Modes of Narrative Engagement
In order to explore how the soap opera genre, its gendered address and post-
feminist representational strategies are structured throughout the Gossip Girl property, I
want to turn to the Gossip Girl Social Climbing game on Facebook. In January 2011,
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment launched a Gossip Girl Facebook game called
“Social Climbing,” whose debut coincided with the return of the show for the second half
of its forth season. Advertised as “Now you too can be a Gossip Girl, on Facebook
anyway,” the game allows fans to earn points as they attempt to attract Gossip Girl’s
attention by attending parties, getting noticed by “cool” people, dressing fashionably and
flirting with strangers, all with the main goal of climbing the NYC “social ladder.” The
game developed as Facebook was becoming a dominant social media network for teens
and young adults, and particularly a very important, growing platform for games.
Leading up to the game’s launch the CW had built a significant Facebook
presence with a slue of pages associated with Gossip Girl and the CW more broadly. The
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show’s social media marketers were engaging its viewers by asking questions, soliciting
opinions, posting photos, and linking out to the Gossip Girl transmedia franchise on each
of its pages. According to Rick Haskins, executive vice president of marketing and brand
strategy for the network, “In many ways social media is almost more important than on-
air marketing.” He elaborates, “I can go out and hit [the CW's] 29 million core base of
Facebook fans with my message. That’s a lot of people for me on the CW, where we tend
to get 3 or 4 million people watching on-air. That is the most efficient, effective media
buy you can do. And, by the way, it’s free” (Villarreal 2011). The idea of offering a
social media extension to the television property was key to expanding the show’s
product integrations and sponsorships, but posts serve as marketing for the show as well,
as they continually try to encourage Facebook users to watch the live television episodes.
The game, which is accessed through users’ Facebook accounts, was an extension
of this social media marketing initiative. The narrative of the game is similar to the
Gossip Girl books and television series, particularly the arc of Jenny Humphrey since the
aim of “Social Climbing” is to go from being a Nobody to being the Queen Bee or the It
girl, which parallels Jenny’s arc throughout the early part of the series. A new player
starts off with 250 Spotted Points (SP), which are subsequently awarded for being
“spotted” or being noticed doing something—anything from getting into a taxi outside of
Tiffany’s to taking pole-dancing lessons from a noted burlesque dancer. The interface is
designed like the CW spotted blog, but as opposed to looking for characters, the player
looks for parties that are available at the current time and accepts the invitation to attend
if they have the requisite number of SP to use. Once the invitation is accepted, the
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minigame begins, which is tracked with two bars, progressing at different paces: the party
progress bar and the scandal bar.
The minigame consists of events happening within the party or events that pose a
particular situation for the player who chooses between several reactions. For example,
making a big fuss over a spilt drink, gracefully brushing it off, or dumping a drink over
the spiller. Other examples include choosing to flirt with your crush or deciding whether
to spread the news that you caught someone cheating on his girlfriend. The reaction
provides rewards, indicated on your bars, in party progress and scandal—both positive
and negative depending on your answer. There is a sweet spot on the scandal bar that
players need to get to and stay in when the party ends to win the scenario. Overall, it’s a
matter of manipulating answers to the situations to stay in that sweet spot on the scandal
bar until the party ends. At the end, the player is given the “spotted” message in the
sardonic tone of Gossip Girl, and acquires spotted points as described in the party
invitation, allowing the user to “advance” up the social ladder to new events.
In many ways, the social climbing game offers viewers the opportunity to live the
life of one of the Gossip Girl characters, and the game, like the television narrative, is
based on the structuring logic of the soap opera. The game is a serial narrative where
actions from one event or party continue and implicate the actions of the next installment,
just like in a soap opera narrative. It is centered on an ensemble cast of characters, both
from the Gossip Girl narrative and new characters made up of game players. Moreover,
advancement in the game, much like the advancement of narrative in the soap opera, is
based on the spread and concealment of information. Just as the game asks you whether
you should spread a juicy piece of gossip you learn at a party or event, entire episodes of
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the television series are devoted to trying to conceal information from one or more
characters or waiting to see the reaction one character might have to a particular nugget
of information. For example, in the first two episodes of Gossip Girl the main narrative
enigma explores why Serena has come back to New York after leaving abruptly for
boarding school the year before. The main piece of narrative information being spread
and concealed in the first two episodes related to this enigma is the fact that Serena slept
with her best friend’s boyfriend, Nate, prior to leaving. Throughout the episodes, Serena
and Nate talk about what happened; Nate tells Blair what happened, but he doesn’t tell
Serena that he told Blair; Chuck tells Serena that he knows, and he threatens to tell Blair;
Blair confronts Serena and threatens to tell Serena’s new love interest Dan. And, this is
only one of the narrative threads; others include a concealed suicide attempt, a secret
affair, and the motives behind a wife’s abandonment of her husband. Strategically, of
course, new media technologies like the Gossip Girl blog, mobile alerts, and text
messages aid in the spread or concealment of this information. Viewer engagement is
encouraged through the suspense as she predicts and interprets character motivations and
actions for telling or not telling, and the spread and concealment of information extends
across the transmedia extensions further encouraging this type of narrative engagement.
Like most traditional soap opera narratives, events and actions in the game are
structured around personal relationships, sexual dramas, and emotional or moral conflicts,
which is a strategic programming strategy to appeal to female audiences and their
perceived preference in programs exploring these topics. In her discussion of how the
flow of traditional daytime soap operas connects to the domestic labor of women in the
home, Tania Modleski (1983) points out how soap operas are “structured around the gaze
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of the mother,” and encourage a particular form of gendered narrative engagement based
on normative gender scripts. She argues that by focusing on close ups and the nuanced
emotional reactions of characters, soap operas provide the spectator with training in
“reading” other people, in being sensitive to their (unspoken) feelings at any given
moment (70). This programming strategy connected directly with the type of affective
domestic labor housewives were expected to do: “Although her family cannot be
bothered with the details of her world, with making such ‘trivial’ decisions as whether to
have stuffing or potatoes with dinner, such decision nevertheless affect her family’s
attitudes and moods, and it is well for her to be able to anticipate desires which remain
unuttered, perhaps even unthought” (70). Beyond serving a broader ideological purpose
that Patricia Mellencamp (1997) describes as the postwar “familial containment of
women” in the domestic space, these representational strategies were also the result of
financial motives to help housewives care about the minute effectual differences in mass-
produced products, like the difference between Tide and Gain laundry detergents, that
had little to no actual difference. In this way the programming strategies and
representational practices of soap operas, like much daytime television in general,
“trained” female viewers in particular gendered consuming practices tied to capitalist
mass production.
Similar to daytime soap operas characters, and the characters of Gossip Girl,
players of the Gossip Girl Social Climbing make seemingly “trivial” choices centered on
what people will think and how they will react or feel. For example, the game asks you to
decide whether a friend is actually drunk or performing for attention and whether you
should ignore her, confront her or tell gossip girl that you know she’s faking. In this
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particular situation, you are rewarded for confronting her, but have the potential to get too
many scandal points if you tell gossip girl that she’s faking, which could make you lose
out on the event’s points altogether. The game awards points for being able to properly
read social norms and expectations as well as performing a particular type of empowered
post-feminist identity that includes being sexually confident and independent. For
example, in the television episode “Dare Devil” mentioned above Blair dares Jenny
Humphrey to steal a jacket from Blair’s mother’s clothing store using Blair’s set of keys.
Upon entering the store, Blair and the other girls leave the store, letting Jenny be caught
by the police. Instead of giving up and getting in trouble, Jenny pretends to be Blair and
flirts her way out of being arrested, eventually earning the desired respect of Blair.
Similarly, the game will reward players with the right amount of “scandal” points for
going up and kissing their crush at a party, seducing a colleague of your father’s for
blackmail, and choosing the right attention-grabbing party dress. Feminine sexuality,
assertiveness, and the right consumer choices will award you points in the game as it does
for the characters in the show.
In many ways the representational contexts and programming strategies of “Social
Climbing” and the broader Gossip Girl transmedia text are “training” viewers in a
particular type of post-feminist consumption that is tied to the contemporary neoliberal
economy of mass-customization. Whereas Modleski showed how the formal structure
and thematic concerns of the daytime soap opera complimented the domestic demands
placed upon women within post-war patriarchal capitalism, updated forms of the genre,
like the transmedia soap opera text Gossip Girl, work to reaffirm and in a way position
viewer/users in a neoliberal post-feminist sensibility in order to “train” them in proper
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consuming behaviors of our movement into post-fordist or ‘flexible capitalism’ (1991)—
the period in which changing economic conditions disrupted stable forms of production
and predictable patterns of demand and economic growth becomes reliant on the
regulation of both information and labor through surveillance.
The television show, the game and the various other transmedia extensions of the
Gossip Girl property ask viewers to identify with characters and model their behavior
after those who are comfortable with giving up information about themselves online,
allowing blogs, peers and marketers to survey them and collect information about them
that form online social profiles. These representational strategies encourage viewers and
users to allow marketers to harvest information about them and sell it back to them in
terms of personalization or mass-customization. Therefore the Gossip Girl transmedia
property positions its female characters and audience members in terms of what Anita
Harris (2004) calls “can-do” girls whose consuming labor drives economic progress.
Characters like Blair Waldorf who wield a great deal of power in the social hierarchy
within the narrative, and by extension the game players modeled on them, symbolize a
“generation of young women…who are self-assured, living lives lightly inflected but by
no means driven by feminism, influenced by the philosophy of DIY, and assuming they
can have (or at least buy) it all” (Harris 2004, 17). In revitalizing the soap opera, the CW
changed its conception of its target audience from women in the domestic sphere to
younger “empowered” post-feminist consuming subjects. According to Harris, the “can-
do” girl is “the ideal late modern subject . . . who is flexible, individualized, resilient,
self-driven, and self-made and who easily follows nonlinear trajectories to fulfillment and
success” (2004, 16). She is a product of the neoliberal social imaginary that has promoted
160
self-reliance, rugged individualism, unrestrained self-interest, and privatization, equating
lack of state interference and labor market efficiency with human freedom (Sewell 2009).
Neoliberal post-feminism endows the self “with the power to make or unmake itself”
(Illouz 2008, 131). However, this power manifests almost exclusively in consumer
choices where, as Morgan Blue summarizes, “women and girls ‘choose’ to embrace the
technologies of femininity via narcissistic consumption in a celebration of the ever more
intricate artifice of a particularly white, privileged femininity” (Blue 2012). Blair’s
character reflects this idealized post-feminist subject; throughout the series as she pursues
a career in fashion, desiring a profession where she can dictate and forecast trends while
critiquing and judging those around her. She is independent, individual and driven to
make a career of her expertise in fashion, consumerism, and femininity.
Significantly, the characters and viewers are positioned in discourses of post-
feminism where the surveillance and policing of female bodies increasingly take place on
the part of women and girls themselves—on behalf of fashion and beauty industries
championing images of contemporary feminine artifice. In “Dare Devil” Blair makes
Jenny try on a series of different outfits, critiquing each one in terms of their “correct
femininity” for Jenny. The First is “Too Beyonce” alluding to the African American Pop
Star. The second is considered “Too Mary Kate” referring to the rebellious child-actress
turned fashion mogul. The third is deemed “Too Hannah Montana” referring to the
juvenile sparkly style of the Disney star, and the last outfit, a slinky gold dress that makes
Jenny look older and feel uncomfortable, is deemed the perfect fit by Blair. She tells
Jenny, “Fashion knows nothing of comfort, only the face that you show the world.” In
the post-feminist discourses structured in the soap opera narrative of Gossip Girl, “the
161
body is presented simultaneously as women’s source of power and as always already
unruly and requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodeling (and
consumer spending) in order to conform to ever narrower judgments of female
attractiveness” (Gill 2007). Moreover, on the show, technology is represented as integral
to these surveillance and disciplined consuming practices. The main conflicts of the show
often involve the schemes of tyrant Blair Waldorf, who seeks to control the social
hierarchy of the upper-east-side like a puppetmaster or guard in Bentham’s guard tower.
In one episode, “Damien Darko,” Blair sends one of her friends, or “minions” as she calls
them, to go shopping for her, but proceeds to follow her minion on the Gossip Girl GPS
map, controlling where she shops in order to uphold particular standards of class-based
feminine decorum and taste. She tells her to stay away from certain stores and go back to
others that reflect the most desirable type of femininity. The surveillance technologies
enabled by the Gossip Girl blog become a means for Blair to not only perform her
privileged feminine cultural capital as spectacle for her legions of followers, but also
allow her to carefully guard and regulate the definition and access to that capital as
watcher. Blair’s power as surveyor is enviable to other characters on the show,
particularly Jenny Humphrey who longs to be a part of the world and “worthy” of either
Blair or Gossip Girl’s surveillance. However, her power is subsumed within practices of
self-surveillance, monitoring, and a disciplined for of post-feminist consumerism.
Similarly, those who play the Gossip Girl Social Climbing and those who use the Gossip
Girl Second Life Portal described by Louisa Stein find themselves gaining or losing
points and social status respectfully based on their clothing and performance of a certain
type of post-feminist subjectivity and femininity.
162
The Gossip Girl blog is also often involved in disrupting and outing rebel Serena
van der Woodson’s many discreet love affairs with young men from different social
classes or attempts to break free from the panoptic web of social regulation and
convention that the blog and Blair enforce. In one episode Serena uses the blog to look
back at all of her “failed” relationships and how she “screwed them all up,” which
promotes her disciplining into proper feminine behavior in support of heterosexuality. In
several episodes, the blog serves as a form technology-facilitated slut-shaming, exposing
the impossible positioning of post-feminist subjectivity that expects women to see their
sexuality as a form of empowerment, but also something they need to keep in line. While
surveillance tends to be shown as a form of power for Blair, Serena represents how that
surveillance “disciplines” her behavior, illustrating an inherent contradiction in the
promotion of surveillance for girls. The surveillance of the blog and her peers contributes
to Serena’s anxieties, that in theory can be fixed, usually with “the proper dress” or
“meeting the right guy.” In the fifth season, Serena and Nate begin to criticize the blog
and particularly what they feel is gossip and hearsay meant only to hurt them. They feel
that because of the blog, they traverse a network of visibility that is usually only reserved
for celebrities or other public figures, and being under constant surveillance has greatly
impacted and even ruined some of their lives. Yet, instead of criticizing the ideology of
new media technologies being used as a form of surveillance and control over ones peers
and self-surveillance, Serena and Nate decide to start their own blog in which they freely
give away information and talk to everyone to “get the truth out” and “set everything
straight.”
163
Ultimately the way that new media technologies are integrated into the narrative
of Gossip Girl is in service of this peer-to-peer and self-surveillance and policing,
ultimately representing technology in service of a neoliberal political economy of the
Information age, where the collection and exchange of information has become a
significant economic activity (Andrejevic 2007; Castells 2009). As described more in
chapter four, Alloy Media+Marketing, which is now subsumed under the division Alloy
Digital, is a significant money-making division of the conglomerate Alloy Inc. The
division was established as Alloy built out their database of tween and teenage girls’
demographic information, collected through website registrations, catalog subscriptions,
and eventually cookie-enabled surveillance technologies across their network of youth-
centered websites. While one division of Alloy Inc., Alloy Media+Marketing, was
perfecting the data-mining and media buying business, creating integrated targeted
campaigns for companies like Cover Girl, Kmart, and Pantene based on this extensive
data-base of consumer information, another division, Alloy Entertainment, was producing
transmedia entertainment properties, like Gossip Girl, that normalized post-feminist
subjectivities, online surveillance, and themes of social profiling. Therefore, surveillance
is promoted in various texts for young girls with the simultaneous goals of making girls
more comfortable with the notion of data-mining and marketers collecting information
about them and encouraging girls to use new technologies in very particular ways—ways
that support girls participation in the profitable fashion-beauty complex and the
information economy.
As mentioned above, the Gossip Girl property centers on an anonymous blogger
who comes to viewers as an unseen narrator, voiced by Kristen Bell. While some feminist
164
scholars are researching the ways in which blogs can be used to help young girls create a
feminist identity and circulate disruptive feminist discourses (Keller 2012), the Gossip
Girl blog can be seen in contrast to these activities. She perpetuates the behaviors of an
idealized post-feminist consumer and her gossip blogs and twitter updates are emblematic
of the ideal way that marketers want girls to use new media technologies: to freely give
up information about themselves and share it about others, particularly information about
shopping, clothing, and other designer goods. The representations of technological
girlhood on the show reflect the confluence of neoliberal and post-feminist discourses
that rely on the regulation of both information and labor through surveillance. The way
these discourses are normalized across contemporary media reflects how our conceptions
of these practices have changed as they became embedded in our everyday activities
particularly those associated with new media production and consumption.
For Angela McRobbie, “the attribution of apparently post-feminist freedoms to
young women most manifest within the cultural realm in the form of new visibilities,
becomes, in fact, the occasion for the undoing of feminism” (2009, 55). Critics have long
argued that TV promotes excessive consumption and promotes femininity as something
to be achieved through consumption. As the industry struggles to find different ways to
monetize their content, they are pushing transmedia franchises for girls that use the
discourse of soap opera to shape and encourage those practices. They also promote the
usage of new media technologies towards those same goals of consumption, surveillance,
and femininity. Although the Gossip Girl Social Climbing game represents an innovative
form of transmedia expansion on Facebook, the structuring logic of the soap opera
narrative underwriting the game actually works towards the retrenchment of gender and
165
gendered relations. Much like how daytime soap operas “trained” housewives to follow
particular gender scripts on domestic labor, contemporary transmedia soap operas train
female viewers how to use new media devices and transmedia extensions like ideal post-
feminist consuming subjects. As Sarah Banet-Weiser notes, “Importantly, the ideals and
accomplishments of the post-feminist subject—independence, capacity, empowerment—
are entangled with similar ideals about the contemporary media-savvy interactive subject
who is at ease in navigating the ostensibly flexible, open architectures of on-line spaces”
(Banet-Weiser 2012). Soap operas, like Gossip Girl provide an ideal structuring logic for
the consumption of transmedia properties in general, but these same genre characteristics
lead to a post-feminist emphasis upon individualized self-surveillance, monitoring, and
discipline within the property, which in turn encourages an idealized, narcissistic, self-
criticizing post-feminist viewer/consumer who not only goes out in search of information
related to the Gossip Girl property, but freely gives up information about herself online
while buying products.

Conclusion:
Gossip Girl reveals some of the fluctuating economic models and programming
strategies of the contemporary convergent media industry, particularly those associated
with transmedia franchising, product integration, and brand expansion targeting young
women. The property is emblematic of the collision between old and new industry
models as well as old and new representations of femininity that are tied to the soap
opera’s historically gendered programming strategies, ideological projects, and industrial
motives. The intricacies of Gossip Girl’s transmedia property expand our understanding
166
of transmedia and contemporary television soap opera’s circulation of post-feminist
discourses and gendered forms of narrative engagement. Returning to soap opera as an
object of study shows how its structuring logic was adapted to meet the revenue and
structural needs of a contemporary transmedia product.
Gender has become a key part of transmedia culture and transmedia products. To
focus on transmedia only in terms of its capabilities for narrative expansion, fan
engagement, or franchising strategies—as so many analyses of the male-targeted
transmedia texts tend to do—ends up ignoring the ways that gender is built into
transmedia expansion strategies, as exemplified by the CW’s transmedia texts like Gossip
Girl. Inserting gender into the discussion forces us to take stock of what transmedia
means, our criteria for a successful transmedia texts, and the presence of post-feminist
discourses in transmedia practices and texts.
Ultimately, the CW and Gossip Girl promote themes of surveillance, consumption,
and post-feminist discourses of individualism to habitualize a particular type of reception
and consumer-driven interaction with contemporary transmedia texts, especially in
relation to new media technologies. Gossip Girl still relies on conventional
understandings of gendered audiences and gendered forms of narrative engagement, thus
restricting the potential of new media—especially in this time of convergence and
industrial instability—to provide new and progressive models for young female
audiences.

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Chapter Four:
Alloy Inc. YouTube & the Next Generation of Teen Television

In June of 2012 the private teen-centered media company Alloy Inc. (which is
owned by an investor group led by ZelnickMedia) sold its profitable intellectual property
and media production division Alloy Entertainment to Warner Bros. Television Group
(WBTVG) for an estimated $100 million. To many youth-oriented media professionals
the sale was not much of a surprise. For the past six years Alloy Entertainment had an
exclusive production deal with Warner Bros. and WBTVG was producing and
distributing five popular television series co-produced by Alloy Entertainment: Gossip
Girl, The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, The Lying Game and the short-lived 666
Park Avenue, all of which started as successful Alloy Entertainment book properties
aimed at teen girls and young women. With the acquisition, WBTVG gained the
intellectual property rights that had strategically remained with Alloy Entertainment
during the development of these franchises. Time Warner can now reap the financial
benefits of several established properties targeting the young female audience that also
“resonate across platforms,” according to WBTVG President Bruce Rosenblum
(Goldsmith 2012). The sale is also a telling move on the part of Alloy Inc. who is
building upon is successful marketing and advertising relationships to reorient their
business models and position themselves as ready for the next generation of teen
television to be reborn online.
As discussed in chapter three, Alloy’s television properties have been at the center
of several debates and anxieties about the changing television industry. Gossip Girl’s
relative lack of success in ratings compared to its perceived popularity and cultural
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impact deemed it one of the first programs to force the CW and its advertisers to rethink
how they measured success in an era of convergence. In a March 2013 issue of
Entertainment Weekly, Tanner Stransky outlines how Pretty Little Liars, another Alloy
property, is continuing to change how the industry measures success, especially in
regards to the social media platform Twitter. He describes the show as being “plugged
into the social media matrix” that involves its stars, producers, and fans tweeting about
the show and interacting around and through the property beyond the primary television
text. In response, Nielsen is set to add a “Nielsen Twitter TV rating” that will deliver a
“syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter”
(Nielsen 2012). As a result, even though Alloy Entertainment is experiencing relative
levels of success with its television franchises in terms of ratings and advertiser
investment, this success is continually qualified by the fact that their target audiences are
no longer watching television they way they used to. The discourses around these shows
proclaim that television, particularly the broadcast and network model of television, is
dying and younger viewers are leading the death march. On the surface, then, with Alloy
Inc.’s sale of Alloy Entertainment, the company seemed to support that notion that the
Internet was luring television audiences away and Alloy was putting their money on
interactive digital platforms as opposed to television, where they built their brand
recognition.
With the sale of Alloy Entertainment, Alloy Inc. is now made up of Alloy Digital,
which controls the largest media and advertising network of young adult targeted
websites (e.g. Teen.com, Alloy.com, gURL.com, and Smosh.com); Channel One News,
the number one in-school television news channel; and Alloy Education, a full-service
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agency specializing in student recruitment services for higher education. For Alloy, the
WBTVG deal symbolizes a significant moment in the reorganization of the company as
well as its future trajectory. It signified Alloy’s abandoning of “old media” (the book
publishing industry and network television distribution) as well as its retrenchment on
digital platforms and its focus on developing new forms of content production,
particularly those available on YouTube, which it envisions as the future of the television
industry. In January of 2012 Alloy acquired Generate, a production studio and talent
management company that specializes in branded content and digital media production,
started by former CEO of the WB Network Jordan Levin. In many ways Generate would
replace Alloy Entertainment as the center of content production for Alloy, moving their
focus from literary and television development to online production and distribution.
And, in anticipation of selling Alloy Entertainment, Alloy Inc. also purchased two of the
top YouTube channels for teens, Smosh.com and Clevver Media between 2011 and 2012.
Yet, I argue that the purchase of these two channels and Generate signals less of an
abandonment of television and more of a reorienting of web content towards television
models. Looking more closely at Alloy’s actions in the digital realm, particularly their
acquisitions and development of web series production, ultimately supports Amanda
Lotz’s contention that this time of media industry instability is not leading to the death of
television, but rather it is reaffirming television’s significance, particularly as a model to
monetize media content and attract audiences, but also in terms of some gendered
programming conventions (2007).
As a telling example of some of the changing discursive formations surrounding
television and new media today, this chapter traces the role of Alloy Inc. in shaping core
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assumptions about the emerging media systems of the twenty first century. Fist, I trace
the development of Alloy Digital during the past twenty years of the company’s tenure,
then its most recent acquisitions and web series productions to map the way television
and young gendered audiences are being reimagined for the digital age. In particular, this
chapter focuses on the web series as an emergent media genre and explores several
different web series produced by Alloy Digital that target the young teen demographic,
including Smosh’s weekly sketch comedy show, Pubertina, an animated web series for
the Alloy-owned YouTube channel ShutUp! Cartoons created by Emily Brundige, and
First Day a live action web series produced by Alloy as branded content for Kmart.
Together these web series, which are seen as successes for all parties involved in their
creation, point to some of the specific ways that media content for young people is
evolving online as well as the way television discourse is influencing the development of
web content. They illustrate how gender conventions and economic motives continue to
circumscribe media consumption for teens in the contemporary convergent media
landscape, as companies like Alloy try to shape young people into specific types of
gendered commodity audiences across online platforms. A critical reading of the
gendered structuring logics and discursive formations of program creation, advertising
models, and representation within Alloy’s web series, ultimately illustrates how particular
post-feminist constructions of technological girlhood align with the TV-like monetization
of the digital space.

Alloy’s history:
Although it doesn’t command the same brand recognition or levels of revenue as
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some of the other more massive corporations that dominate the U.S. media landscape,
like Disney, News Corp, Time Warner or Viacom, Alloy Inc. is nevertheless a major
player in the contemporary youth media industry, having established itself with success
targeting the elusive 12-34 year-old female demographic during its launch as a website in
1996 and a direct mail clothing company soon thereafter. Matthew C. Diamond, James K.
Johnson, and Sam Grades launched alloy.com as a teen community-centered website in
1996 when they were all only slightly older than the demographic they sought to target.
With the launch of alloy.com, together the three hoped to capitalize on the converging
booms in youth-oriented entertainment and the Internet happening at the time. “Our
timing coincided with the release of Titanic (1997) and teenage girls’ infatuation with the
movie and its star, Leonardo DiCaprio,” Diamond recalls (Woods 2002). The 1990s saw
a newfound attention being paid to the tween/teen girl demographic as they flexed their
consumer power at the box office, while buying the CDs of boy bands like N*Sync and
Backstreet Boys as well as girl power artists like The Spice Girls, Britney Spears, and
Christina Aguilera at a time when the music industry was facing mounting threats from
Napster and other music downloading sites. Along with this consumer power, teenage
girls, especially ages 12 to 15, were thought to be one of the fastest-growing groups on
the Internet, according to Teenage Research Unlimited; in 1996, they estimated that 54%
were online and projected that by 1999 it would be as much as 87% (Sefton 2000).
Significantly, Diamond and Johnson realized that the presumed activities that teen girls
liked best about the Internet in its early days—the ability to use bulletin boards, chat
rooms, e-mail, instant messaging, and participating in surveys—would be ideal avenues
with which to collect information about them, information that they could use to woo
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advertisers.
Like other investors in the dotcom boom, Diamond and Johnson sought to
develop a website that could act as an e-commerce hub for the teen demographic. They
would offer products and services for teens that would also draw the business of third-
party marketers wishing to reach those young consumers: “We saw the Internet as a
good, low cost entry to the enormous youth market,” Diamond reflects (Woods 2002).
For example, at its launch in August 1996 alloy.com offered young visitors free e-mail
and was designed like an interactive teen magazine with sections covering celebrity
gossip, horoscopes, and other teen-oriented news items. But, it also offered a shopping
channel to buy clothing and other merchandise, a chat channel, and a number of other
features designed to attract girls (Covell 2003). Johnson says that alloy.com was
explicitly designed to recreate the experience of a mall: “Teenagers go to malls. They’re
there to shop, but also to talk to friends, look at magazines, and generally hang around.
We thought if we could keep them hanging around the Alloy site, we could sell to them”
(Girard 2000). According to Diamond by 2001, at least 20% of online visitors had made
at least one purchase and the average order on the website was $80-$100 (Cotlier 2001).
They also gained revenue with banner ads on the site of other brands targeting the teen
girl demographic. In effect, alloy.com was and continues to be a “walled garden,” or “an
online environment where consumers go for information, communications, and
commerce services and that discourages them from leaving for the larger digital world”
(Turow 2005, 116). This original formula has continued to be an underlying logic for
Alloy’s digital network and is key to how it still imagines its target demographic,
particularly in how it is trying to shape their consuming behaviors through web content.
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From the beginning, Alloy designed its site to be appealing to both young female
viewers and the advertisers wishing to reach those young viewers. Overall, alloy.com
reflects what Joseph Turow observes about the contemporary media environment: “media
firms fundamentally shape the main streams of entertainment and news into
environments that harmonize with sponsors’ desire to sell their products… media firms
position themselves to attract certain kinds of people in ways that the advertisers consider
better or helpfully different from the media firms’ competitors” (Turow 2005, 104). In
their discussion of the alloy.com website, Sharon R. Mazzarella and Allison Atkins
illustrate how Alloy promotes products on their website “by celebrating a female identity
grounded in normative or idealized femininity” and that they sell “products promising to
facilitate the transition from girlhood to womanhood” although they often result in
“prematurely sexualizing girls” (Mazzarella and Atkins 2010). They suggest that
alloy.com constructs an idealized version of the teen girl based on a type of commodity
femininity, where girls are both pop culture savvy and “boy crazy,” which supports the
definition of girls that advertisers are comfortable with (269-275). They also point out
that even though the site serves as a “place for girls to express their thoughts and relate to
one and other,” (279) many of the services required visitors to register and give up
valuable personal information about themselves. With the information gleaned from
registrations, Alloy was able to compile a database of names that could be used to attract
advertisers and sponsors to place their business on alloy.com (Covell 2003). By January
2000, Alloy had yielded a database of 3.2 million visitors, including 500,000 buyers
(Girard 2000), which has only grown over the years with Alloy’s acquisition of several
other catalogers and media and marketing companies, leading to their success in
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providing recruitment services for higher education through Alloy Education.
Despite the profitability of this business model for the company’s future, and
similar to many other internet-reliant companies launched at the time, Alloy didn’t turn a
profit for Diamond, Johnson, and Grades during its first year. But, unlike so many other
dotcom companies who failed in their first few years, Alloy survived by bucking the
“pure-play” trend of the dotcom boom: a trend that believed the Internet was going to
usurp every other print business and therefore all companies should focus on e-commerce
and Internet-only business plans. Moving against this logic, Alloy diversified its business
model by copying the surprise success of direct mail clothing cataloger Delia*s. One of
the first of its kind to go after teen girls directly, Delia*s became a game changer in the
catalog world when it launched in 1994. As Sherry Chiger, the editor of Catalog Age
observes, “Before the first Delia*s book mailed in 1994, catalogers didn’t spend much
effort courting teens…[they had money to spend] but teens were relatively hard to find,
and unlike their parents they didn’t necessarily have credit cards” (Chiger 2003).
Diamond adds, “In many ways Delia’s pioneered direct mail for teens. Before Delia*s
kids weren’t buying direct mail. Then Delia’s began circulating its catalog and introduced
the whole phenomena” (Chiger 2003). Both Chiger and Diamond fail to acknowledge the
role of the Sears “Wishbook” catalog featuring toys and gifts targeting children that had
been in circulation since the 1930s, or the fact that women’s magazines often featured ads
for toys directed at mothers, and were presumably read and seen by children.
Nevertheless, Delia*s reflecting the increased market segmentation that had been rising
since the 1960s and 1970s, was part of a move to acknowledge teen girls as a separate
consumer category (Cohen 2003). And, because Alloy was already trying to sell clothing
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on alloy.com, in order to build revenue, Diamond and Johnson launched the first Alloy
catalog in August 1997, one year after the debut of alloy.com (Covell 2003).
In many ways, Alloy was a blatant copycat of the Delia*s clothing catalog.
Similar to its competitor, the typical Alloy catalog ranged between 72 and 96 pages and
featured approximately 400 trendy and relatively low-cost items, including apparel,
footwear, and room furnishings (Covell 2003). Although the original catalog included
merchandise for both boys and girls, as the company developed, both alloy.com and Alloy
catalogs were designed exclusively for girls; boys were given their own websites and
catalogs in the future. Although Diamond and Johnson later would stress building
advertising and sponsorship revenue, initially the company derived almost all of its
revenue from the sale of merchandise. Thanks primarily to the distribution of Alloy, the
company recorded $1.8 million in revenue by the end of January 1998, a significant
increase from the $25,000 collected the previous year (Covell 2003).
Needless to say, the integration between the catalog and the website was key to
Alloy’s success in these early years. According to Diamond, when targeting teens, “it’s
not enough to be just online. A print catalog gives you the credibility to their parents, and
it’s often passed along among friends.” He adds, “the print catalog is four to five times
more cost-effective than any portal relationship or other advertising method in driving
traffic to the website” (Oberndorf 1999). Alloy was especially effective in developing
promotions that would drive catalog readers to the website, including poetry competitions
and contests that linked reading the catalog explicitly with the site’s content. And, despite
Delia*s effective start out of the gate attracting the teen demographic, it was Alloy’s
strategic acquisitions in the teen market and a series of unfortunate missteps on the part
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of Delia*s that eventually led to Alloy’s buyout of its main competitor in 2003.
According to Derek Brown, an analyst for the San Francisco-based investment firm WR
Hambrecht & Co. Alloy built their business on a convergence media model that uniquely
blends offline and online assets, including the three C’s: content, community, and
commerce (WR Hambrecht + Co, 2000). This convergence logic was key to its success
and continues to underwrite is media production strategy as the company moved into
other platforms, including booking packaging, television, and web video (see chapter
three).
In the early 2000s, Alloy began more aggressively soliciting customer feedback
on alloy.com. After gathering feedback through polls and message boards, the company
sharpened its merchandising approach and buying strategies. According to Samantha
Skey, Alloy’s senior vice president of strategic marketing, “We can feel trends emerging
through that kind of discourse, and we can stock products accordingly. We don't want to
be so edgy that we're starting fashion trends, but we want to be right there at the moment
a trend hits” (Tedeschi 2005). Alloy’s ability to garner information about trends in teen
consumption quickly led the company to offer marketing consulting services to outside
companies. Soon Alloy realized the value of this consulting service and began purchasing
marketing companies targeting the same teen demographic, including CCS, a direct
marketer to teen boys, MarketSource’s 360 Youth Division, Marketplace Media, and
YouthStream among others to combine and build its database of teen consumer
information, while developing relationships with advertisers and marketers. Alloy's
media and marketing division accounts for nearly half of the company's sales, which,
Alloy said, reached about $400 million in 2005 (Tedeschi 2005). Since private companies
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don’t need to make their financial records available to the public, Alloy’s sales and
revenue streams are harder to calculate since the company went private in 2010, but the
success of these divisions is nonetheless a major component of building Alloy’s digital
network and a major reason why Alloy Digital has become the center of the company as
it moves more aggressively into the online market, which is discussed more below.
Realizing that advertising and sponsorship relationships were making more
money than the sales of merchandise, Alloy focused on developing their brand as a media
and marketing company. Throughout its history and even now the Alloy brand is
probably better known on Madison Avenue than in the hallways of high schools around
the country. However key to building their business was building its brand. According to
Diamond, “Like ESPN, CNN, and MTV, we want Alloy to have a strong media reach on
its brand. We’re building a media brand” (Cotlier 2001). As the company grew, it would
start putting its efforts to creating a consistent brand name that would be recognized by
teens across the US. In order to build out their brand, Diamond and Johnson extended
Alloy’s reach into other mediums, taking advantage of the lack of regulation on corporate
cross-ownership by either launching or acquiring a spectrum of media properties (Covell
2003). One of the most significant moves the company made was acquiring 17
th
Street
Productions, run by Leslie Morgenstein and Ann Brashares, in 2000, which dramatically
impacted Alloy’s brand recognition and shaped the company’s future. Prior to Alloy’s
acquisition, 17
th
Street Productions was a book packager best known for the Sweet Valley
High (SVH) property, which dominated the teen-girl publishing world for over 20 years.
Its author Francine Pascal, known as a “one woman publishing industry,” came to the
book packaging company to help her develop the series’ multiple spin-off releases: Sweet
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Valley Kids, Sweet Valley Twins, Team Sweet Valley, The Unicorn Club, and Sweet
Valley University, as well as later books within the Sweet Valley High series.
Building on the success of SVH, Alloy and 17
th
Street Studios (later named Alloy
Entertainment), maintained a highly successful formula for producing, promoting, and
distributing book properties like Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, The
Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars and most significantly Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip
Girl series, discussed in more detail in chapter three. It had a solid track record in selling
its book packages to publishers and appealing to the young female demographic, which is
outlined in Rebecca Mead’s (2009) exposé of Alloy Entertainment in The New Yorker. In
an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, however, Bank credits his success to the
knowledge he gleaned about the marketplace during the five years he spent at a boutique
ad agency positioning consumer products in an oversaturated media environment: “That
experience is invaluable to what I do now; we develop high concepts that are sharp and
specific, that will appeal to a broad audience. That's something we really concentrate on,
understanding what a commercial concept is” (Rosen 2008). Although Alloy produced a
lot of teen media properties, they were still considered mainly a marketing and
advertising company, and it wasn’t until Alloy produced and distributed Gossip Girl with
WBTVG’s The CW that Alloy began to build its brand recognition among its target
audience (See chapter 3).
The Alloy name started to make headlines in the popular press and trade journals
with greater frequency from 2006 on when the Alloy Entertainment properties Gossip
Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries premiered on television and seemed to
resonate in the popular culture zeitgeist. Journalist and critic Tanner Stransky named
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Alloy Entertainment “The premier hit-making factory” and “the force behind today’s
most influential YA television” in a June 2011 article in Entertainment Weekly (Stransky
2011). Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Emily Steel proclaims, its innovative
“multimedia formula makes Alloy a teen magnet” (Steel 2009). Ari Karpel of the New
York Times says Leslie Morgenstein, chief executive of Alloy Entertainment, has his
“finger on the pulse of what Girls Watch” (Karpel 2011). It was the success of these
television, book, and digital media franchises that soon thereafter made Alloy as well
known for its media products as its marketing divisions—a balance that would prove
useful as web content production continually blurred the line between entertainment and
promotional material (Dawson 2011). In fact, Alloy was credited with being one of the
only media companies to have a handle on the elusive digital-savvy teen audience given
the multi-platform success of its franchises. And, proclamations of Alloy’s innovation
continue to litter the popular press and trade journals, where Alloy press releases are
frequently copied verbatim. So, it seemed that just as Alloy Entertainment had
established a brand name for its parent company, Alloy then sold the division to
WBTVG.
Prior to the sale, however, Alloy had made some strategic acquisitions that were
signaling its intentions to move the company’s focus from literary and television
properties created by Alloy Entertainment back to the advertising, media, and marketing
initiatives of Alloy Digital. While in many ways Gossip Girl and other television
franchises produced by Alloy Entertainment were crucial to attracting teens and young
women to Alloy products and building Alloy’s brand, it was the development of Alloy
Digital’s ad network and target marketing consulting services, which stemmed from its
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community centered websites and databases that made Alloy so successful and the most
poised to transition into one of the major players in online content production. In the next
section I situate Alloy within the political economic history of web content creation and
especially the media ecology of YouTube to illustrate how the company was uniquely
positioned to create connections between new media forms and old media political
economies and how it is playing a role in shaping the future of television through its web
series targeting teens on the YouTube platform.

Alloy, Smosh, & YouTube’s Double Function
Alloy Inc.’s evolution over the past seventeen years illustrates a lot of changes in
the media industries, particularly the rise in niche marketing, new trends in brand culture,
the advancement of targeted advertising strategies based on data-mining, and the
increasing horizontal conglomeration of the early twenty-first century media
environment. Alloy is unique in the way is focuses on one demographic across media,
platforms, and business models. The company also reflects, however, some particularly
interesting aspects of the moment of transition in the television industry defined by
Amanda Lotz as the “post-network era,” from the 2000s to the 2010s, in which the
television industry faces the challenges of digitalization in terms of distribution,
transmission, and what she calls the “interoperability between television and the other
technologies” (Lotz 2007, 53). As discussed in the introduction, many scholars and media
professionals conceptualize this moment as a threat to television: the mass audience of
the broadcast network era is becoming increasingly fragmented and traditional
advertising and distribution models are being threatened as the spatial and temporal
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process of television change due to the development of new technologies, giving
audiences more control over the flow of content.
For many, YouTube, the online video sharing and social networking platform that
launched in 2005, symbolized many of these key changes. As Jean Burgess and Joshua
Green (2009) note in their book on YouTube, even though the site is best known as a
“user-generated viral video wonderland,” it has been seen as a substantial threat to the
network and broadcast models of television, particularly with its appeal to younger
audiences. The video-sharing site has become one of the most well-known and widely
used sites of participatory media in the eight short years since it began. As one of the first
genuinely mass-popular platforms for user-created video, known especially for its
eclectic and mixed media content, YouTube’s popularity has garnered a great deal of
scholarly interest, particularly regarding its cultural meanings, but also regarding its
position in relation to established media industries, like television.
While some scholars credit YouTube’s success to little more than good timing
because its development coincided with expanding broadband penetration, others credit
its success to the platform’s ability to “set content free” (Daily Motion 2013). Henry
Jenkins argues that YouTube was able to tap into already established networks of
participatory culture, especially fan communities, where people had developed the need
and desire to upload and share videos with each other; they wanted to bring media
distribution more fully under their control. He argues that YouTube’s main success was
due to the site’s willingness to make it possible for users to embed videos on other social
networking sites and blogs, and that it would not have succeeded had MySpace and
Blogger not been places to share YouTube videos (Jenkins 2010). Even though YouTube
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is best known for what Jenkins calls “spreadable media content” that viewers find
interesting like fan videos, amateur user-generated content of cats using the toilet, babies
sneezing, or teens vlogging, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green suggest that its success is
partially tied its ability to re-broadcast mainstream media content, albeit through
copyright infringement, ultimately acting as just another distribution outlet for
established media to reach out to the elusive but much-desired youth audience (2009, 3-
4). Moreover, while much has been made about the social networking capabilities of the
site, which allow users to like, dislike, or comment on videos, Jenkins points out that the
social networking aspect of the site itself is not as important when considering its
dominant uses. He explains that the comments sections of YouTube are mainly for
“flaming” or hosting hostile and insulting interaction between users, and that the social
network that really matters is where that content gets shared amongst other already
established communities (Jenkins 2010). Nevertheless, as scholars and users debate why
it matters, how it resonates with users, and how the site will evolve, the YouTube site
continues to grow in popularity, particularly with younger viewers that Alloy targets, as a
result of these heterogeneous meanings and uses, and Alloy Digital has worked to expand
its digital network onto the site.
In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion
videos a day, which it described as “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three
major US television networks combined” (Chapman 2010). As of 2013, over 800 million
unique users visited YouTube each month, leading to 72 hours of video uploaded every
minute and over 4 billion hours of video watched each month (YouTube 2013). YouTube
was the ultimate destination for those media consumers seeking niche content
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traditionally found in what Chris Anderson (2008) calls the statistical long tail away from
the most popular content. In 2006, pulling from YouTube’s demographic statistics,
Mashable.com reported that the average age of a YouTube user was 27, but the general
consensus was and continues to be that YouTube skews even younger, because the most
popular videos and most subscribed-to channels feature content targeting the teen and
young adult demographic (Kelvin 2006). Age continues to be difficult to accurately track
on social networking sites because it requires that users be registered and logged into
their own accounts when viewing videos and also that they are accurately reporting their
age, which teens are often discouraged to do because then they would be denied access to
age-restricted content. Nevertheless, in May 2011, Nielsen reported that 54% of all teens
were on YouTube, meaning they had visited or watched videos from the site, totaling
21.6 million of 40 million online teen users (The Nielsen Company 2011). In YouTube’s
demographic one-sheets for advertisers, it compares YouTube’s 54% reach of all online
teens to Disney.com and Nick.com’s 10% and 9% reach respectively in order to illustrate
their dominance, even though those sites are more likely targeting kids or tweens as
illustrated in chapter two (YouTube 2011).
One of the most significant changes in the site’s demographic makeup and
audience reach, however, has been with gender. The Internet and American Life Project
at the Pew Research Center reported that “27% of internet-using teens aged 12-17 record
and upload video to the internet…[but the] one major difference between now and 2006
is that online girls are just as likely these days to upload video as online boys” (Lenhart
2012). The report’s author Amanda Lenhart explains further: “Nearly equal shares of
online boys (28%) and girls (26%) say they shoot and share video. In 2006, online boys
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were nearly twice as likely as online girls to report uploading video they had taken, with
19% of boys and 10% of girls reporting the activity” (Lenhart 2012). This discrepancy
was the product of a variety of issues, including the dominant circulating discourses of
girls’ perceived innate deficiency with technology and the moral panics surrounding girls
in relation to the Internet in general that are discussed more in the introduction to this
dissertation. But, it is also seen as the product of YouTube’s sexist and often abusive
“trolling culture” in the comments sections, which ultimately impacts overall female
participation rates (Burgess and Green 2009, 96–97). Henry Jenkins adds that members
of the female fan viding community who were positioned as ideal online video content
providers, nevertheless feared being prosecuted for their videos’ copyright violations, and
were anxious that their videos would not be understood outside of the established
interpretive context fandom provided (Jenkins 2009, 117).
Despite these deterrents, though, videos made by and staring girls are more and
more common on YouTube. In a 2013 paper presented at the Society for Cinema and
Media Studies Conference in Chicago, Catherine Burwell discusses for example the
presence of Gossip Girl fan vids that tend to amplify the emotional melodrama of the
series through the juxtaposition of facial close-ups and music tracks, a practice that
extends to many of Alloy’s television properties, which are repurposed on YouTube. One
of the main genres to emerge from these girl producers, however, was the “bedroom
dance video,” where girls of various ages danced around in their bedrooms singing along
with or lip-synching to popular music hits. These videos were extensions of the
“productive play, media consumption, and cultural performance” comprising a long
history of girls’ bedroom culture as explored by McRobbie and Garber (1976), Baker
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(2004) and others (cited in Burgess and Green 2009). Girls’ bedroom cultures and
practices have been interpreted as a form of feminist cultural citizenship, where mundane
but engaging activities create spaces for social and sometimes political engagement as
well as community formation (Burgess and Green 2009, 79–80). Nevertheless, in her
article, “Branding the Post-Feminist Self: The Labor of Femininity,” Sarah Banet-Weiser
positions these videos (as well as girls’ more sustained online performances) as
emblematic of building a type of "post-feminist self-brand." She uses these practices in
order to discuss how brand culture has “extended beyond a business model to become
intertwined with our most basic social and cultural relations” (The book jacket of Banet-
Weiser 2012). Tracing how economic shifts within the U.S.’s advanced capitalist
consumer culture intersect with significant shifts in gender constructions, Banet-Weiser
discusses not only how these shifts become “important for the legibility of self-branding
as a normative strategy,” but also how post-feminism becomes a rich context for girls to
build a self brand (Banet-Weiser 2012, 55–56). This chapter is similarly interested in the
ways in which post-feminism structures online content and practices, but focuses on the
ways in which certain post-feminist representations serve to help companies like Alloy
create and shape commodity audiences out of YouTube’s diverse user base.
Banet-Weiser’s interpretations of these practices as emblematic of both branding
and personal expression points to YouTube’s broader tensions between the vernacular
and the corporate cultures that exist both in tandem and in opposition on the site. These
tensions were exasperated when Google bought YouTube in November 2006 for $1.65
billion. As Google has expanded YouTube’s AdShare program, the platform is becoming
arguably more and more of a threat to the network television model and increasingly
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focused on expanding consumer monetization (Hardy and Hessel 2008). Of the many
things Google added to the platform after acquiring it, which included expanding its
reach to a global scale, enabling more dexterity with the flood of data YouTube was
producing, and developing a fingerprinting system that can spot videos infringing on
copyright
1
, Google established and cultivated a variety of advertising formats and models
to monetize the site. Some examples include the addition of annotations linking to
products and services, pre-roll video ads prior to the main video, and short banners that
pop up from the bottom of the video window, because ads adjacent to videos were seen
as less and less effective in comparison to these. Originally, though, ads were only linked
to YouTube’s professionally produced content, which is content produced by the major
media outlets. In the spring of 2007, however, YouTube developed their partnership
program, which allowed several of the most popular and prolific amateur original content
creators from the YouTube community to participate in the same revenue sharing and
promotional opportunities that were available to professional content producers. Some of
the partners included Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, valsartdiary, and
significantly the now Alloy-owned Smosh.com
The origin story of Smosh.com and its eventual sale to Alloy Inc., like YouTube’s
own story, conforms in many ways to the Silicon Valley myth of the garage entrepreneur,
where young visionaries tinker in their garages and follow their passions, eventually
turning it into a multi-billion dollar success story (Allison 2006 in Burgess and Green
2009). Smosh.com is the brainchild of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, two young guys
who produce a wacky weekly sketch comedy show that attracts an average of 3.5 million
viewers. Back in 2004 and 2005, Hecox and Padilla started recording themselves lip-
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synching TV theme songs in Padilla’s bedroom in Sacramento, California. Without any
other real career path, they funded their hobby by selling T-shirts to their small fan base
and lucky for them the development of their hobby coincided with the development of
YouTube. Although YouTube was growing in popularity, during the early years there
weren’t as many people doing weekly programming on the website, so Hecox and Padilla
developed a modest following. The two hit it big, though, when they uploaded a lip-
synched parody of the Pokemon theme song, landing them on the YouTube front page
(which at the time was reserved for the most popular videos) for several weeks
(Pomerantz 2013). The video eventually attracted 24 million views before it was removed
for copyright infringement, only to be replaced by their “Pokemon theme song
REVENGE,” an obvious parody of the original video, which as of February 2013 has
garnered 17 million views. Significantly, with the success of their Pokemon videos, the
pair caught the eye of Barry Blumberg, who had just left his job as president of Disney’s
television animation.
Seeing the Internet as a potential hotbed for content monetization, Blumberg
signed on to help Hecox and Padilla develop their website into a business. He was the
one who forged the deal with YouTube that made Smosh one of the first ten channels to
be initiated into the YouTube partnership program so they could earn money from their
videos. Their deal guaranteed $9,000 per month if they let YouTube put some display
advertising on their videos. At first Hecox and Padilla were resistant to the idea of
posting ads on their videos. More than just the fear of scaring away their viewers,
accepting ads on YouTube symbolized the tension between professional and amateur
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content that defined YouTube’s “hybrid media ecology” and continues to epitomize the
practices of the site (Jenkins 2010).
Tiziana Terranova (2000), among others, describes how the digital economy
operates through the practices of free labor and the logic of a gift economy. She argues
that free laborers in the digital economy, like Hecox and Padilla, translate their
“knowledgeable consumption of culture into productive activities that are pleasurably
embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (37). By freely offering up
their videos to YouTube without expecting anything in return, Hecox and Padilla were
participating in a gift economy. As active contributors of what Henry Jenkins calls
YouTube’s prolific participatory culture, the addition of ads becomes an example of how
“the market economy is always threatening to reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift
economy” (36). The YouTube partnership program materialized for Hecox and Padilla,
and many users of the site, the uncertainty about its meaning or what Burgess and Green
describe as YouTube’s “double function as both a top-down platform for the distribution
of popular culture and a bottom-up platform for vernacular creativity” (Burgess and
Green 2009).
Facing pressure from Blumberg, eventually Hecox and Padilla reconciled their
conflicted feelings and began using the ad function on their videos. Their incorporation
results in what Henry Jenkins describes as a blurring between the grassroots practices that
he calls participatory culture and the commercial practices called Web 2.0 as well as the
ongoing debate amongst fans and fan scholars about the pros and cons of amateur gift
economies and professional incorporation (Scott 2009). Nevertheless, their ad-sharing
revenue skyrocketed well past their $9,000 monthly guarantee. And, soon thereafter
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Alloy came on board to help Smosh sell ads and sponsorships, splitting the resultant ad
revenue.
Before buying Smosh and co-producing content for them, Alloy’s main
relationship with content producers on YouTube was selling ads via an in-house sales
team that tapped into its database of demographic data, ultimately developing an
extensive ad network that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host
advertisements. Alloy’s key function was to aggregate ad space supply and match it with
advertiser demand, but Alloy also produced and distributed custom content for brands, so
soon Alloy began arranging sponsorship relationships between Hecox, Padilla and a
variety of brands. For example, because Smosh is incredibly popular with the young male
audience, Alloy connects brands like Hot Pockets and X-Box directly with Smosh,
arranging ad buys on the site and sometimes producing branded content starring Hecox
and Padilla. One successful sponsored video for the frozen food Hot Pockets, called
“Teens in the Wild” features Hecox as a wilderness explorer describing a group of video-
playing teenage boys as if they were wild animals in their natural habitat. Eventually he
captures them in cages by luring them with Hot Pockets and comedy ensues. This video
was distributed via Smosh’s YouTube channel and based on both Smosh’s loyal fan base
and an extensive media spend, including the purchase of YouTube trueview ads in front
of other related videos, “Teens in the Wild” raked up over 10 million views.
While “Teens in the Wild” was produced by ZenithOptimedia and reflects the
dominant form of branded content on Smosh’s channel, the Smosh boys were involved in
another branded content series, produced by Alloy Digital that more directly illustrates
Alloy’s extensive ad network and distribution functions. The eight-episode online reality
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series, called Chasing With Steve Aoki, was designed for Xbox’s Forza Horizon game.
Each of the six-minute programs that comprise the series star DJ Steve Aoki and Hecox
and Padilla as hosts who guide three teams competing in a series of challenges, much like
The Amazing Race. The teams receive helpful clues by pulling up video messages from
Aoki via an Xbox console and Forza Horizon receives placement throughout the episodes
via branded clothing and gear, while taking center stage during the show’s fourth
installment when the teams compete in the action-racing game (Heine 2012). The series
was promoted and distributed via both YouTube and Fuse.com, the later of which helped
secure Aoki as a contributor. Along with media buys across YouTube’s channels, banner
and video ads also ran across Alloy’s network of other websites that target 12- to 34-
year-old consumers. Smosh’s target demographic is mainly boys aged 12-24, but Hecox
and Padilla have had significant crossover appeal to girls as well, particularly through the
positioning of Padilla as a goofy teen heartthrob. Nevertheless, these two examples
reflect particular stereotypical gendered views of young male online audiences as
immature, childish, goofy “gamers” whereas those for girls discussed below depict young
female online audiences as emotionally introspective, if a little awkward and mainly as
shopper/texters.
Realizing the gold mine Smosh represented, especially as an avenue to expand its
demographic reach to more effectively include boys, Alloy bought Smosh in 2011. Alloy
Chief Executive Matt Diamond says about the purchase: “We were looking for content
that we could help build into a franchise. We felt they were bigger than a few guys
putting up videos every week” (Pomerantz 2013). With this extensive brand reach and
network, Forbes estimated that Smosh brought in $10 million in revenue in 2012, half
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coming from ad sharing with YouTube and the other half comes from ads on Smosh.com,
merchandise sales, sponsored videos, and iTunes downloads of a Smosh app and Hecox
and Padilla’s comedy songs (Pomerantz 2013).
As Dorothy Pomerantz observes, the success that Hecox and Padilla are
experiencing used to be a “golden ticket to Hollywood, where agents and producers are
salivating at the chance to stick a popular, good-looking duo with millions of fans on TV”
(Pomerantz 2013). She cites “Fred,” a character with a grating high-pitched voice played
by Lucas Cruikshank in a series of web videos, as an example of this new trend. After
parlaying his online success into a guest spot on Nickelodeon’s hit iCarly, two successful
Fred movies and a TV series on Nickelodeon, Cruikshank now has his first non-Fred role
on Marvin Marvin, a sort of modern-day Mork & Mindy for Nickelodeon. Hecox and
Padilla, on the other hand stayed on the YouTube platform, and decided to build out their
brand with a series of new channels including SmoshGames and ShutUp! Cartoons,
discussed more below. Alloy’s purchase of Smosh and their promotional network helped
Smosh reach the number one most-subscribed to YouTube channel in February 2013.
During this time, Alloy also added the popular network of YouTube channels that
comprise Clevver Media in the fall of 2012, which specialize in entertainment news
targeting teen girls. Clevver TV, one of the most popular channels, is similar to the
television show Entertainment Tonight, and seamlessly blurs the line between
promotional and news content much like its predecessor. Through call outs to the
audience and encouraging participation through voting, for example, on which Pretty
Little Liars character has the best style, Clevver represents the most common online
programming produced by corporate culture—repurposed content that acted as
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promotional material for established media properties and allowed media producers to
establish a web presence without incurring substantial startup costs and without making
their programming vulnerable to digital piracy (Dawson 2011). Together the two
channels helped build out Alloy’s digital network, which started with alloy.com and now
includes a slue of teen targeted websites including teen.com, crushable.com & gurl.com
amongst others. As of February 2013 the network delivers in excess of 95 million
monthly unique users, reaches over half of the total 12-34 aged Internet users, and
continues to reign at the very top in its category, according to comScore (Alloy Digital
2013). Ranked number one by total subscribers on YouTube, with 18 million across
multiple video channels, Alloy serves among the web’s largest video content providers,
delivering 428 million streams monthly (Alloy Digital 2013).
Significantly though, as mentioned above part of this success was also predicated
on Alloy’s acquisition of Generate, the management and digital production company
launched in 2006 by Jordan Levin, Pete Aronson, Dave Rath and Kara Welker. With the
acquisition of Generate, Alloy gained its own in house production studio and
management team whose reputation for branded content paralleled its own marketing
agendas, albeit for a broader market. Instead of hiring out production studios to produce
content, Alloy now has everything in-house. In an interview with deadline.com, Generate
CEO Levin was explicit about how the deal was strategic: “The companies share a
common vision, we believe that in this moment in time there is an opportunity to
consolidate to scale sought by advertisers” (Andreeva 2012). He even likened the
acquisition to creating a vertically integrated company, bringing together “the five pillars”
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of a classic entertainment entity: talent and production (Generate) as well as distribution,
sales and marketing (Alloy Digital) (Andreeva 2012).
With these acquisitions, Alloy Digital joins the ranks of Machinima, Maker, and
Fullscreen, as the leading video content aggregators within YouTube, also known as
multichannel networks (MCN). These companies are seen as a new generation of online
“verticals” that provide production, marketing and technology infrastructure, which they
argue allows creators like Hecox and Padilla to focus on creative content production in
exchange for a cut of the revenues generated by everything from advertising to
merchandising. In actuality they are trying to consolidate power, resources, and capital to
better control the flow of audiences in order to monetize the space. For example,
Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos has said, “The thesis here is YouTube is the next
evolution of cable. We’ve set out to build a company that is kind of like a Viacom would
be if it were built on YouTube” (“Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 in Marketing, Agencies and
Media” 2013). These companies aggregate hundreds and thousands of channels and
develop sponsorship relationships and cross-promotions with them all, much in the same
way Viacom bought up cable networks, film studios, and music companies.
These companies are positioning themselves as a new breed of media
conglomerate, stealing business from established media companies, while in many ways
borrowing from their playbook. At the 2012 VidCon conference in Anaheim, a
conference for leaders in online video content, Rob Jones the VP at Machinima
proclaimed, “If I were a cable TV executive, I’d probably plot to blow up the Anaheim
convention center this weekend to save the future of my business” (VidCon 2012). While
many of the big media conglomerates steered clear of YouTube in its early years because
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of its problems related to copyright infringement, many are realizing the platform’s draw
and are becoming clients of MCNs, even testing the waters for potential acquisition
(Wallenstein 2012). Several, like NBC Universal, understand that the nuances of content
distribution are different on YouTube compared to TV or film and that building and
maximizing an audience requires "mastering YouTube minutiae like thumbnails,
annotations and title tags—what MCNs refer to as ‘audience development’” (Wallenstein
2012). Many of the MCNs, like Fullscreen, have built a side business that manages the
conglomerates’ various brands and help them distribute content on YouTube.
Nevertheless, for as different and in some ways threatening YouTube may seem, Time
Warner’s $36 million investment in Maker and Comcast’s expressed interest in buying
Fullscreen suggest more overlap between YouTube and traditional television distribution
than discrepancy. The next section illustrates the ways in which MCNs, like Alloy, are
borrowing from television as they lead the way in how online production, distribution,
content, and audience address evolve online, particularly on the YouTube platform

YouTube Tries to Be More Like TV
The rise of MCNs and YouTube’s support of their business models reflect a major
transition for YouTube that exacerbates the tension between the participatory culture of
the site and the motives of web 2.0 companies, like Alloy Digital, which Jenkins (2010)
argues, “seek to court, capture, and commercialize aspects of participatory culture.” In
particular, Alloy’s movement onto the YouTube platform and their efforts to monetize
channels like Smosh and other forms of online content exemplify the ways in which their
commercial interests are imperfectly aligned with the noncommercial interests that
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Jenkins argues motivate DIY cultural production (Jenkins 2010). Some of these emerging
business models and practices work to discourage DIY production in favor of more
traditional forms of media content, which are more easily monetized.
Even though Banet-Weiser (2012) draws attention to the commercial logic of
branding in a majority of YouTube's user practices, for many, YouTube represents a form
of democratized entry into media production, an egalitarian ideal that promotes diversity
and variety in content and representation, allowing users free and unfettered access to
anything they find interesting and entertaining, even if it’s not popular on a mass level. It
promotes personal interactivity and engagement with creators and communities of
followers through strong call to actions by creators and intimate fan engagements. In
many ways it provides a more level playing field than any other media distribution
platform where DIY productions are as equally accessible as professionally produced
content. Despite these unique affordances though, web video production has in numerous
ways been seen as an extension of television and its proprietary motives (Christian 2012).
Moreover, YouTube, in coordination with MCNs, is attempting to increasingly model the
platform on television, particularly with the goal of stimulating advertiser interest and
increasing proprietary ownership of the platform.
In many ways, television has always been an unstable medium and an ephemeral
object of study (Feuer 1992). Television scholars have debated whether the television
object is a technology, a program, a network, an organizing logic or a series of
programming strategies, all of which are continually in flux. This definitional instability,
however, was especially apparent as the dominance of the big three networks was under
increasing threat during the multichannel transition in the 1990s and the rise in cable
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programming, which non-coincidentally overlapped with the development of web content.
As Aymar Jean Christian notes, “television’s perceived weakness in the multichannel
transition opened a rhetorical and economic space for entrepreneurs eager to curate and
distribute web programs” as extensions of or additions to television programming. He
adds, “Television in the convergence era was one malleable concept through which
Hollywood insiders, outsiders, financial backers and artistic leaders brought their hopes
of media monetization (and domination) in a period of instability” (Christian 2012, 341).
The convergences of television and web content production on platforms like YouTube
materialize some of the discursive formations of television as a mode of viewing, a
structuring logic, and an economic imperative impacting and embedded in new media
programming and business models. Therefore, while YouTube and its users have
introduced various forms of experimentation with content and viewership practices
associated with the advantages of digital technologies, they have also maintained
continuity with television’s practices. YouTube continues to design the platorm in
relation to television, particularly through changes in interface composition, the
development of branded channels, and promoting content with higher production values
and traditional gender conventions, all with the goal of facilitating forms of audience
engagement that appeal to advertisers. In short they are trying to turn diverse and varied
Internet users into commodity audiences.
Although YouTube has continued to grow since its launch in 2005, the site’s
heterogeneity has made it difficult to know the directions in which to take the site. Robert
Kyncl, a senior strategist at YouTube, describes the difficulty in charting YouTube’s
future: “Because YouTube is focused on a lot of different types of content at the same
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time, it has many opportunities; and the hardest thing is to figure out which ones you
shouldn’t do, and focus on the ones you should” (Seabrook 2012). For a variety of
reasons, YouTube has chosen to focus on modeling the platform much more like cable
television. Experiencing success with the AdShare program made executives at YouTube
aware of the advertiser demand to reach the young niche-specific viewers who use the
platform the most. The problem, however, was matching their supply with what
advertisers wanted. Even though YouTube was tracking a lot of “clicks” and “views” on
its site, the platform lacked the sustained audience engagement that TV had traditionally
promised advertisers. The average YouTube user “spends only fifteen minutes a day on
the site—a paltry showing when compared with the four or five hours the average
American spends in front of the TV each day” (Seabrook 2012). So in order to truly
compete for advertiser dollars, YouTube would have to expand the average user’s watch
time and engagement, which proved difficult because the standard block of programming
on TV lasts twenty-two minutes and its only three minutes on YouTube. Nevertheless, as
John Seabrook of The New Yorker notes, “If YouTube could get people to stay on the site
longer, it could sell more advertising, and raise the rates it charges advertisers for each
thousand views, which are known in the industry as Cost per mille (C.P.M.)” (Seabrook
2012). YouTube was motivated to make this change because “the $60 billion TV
advertising business in the U.S. is about 30 times larger than the video-ad market on the
Internet” (Bond and Szalai 2011).
While the idea seemed simple, no straightforward solution to YouTube’s problem
exists. While YouTube’s content had in many ways drawn from much of television’s
library and norms, part of what had distinguished the YouTube platform from television
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had been both the seemingly limitless abundance of content and its own aesthetic and
textual norms. Although, the content on YouTube is, of course, various, the dominant
aesthetic and textual norms adhere generally to what Christian describes as the digital
aesthetic tied to the visual culture of new media technologies (Christian 2011). It includes
the exhaustive use of close-up, and the use of direct address and subjective camera, styles
based in webcams and popularized as forms of vlogging. Like those used by Smosh, the
YouTube aesthetic is also marked by experimentation with the video form or an explicit
foregrounding of the medium itself. Often seen in “trick videos,” this aesthetic includes
the use of green screen technology, split screens or reversed footage, and sound
processing tools (Burgess and Green 2009, 52). But, above all, YouTube videos have
been defined by their short duration. What began as a technological limitation imposed
by YouTube because of limited bandwidth, the short duration of YouTube videos has
become an industry standard: “As audiences grew more accustomed to watching shorts
on the web, they came to recognize brevity as a desirable quality of web video, to the
degree that, as Daniel Chamberlain has noted, duration emerged as one of the primary
criteria on which the merits of videos are evaluated on the web” (Cited in Dawson 2011).
The short duration enabled viewers to feel like they could sample a little piece of the vast
expanse of content available to them online.
YouTube’s impetus to expand the average viewer’s watch time and engagement
could not simply be fulfilled by making videos longer. Rather, YouTube implemented a
variety of strategies, modeled on television programming strategies that would encourage
viewers to stay on the site longer even if the videos were not substantially longer. In
December 2011, YouTube overhauled its homepage, changing its main interface from
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featuring the most popular videos curated by YouTube algorithms to a personalized feed
that mimics Facebook and Google+, where the main center column provides a “news feed”
of all the videos from your subscription lists as well as videos “recommended” for you
based on your engagement with other videos. YouTube spokespeople claimed the new
interface would allow for better “discovery features”: it would better surface videos
viewers actually watch as opposed to those that they click and abandon—a practice
encouraged by the increasing use of misleading “cleavage thumbnails” or other such
deceptive naming and labeling tactics used to jack up “view” numbers. Google also
highlighted the fact that the site now offered deeper integration with Google+ and
Facebook, helping members see what their friends were sharing without leaving
YouTube’s site. Yet, the shift mainly signaled YouTube’s move towards promoting
professional programming in order to create a more TV-like service, which makes it a
more attractive environment for advertisers (“YouTube Rolls Out Site Redesign” 2011).
As William Uricchio (2004) observes, metadata and user interfaces have become
central as they mediate between viewer experience and the plenitude that characterizes
the current media environment. Although YouTube is discussed as a level playing field
and interfaces and organizational structures are pitched as that which helps viewers “find”
programs, as Uricchio points out ultimately those who control the metadata will control
what is seen: “Control—which was once seen as the domain of the television
programmer and, following the widespread use of RCD, as the domain of the viewer—is
now shifting to an independent sector composed of metadata programmers and filtering
technology (variously constructed as search engines and adaptive interfaces” (Uricchio
175). It’s no coincidence that YouTube’s algorithm for recommended video is a safely
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protected asset, as is what truly counts as a view on YouTube. These assets allow Google
to control the flow and success of programming and content. Moreover, YouTube’s
interface changes are leading to a more unified experience across platforms. TV, online,
and mobile apps for YouTube will eventually have the same interface, which further
blurs the line between YouTube and other television networks and will allow for more
sustained engagement with YouTube across different platforms.
These interface changes are all in support of YouTube’s move to structuring its
content much like cable-programming flow that is organized around channels. While
filtering content via channels and channel subscription had been an option on the
YouTube platform since its early days, spiking advertisers’ interest and encouraging
more sustained audience engagement were key to the push and reorganization of
YouTube into “channels” as opposed to videos or categories. As Rob Barnett the
founder/CEO of My Damn Channel notes, “We're starting to see the cableization of the
Internet. It’s shifting into zones of niche programming that viewers can (surf) through
just as you do when you turn on cable” (Littleton 2013). Much like the cable branding
strategies of the 1990s on channels like Nickelodeon, MTV, and Bravo, YouTube is
using branding strategies “to commodify an experience—not just a product for audiences”
(Banet-Weiser 2007). In comparison to focusing on specific popular videos or even
categories of videos, the formation of channels works to attract and target narrowly
specific audiences and advertisers interested in reaching those same narrow audience
segments, a practice Alloy was well versed in. According to Alloy Digital VP Barry
Blumberg, “More of our sites are programmed like networks now. YouTube has become
a programmer. They are a distributor of professionally produced content that viewers turn
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into personalized networks” (Littleton 2013). Explicitly acknowledging a shift from user-
controlled flow to network-controlled flow, Cristos Goodrow YouTube’s director of
engineering notes, “Our goal is we want users to watch more and click less,” indicating
YouTube’s shift from a focus on views towards engagement or time spent (Learmonth
2012). This change in interface and focus on channels has been described as “a lean-back
interface for more passive viewing” (Learmonth 2012).
Along with encouraging more passive interaction with the site, the channel
structure works to shape commodity audiences around traditionally profitable niches.
This interface reorganization coincided with YouTube’s $100 million investment in high
quality original content for the platform, which they hoped would both bring in new
audiences and cut through the clutter of the site. Ben McOwen Wilson, the director of
YouTube for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, explains further: “The insight for us
was that though some partners were making successful businesses out of creating content
on YouTube, it was not happening at the scale or the pace that we would love to see it
happening, or as widely in terms of genre” (Kiss 2012). YouTube’s original content
initiative therefore funded about 100 channels, produced by celebrities like rapper Jay Z,
pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, and actors Ashton Kutcher and Amy Poehler as well as
established media companies like BermanBraun, FremantleMedia, Shine Group, and The
Wall Street Journal, with a maximum $5 million going to any single channel. All of the
major MCN’s were also part of the deal, with Machinima and Maker getting the most
press, but Alloy Digital and Fullscreen partnering with a lot of producers to develop
content and find supplemental revenue through advertising sponsorships. The financial
details have been kept private for the most part, but partners like Stewart Hendler & John
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Cabrera who developed H+: The Digital Series for Warner Bros. suggest that their deal
involves YouTube recouping its advances then giving between 45 and 55 percent of the
ad revenue to the content creators.
Malik Ducard, whose team manages YouTube’s relationships to the MCNs as
director of content partnerships at Google, sees these companies as an essential element
of what he describes as the site’s ecosystem: “So much innovation comes from this
group, and this group often pushes the envelope for YouTube in a lot of ways”
(Wallenstein 2012). One of the most talked about examples of this type of boundary-
pushing programming is H+, a global apocalyptic science fiction web series that revolves
around a non-linear narrative and a diverse ensemble cast, encouraging viewers to create
their own playlists and reorder the narrative to create a structure and storyline that speaks
to their interests. Another channel symbolic of the type of high-end digital content that
would adopt more of a network programming model is WIGS a channel committed to
producing “quality” programming for women similar to Showtime, which was co-created
by Jon Avnet, producer of Black Swan and Risky Business and Rodrigo Garcia, who
directed Albert Nobbs and In Treatment. The channel presents a series of short films and
documentaries about the lives of women and each installment is around five to eight
minutes in length. Despite these highly publicized “Original” examples, most of the
funded channels were developed around tried and true television genres, lifestyle brands,
and identity categories already proven successful on cable television, including comedy,
sports, news, home and garden, beauty, science and technology, and “women’s interest”
programming that would “help bring some navigable order to the vast landscape of the
Internet and draw the sustained repeat viewership that advertisers prize” (Littleton 2013).
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What became most successful from this partnership, and signals one of the
prominent directions YouTube is heading, however, were the YouTube brand spinoffs
like those created by Alloy Digital from Smosh and Clevver that were able to move and
funnel audiences from their established channels to spinoffs, leading to the common
industry slogan that “YouTube Feeds YouTube.” As industry journalist Andrew
Wallenstein notes, many of the channels utilized “the traditional strategy that cable
channels have exploited so successfully: getting traction in the marketplace with low-cost
licensed fare before graduating to ownership of premium content” (Wallenstein 2012).
For example, Alloy and Smosh were awarded money from the YouTube original content
initiative to develop ShutUp! Cartoons, an animation spinoff named after the popular
Smosh slogan “ShutUp!.” McOwen Wilson said YouTube had seen a huge number of
pitches for the new channels, but wanted content that “exploited YouTube's interactivity
and could respond to comments and shares among viewers, rather than lengthy pre-
written series” (Kiss 2012). He added, “It is not a dumping ground. Some of these ideas
couldn’t be done on traditional television, which couldn’t afford the specificity of the
audience or the interactivity” (Kiss 2012). According to Blumberg who led Disney
Television Animation from 1994 to 2006, ShutUp! Cartoons was merged his two
passions: “It was taking what was great about animation and applying the freedoms and
the niche sense of humor you see much more in the online video space” (Kushigemachi
2012).
Animation was deemed a unique and "quality" genre that was under-explored on
YouTube and could illustrate some of the innovative ideas that YouTube wanted to
publicize with the initiative. Some of the eighteen short form animated web series aimed
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at the 12-24 demographic include Ryan Naumann’s Do's and Don’ts: A Children's Guide
to Social Survival, featuring the voices of actual children covering topics like veganism,
race relations, and hiding a dead body, Michael Granberry’s Zombies vs. Ninjas, and
Cory Edwards’ Krogzilla Gets a Job, a gag cartoon about a downsized Japanese monster
seeking employment. The channel was envisioned as space for established and upcoming
animators to try out and sample story ideas and characters they couldn’t sell on other
platforms. And, because of animation's freedom from the constraints of realism the
channel had potential to challenge gender norms and provide subversive critique. Similar
to what Christian (2012) notes was common of early web development, animation proved
central to YouTube's mission of providing “a more offbeat version of television that is
often more profane and always less formulaic than its broadcast and cable counterparts”
(Harmon 2000).
Further investigating how Alloy’s new original content for YouTube is
discursively positioned in relation to television, the next section examines ShutUp!
Cartoons by focusing particularly on one of its animated series Pubertina. It
conceptualizes the web series as an example of Alloy Digital’s innovative and
experimental, yet uneasy attempt to shape Internet users and fans of the Smosh brand into
commodity audiences. Then I look at its award-winning web series First Day to show
how the production fit particularly well with some of the strategies that YouTube was
implementing to monetize content (channel and quality), but it also illustrates some of the
gendered structuring logics and advertising motives that continue to circumscribe
representations of girls in these programs and professionally produced YouTube content
in general. These series draw attention to how Alloy is replicating several traditional
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television models to help facilitate audience engagement and advertiser interest by
tapping into the marketing and advertising relationships and strategies that Alloy
developed during its early web and transmedia developments. Yet, they also show how
particular constructions of post-feminist girlhood align with Alloy and other MCN’s
goals for monetization of the digital space and suggest that highly gendered videos may
be the future of teen television online.

Pubertina
When developing content for ShutUp! Cartoons with both the financial and
promotional backing of YouTube’s original content initiative, Alloy Digital and Smosh
gave art school alumnus Emily Brundiage almost total creative freedom in making an
animated series based on her short film Pubertina, which is one of eighteen new series
the channel plans to distribute. Building on the experimental and abstract nature of
animation as a genre, the series is a rare and explicit media portrayal of the transition
from girlhood to womanhood. It’s not a representation one would typically find on
television, and represents some of the freedom that comes along with creating niche
content with the financial support to experiment without the constraints of sponsorships.
Pubertina is about an eleven-year-old girl who is the only one in her 5th grade class
going through puberty. Her life and emotions are explored in episodes like “Tampon
Dreamin’” chronicling Pubertina’s wish to use a tampon instead of the bulky sanitary
pads her mom says she has to wear, and “Ruff Ruff’s Dilemma” exploring the inner
turmoil of her stuffed plush toy as she begins to grow up and spend less time with him.
Pubertina’s best friend is a pre-pubescent girl named Debs, who acts as Pubertina’s self-
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appointed adviser as she experiences menstruation, getting acne, and breasts that she calls
“nubbies” as well as obsessively crushing on boys who turn out to be gay.
The first episode of the series is called “Rusty Sprinkler,” a parody about
Pubertina’s fan obsession of a young pre-teen singer who sings an auto-tuned song to her:
“This song’s not about you, but I’ll make it feel like it’s about you.” The episode both
validates girls’ obsession with commercially produced pop acts and pokes fun at their
contrivances by acknowledging the manufactured “authenticity” behind user-generated
music videos on the internet and other tactics that produce celebrities for consumption.
Similar to this episode, most of the fourteen 3-4 minute episodes in the series incorporate
original songs to highlight Pubertina’s changing emotions and explore issues of isolation,
loneliness, depression, and homosexuality with a sometimes-dark humor. Brundiage says
she initially envisioned Pubertina as “a Godzilla-equivalent of a teenage girl, way more
grotesque-looking than she is now, where she went around pulling boys out of their
bedroom windows and stuffing them into her pockets” (Blabber 2012). She says that she
arrived at “a more introverted character who looked like an awkward elongated squeeze
toy fit into a pink shirt and jeans” (Blabber 2012).
Although the veracity and accuracy of YouTube's comments section are
increasingly being cast in doubt as companies are being exposed for seeding comments
and generating publicity stunts, the series has been quite divisive amongst viewers who
are visible in the comments section of the channel. But Pubertina and by extension
ShutUp! Cartoons has been comparatively successful to other YouTube funded content
with the debut episode getting over two million views, and the rest of the 14 episodes
(and counting) totaling between 500,000 and two million views each. In a brief but
215
provocative post on the academic discussion board In Media Res about Pubertina,
Jennifer Porst points out how, like television, Alloy programs the series to air during
specific dates and times: “Producers hope they can create appointment viewing, which
may help create ‘buzz’ around some shows, and depending on their deals with advertisers,
earn the channels more money for more views within a certain timeframe” (Porst 2012).
In the discussion that followed Porst’s post, scholars Louisa Stein, Karen Petruska, Dana
Och, and Amy Hasinoff explore the potential meaning behind the representation of
girlhood Pubertina provides. They suggest her characterization is both unique in its overt
“ugliness” in comparison to the dominant “prettiness” of most girls’ media culture and
celebrate the show’s animation, which allows her body to be an expressive critical canvas
for the roller-coaster ride of emotions and insecurities that come with puberty and
adolescence. Stein, however critiques what she sees as the series’ framing of “the female
body as monstrous” even though she recognizes that “offering this representation of
tween-girl-monstrousness could be very significant in terms of representing what
adolescent femininity can be [while] acknowledging adolescent girls’ perspectives and
experiences” (Porst 2012). Through the fantasy and experimentation allowed by
animation, the show provides a visceral look into the female experience heightened by
Brundiage’s high-pitched and piercing voice of the character. At times, Pubertina’s teeth
take the shape of a shark’s and her eyes protrude or recede according to her emotional
state; viewers are confronted with blood soaked jeans, acne whiteheads poping, and other
“ugly” or grotesque bodily properties not usually represented in girl culture. But in doing
so it gives newfound visibility to a major aspect of contemporary girlhood that is so often
rendered invisible by the mainstream media, except in the happy sanitized utopias of
216
tampon commercials. Pubertina, as an Internet web series, also offers teens a space for
community and conversation about puberty. In the comments sections viewers ask each
other about what is “normal,” validate Pubertina’s experiences and feelings, and share
what they and their friends have gone through. As Porst suggest, “In this way, it might be
the ideal outcome for this combination of television and the internet: providing a
common text and space for discussion while still allowing for a certain amount of
anonymity—thereby allowing open discussion of this somewhat taboo subject” (Porst
2012).
This is a form of idealized interactive web content that YouTube envisioned with
their original content initiative. Yet, these discussions are unfortunately occurring in the
highly masculinized space of the Smosh comedy brand, which promotes particular
gendered assumptions about both comedy and girls’ bodies. Given its subject matter and
the cultural reinforced distain for girl culture that’s written off as insipid and insignificant,
particularly by boys, the polarizing nature of the show is unsurprising. There are a lot of
teenage girls who love the series and are dedicated fans and committed defenders. Many
even call themselves “Puberlievers,” creating fan art, and tattooing the symbol for
Pubertina (a bleeding heart) with marker pens on their hands and wrists. They follow the
many transmedia extensions of Pubertina to Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Gurl.com for
Brundiage’s Pubertina comic. However, many people (mostly self-identified young-
teenage boys, but also other girls) hate it with a passion. Before the start of the second
season, ShutUp! Cartoons disabled the “like” and “dislike” buttons for the first season as
several of the videos were “disliked” more than they were “liked,” despite the relatively
high number of views. Many of these views were the result of Smosh’s audiences being
217
funneled to ShutUp! Cartoons from the original boy-centered site as well as those being
cross-promoted with other of Alloy’s web sites. Many of the negative commenters called
the show disgusting, repulsive, and offensive or inappropriate. But, one commenter was
perhaps the most self-aware of his position as a target niche audience member when he
said, “I came here for Smosh, I’m sooooo confused?!,” indicating his confusion about
why a show about a girl going through puberty would be on a channel branded for teen
boys.
The tensions made visible in the comment sections of Pubertina is similar to the
tensions experienced by Dave Chappelle during the production of his highly successful
comedy sketch series airing on the television cable channel Comedy Central in the early
2000s. In her article, “I’m Rich, Bitch!!!: The Comedy of Chappelle’s Show” Christine
Acham (2007) explores how cable television distribution, much like the internet now,
created a new space for the expression of niche racial representations and
experimentations with comedy. Chappelle was drawn to this space because he could
provide cultural critiques of racism and black or white culture equally, after in many
ways being shut out of mainstream broadcast television. But his decision to leave the
network and turn down the $50 million pay check was symbolic of what he felt was his
lack of control in the way people would interpret his comedy. Particularly because
Comedy Central’s target demographic was a more mainstream audience, made up mostly
of affluent young white men between the ages of 18-49 (especially as the show and
network got more popular), Chappelle worried about the key distinction between
laughing at something and laughing with it. He worried about reinforcing stereotypes and
confirming preconceived notions about black people. This tension between laughing at or
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laughing with comedy is similar to the conflicted views of Pubertina, where some
viewers identify with Pubertina and her exploits whereas others ridicule and deride the
series.
Although ShutUp! Cartoons has been supporting the series by renewing it for a
second season, the overall Smosh brand and the target marketing defining the channel as
a “masculine” space makes for a particularly hostile environment for a show like
Pubertina. Brundiage alludes to this with a playful gimmick added to the comments
section of the first season of the series. There, she added a link labeled, “Click if you
don’t like,” which upon clicking leads viewers to a video titled, “Y U No Liek Me!?,”
featuring a twelve minute loop of Pubertina sobbing dramatically “Why? I’m just a
girl…why…I’m just a girl!” If one sits through the whole twelve minutes he or she will
witness a series of pop up annotations that act as Pubertina’s thought bubbles and subtly
critique the subject positioning of some of the male viewers. One says, for example,
“Maybe boys are just scared of the female body,” and another says “Don’t tease me about
my teeth, I’m insecure,” and yet another acknowledges the patriarchal notion that girls’
culture should be private and boys public when it says, “I should have just written this in
my diary.” A lot of these tensions stem from Alloy’s work to create a masculine
commodity audience around Smosh and how that limits the expressive reach of a unique
series like Pubertina. Unfortunately, though, Pubertina would probably be similarly out
of place on Alloy Digital’s other channels that target teen girls, which attempt to
construct a particular type of commodity audience around post-feminist girlhood that
stands in contrast to that depicted in Pubertina.

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First Day and Alloy’s Branded Content Web Series
In many ways, Pubertina is an exception to Alloy’s other digital web series, and
represents an experiment produced with little of its own financial risk. The majority of
Alloy’s web series production is based on its advertising and marketing relationships with
brands targeting teen girl demographics. Along with creating television shows like
Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars that foregrounded teen girls’ use of cell phones, social
networking and other digital technologies, prior to entering the YouTube game, Alloy
also created several web series that aired on teen.com, gURL.com and other sites in
Alloy’s digital network that more closely reflect their understanding of the future of teen
television online. Building on the adaption and transmedia model started with success of
Gossip Girl, during the show’s second season Alloy released a web series based on
another of its popular literary properties Private, which aired on teen.com. Private is a
scripted teen mystery about a girl who infiltrates the popular girl group at her prestigious
boarding school only to discover murder and other dark activities as a result. The series
was announced in May 2009, beginning with a contest allowing female readers the
chance to audition for the role of one of the characters Kiran Hayes. The series adapted
the first four books into twenty episodes, each with a standard length of four to six
minutes. It premiered August 11
th
through September 24
th
, 2009 and logged 14 million
hits, convincing Alloy of the potential for web series development (Berfield 2010).
Private was the first series produced independently from Warner Bros. and
without the promotional muscle of a network behind it, Alloy used its own online
holdings and in school television channel to promote the series, which turned out to
generate of a lot of traffic. The show was also sponsored by beauty product lines
220
Neutrogena and Johnson & Johnson, and following this model of sponsored web
programming, Alloy produced other web series including Hollywood Is Like High School
funded by L'Oréal and Talent funded by Cover Girl, Pantene, Secret, Olay, and Venus. In
the fall of 2010, Alloy launched a branded content web series on YouTube for Kmart
titled, First Day that really encompasses the types of strategies Alloy is deploying as it
develops more and more content for YouTube. In each of the eight short episodes, which
run about six to eight minutes, the main character Cassie is forced to relive the same first
day of school repeatedly, just like Bill Murray in the comedy Groundhog Day. Based on
the premise outlined in the first episode by our protagonists’ “mean girl” little sister,
Cassie needs to “change up” her style if she ever plans on being “kissable,” landing a
boyfriend, and avoid ending up alone for the rest of her life. Because Cassie’s first day is
one traumatic clothes disaster after another, in each of the subsequent episodes, she steps
out in different Kmart clothes, until she gets it right, lands the guy, and is able to move on
with her life. The first season netted approximately eight million views across its eight
episodes. Those numbers almost doubled for the second season, titled First Day, First
Dance, which was launched in the fall of 2011.
First Day, like Alloy’s other web productions, has high production values
exemplified with the use of film cinematography and lighting, strong acting talent, an
original score, pop musical accompaniment, and a pretty tight script. In fact, on the
surface little sets it apart from a show intended for television except for the fact that on
the right side of the screen viewers can click on the products featured in the programming
and it will take them to Kmart’s website for purchase. The web series reflects the
dominant business model for online content creation promoted by Alloy Inc. similar to
221
the early television era when advertisers not only sponsored but helped to create, cast,
and script everything from soap operas and sitcoms to quiz shows and variety programs.
Kmart provided somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000 to pay for the web series,
and approved everything from story lines to wardrobes to names of characters (Schechner
and Schuker 2011). “In rounds of back-and-forth story development, Kmart asked Alloy
to shape each of the four main characters to reflect several clothing brands that Kmart
wanted to push. The protagonist, for instance, was written to embody the Dream Out
Loud by Selena Gomez brand. Kmart also pushed Alloy to change the protagonist's
original name, Bree, to which it thought its customers wouldn't relate. They settled on the
name Rosie instead” (Schechner and Schuker 2011). Alloy and Kmart maintain that they
did not want it to appear like a commercial by emphasizing that characters never mention
Kmart by name, and they rejected the idea that the main character would skip school to
shop at Kmart because “it seemed forced” (Schechner and Schuker 2011). Andrew Stein,
Kmart’s vice president of marketing for Sears Holdings asserts, “Our goal here is to be
real and authentic, and to embed our brands into the storyline” (Schechner and Schuker
2011). Nevertheless, Kmart had a great deal of influence over the content of the web
series. There are moments written into the script outlining product placement and camera
techniques to highlight various products, and on set, advertisers gave direction and
advice: “If the sponsor sees something they don't like, they'll speak up and we'll change
it,” says Tripp Reed, an independent filmmaker who joined Alloy to produce its digital
programs. In fact, Kmart provided a product director for the shoot who made sure that
particular products, like a pair of cargo pants included in a “look sheet” for a character,
were being used in the right way (Schechner and Schuker 2011).
222
Unlike Pubertina which was funded with YouTube seed money, the advent of
advertiser-produced shows like First Day are seen as the future of “quality” online teen
television. Brands like Kmart turn to online branded content, especially when trying to
reach teen audiences who are watching video on their computers, phones, and tablets. For
the $600,000 it cost to produce the first season of First Day, an advertiser could buy only
one 30-second ad on American Idol, which can cost around $500,000 just for the airtime
(Evans 2009). As the TV industry responds to these changes, they too are turning more
towards branded content as product placement and product integration become more and
more of a staple across broadcast and cable television, particularly in teen or tween
programming much like those developed by Alloy Entertainment.
At Alloy the line between content and advertising becomes increasingly blurry in
both their television and digital media franchises, conflating problematic advertising
tropes and representations with targeted content for young girls. In many ways First Day
represents the direction Alloy is moving as they become more integrated and create
content to be exploited across various platforms. I am concerned with the lack of
transparency of a large conglomerate like Alloy, which allows advertising logic to both
implicitly and explicitly underwrite the representational and textual system of their
content creation. With the blurred distinction between advertisers and content, the content
has to directly support consumerist values, paint the products in a complementary light,
avoid controversy that may alienate consumers from the brand or company, and focus on
white, middle-class girl characters who are hyper-feminine and more often insecure so
they will use commodities to feel better about themselves—much like our protagonist
Cassie in the First Day web series. As Jennifer Holt notes, regulation and policy of the
223
digital sphere are decades behind in keeping up with the changes in technology (Holt
2012). Although these rules have been relaxing for years and are not enforced in “teen
targeted content,” because First Day will air on the web instead of a traditional television
channel, the FCC’s rules that dictate strict separation of commercial content and
programming matter for children do not apply. As a result, there’s no guarantee that the
goals of monetizing the web won’t usurp or render invisible certain types of
representational practices in favor of others unless we think about forms of regulation and
policy that acknowledge the importance or need for digital access to communication and
culture and acknowledge the practices of companies taking advantage or a relaxed and
lenient regulatory time period by critically evaluating their products and motives.

Conclusion:
Even though the development of YouTube specifically, but digital media
technologies more broadly have provided countless new outlets for the distribution of
content and arguably more diversity in terms of representation for girls who have
numerous choices to consume and interact with content, the production and distribution
of content are increasingly controlled by MCNs who both obfuscate their involvement
with advertising and have vested interests in content with certain types of marketing
targets at their core. The television industry has long been critiqued for promoting
excessive consumption and promoting femininity as a means to more consumption. But,
as the online web industry struggles to find different ways to monetize their content in
this era of uncertainty, they are pushing content for girls that promote the typical
representations of an unattainable feminine perfection through their main stars, who serve
224
as platforms for product placement to encourage the purchase of those products. With this
chapter I want to draw attention to the frequently unspoken or veiled industrial motives
that are underlying the contemporary cultural production of gender. Alloy as an
expansive media company has built their brand around these conventional understandings
of a hyper-feminine consumerist girlhood and these themes permeate all aspects of the
company’s holdings from its books, to its films, to its digital assets and branded content,
as we see in the premise for First Day being about finding the right outfit to land the right
guy.
While Alloy’s association with girls’ media culture often allows it to fly under the
radar by hiding underneath the cultural stigma that girls’ media is not significant to
broader political, economic or cultural concerns, Alloy is nevertheless playing a major
role in how we understand the future of both television and newly emerging digital media
platforms like YouTube. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green note, “YouTube, like all
enterprises that rely on user co-creation, will need to find ways to maintain its scale and
rate of growth while supporting cultural and aesthetic diversity, and respecting the
agency of the communities of users who work to produce its various forms of value—
whether economic, cultural, or social” (Burgess and Green 2009, 104). Clearly YouTube
is invested in shaping the platform on cable television through interface changes and its
focus on channels. It is even using discourses of quality and diversity to frame these
changes, much like the “blue skies” era of cable television development (Streeter 1997).
Yet, as William Kunz (2006) points out, diversity is not guaranteed by the seemingly
endless array of more content options. Consolidation of ownership and the horizontal and
vertical integration strategies restricts the important categories that support diversity:
225
viewpoint, outlet, program, and source. Paying attention to the growing influence of
MCN’s like Alloy Digital is therefore critical to evaluate YouTube’s support of cultural
and aesthetic diversity as well as the needs and desires of its users.
In many ways YouTube’s democratic logic has the potential to offer a “critical
juncture” in the evolution of television programming (McChesney, 2007). Defined by
Robert McChesney, a critical juncture is when a new technology, has the potential to
deeply modify social interactions, democratic action, and the functioning of economic
and political institutions. Lasting only a decade or two it is a key time in which
“decisions are made that establish institutions and rules that likely put us on a course that
will be difficult to change in any fundamental sense for decades or generations”
(McChesney 2007, 9). Television has been and continues to play a foundational role in
the way American citizens learn about and interact with the world. And, YouTube has the
potential to make us rethink the role of television as democratic medium, making us
reevaluate the current commercial underpinnings of the medium. Yet, as opposed to
thinking about the way that YouTube can change television, MCNs like Alloy are
looking at the ways in which we can make YouTube more like television.
Alloy provides an unmatched reach to the teen girl demographic. They are ranked
number one in total subscribers on YouTube, with 18 million across multiple video
channels. They serve as among the web’s largest video content providers, delivering 428
million streams monthly. Moreover, their goal is rarely just to sell content directly to girls,
but rather to shape varied and diverse Internet users into commodity audiences to sell to
advertisers. Similar to how Max Dawson (2011) describes the role in digital shorts in
early web programming, it is the brazen fashion in which Alloy’s web series carry out
226
their commercial obligations that make then so revealing. They disclose a great deal
about the industry’s entrenched conceptions of its programs and audiences. The goal of
this chapter, therefore, is to draw attention to the political economic conditions under
which Alloy’s web series are produced in order to expose the interlocking entertainment,
commercial, and promotional imperatives they are expected to carry out. Alloy’s
saturated horizontal integration and targeting of the teen demographic, however, is based
on narrow and specific gendered understandings of audiences that advertisers are
comfortable with.

Notes:

1
On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube
alleging that the site had engaged in “brazen” copyright infringement by allowing users
to upload and view copyrighted material owned by Viacom. They also contended that
YouTube “engages in, promotes and induces” the infringement, and they had deliberately
built up a library of infringing works in order to increase the site's traffic (and advertising
revenue). It was important for YouTube’s future then to ensure the major media
producers that they were committed to discouraging and preventing copyright
infringement.

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Chapter Five: Conclusion:
Reconsidering “The Virtual Big Sister”
Visibility in Technological Girlhood

The original logic behind the title to this dissertation, “The Virtual Big Sister,”
was inspired by the changes in what I conceived of as the highly gendered visual culture
enabled and encouraged by digital media technologies in the early twenty-first century. It
was an effort to align what Rosiland Gill (2007) calls the increased “emphasis upon self-
surveillance, monitoring and discipline” that is a part of the contemporary post-feminist
sensibility with the rehabilitation and naturalization of forms of “big brother”
surveillance that resulted from the development of neoliberal digital capitalism
(Andrejevic 2007). I was interested in examining what I saw to be in the words of Angela
McRobbie (2009), a new type of “gendered regime” or “gender habitus” in contemporary
media marked by increased surveillance, discipline, and monitoring of the bodies and
capacities of young women, particularly through new media technologies. This “gender
habitus,” made up of changing lifestyles, values, dispositions and expectation of girls, in
particular, seemed to be acquired both through the technologically enabled activities and
experiences of everyday life and the media texts for girls that represented and normalized
such activities.
Yet, in the course of researching and writing this dissertation, the concept of the
“virtual big sister” began to take on other meanings as well. The title, for example, is also
emblematic of the way television acts as a metaphorical “big sister” to new media. Like a
big sister television was both a role model and point of differentiation for new media
producers and developers as well as the subject of affinity and aversion during the growth
of new media technologies and platforms. When thinking about the messy ways in which
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content and audiences are moving and structured across media technologies and
platforms in what Henry Jenkins (2008) describes as “convergence culture,” I started to
recognize the various ways new media was being modeled after or in relationship to
television, particularly in terms of monetizing audiences and practices. Even more
centrally, I began to see how the empowered post-feminist girl consumer of television
properties becomes the ideal agent to navigate this changing media environment, often
being subjected to cultural anxieties while nevertheless assuaging industry uncertainties
in the discourses of trade journals and industry professionals. These industrial and
cultural discourses usually tied to hegemonic femininity produce dominant
understandings of what it means to be a girl and how girls should interact with television
and new media. In the words of Anita Harris (2004), she becomes the “can do girl” an
idealized neoliberal consumer citizen, comprising great capacity and potential,
particularly in the convergences of television and new media. Therefore, in order to
understand the meaning of these representations and discourses of post-feminist
technological girlhood it was necessary to contextualize their modes of production and
reception within existing structures of power.
Before exploring the implications and applications of the ideas and case studies
put forth in this dissertation, I want to map the ways in which these two themes of the
virtual big sister structure my chapters. In chapter two, for example, examining the
representations of girls and technology on the popular Nickelodeon cable sitcom iCarly
demanded an understanding of the network and parent company’s economic motives for
Internet expansion as well as its history of branding consumer citizenship. The
representations were products of a variety of industrial imperatives and circulating
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discourses around television and new media as well as girl audiences. The series reflected
on the one hand, what Harris (2004) observes is the new narrative goal of post-feminist
media texts for young women to seek out fame and celebrity rather than marriage and
family as their life goals. For Carly and Sam, performing on their web show led to
several advantages associated with celebrity culture and afforded them a great deal of
cultural agency. As Carly explains in the pilot to the series, “I hate when adults like Miss
Briggs can control what kids can do and see.” So she purposes they create their own
show, telling Sam and Freddy, “Let’s give [our kid fans] what they want, online, every
week. It can be whatever we want it to be. No adults to say, ‘You can do that, you can’t
do that.’ We can do or say whatever we want.” Although it neglects the importance of
having a privileged social and economic positioning when making one’s own web show,
this logic nevertheless supports Nickelodeon’s branding of empowerment through the
kids’ rhetoric of “Us V. Them” against adults perpetuated through the network’s
carefully constructed brand culture described by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2007).
In her article “Young Women, Late Modern Politics, and the Participatory
Possibilities of Online Cultures” Harris (2008) argues that in interpreting actions like
those of Carly, scholars must “take seriously young women’s styles of technology-
enabled social and political engagement, as they represent new directions in activism, the
construction of new participatory communities, and the development of new kinds of
public selves” (482). It is in creating a “public self” on her web show that Harris argues is
the first step towards Carly viewing herself as an agential citizen and political actor
(Keller 2012). On the other hand though, the show represented a limited form of
gendered digital citizenship, particularly for young girls—one restricted by the network’s
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industrial desires to exploit the sitcom genre and encourage a specific form of Internet
engagement within the digital enclosure of the Nickelodeon and Viacom brand. This
form of structured participation is what Amanda Lotz (2013) describes as “circumscribed
agency,” discursively discouraging girl viewers from seeking the same agency as Carly.
Nevertheless, as Carly and many of the girl protagonists examined in this
dissertation reflect, because young women are represented as exemplary subjects in
neoliberal governmentality, they’ve acquired a newfound visibility. No longer relegated
to the domestic sphere or rendered simply insignificant and invisible by the dominant
patriarchal society, neoliberal capitalism has granted girls access to new forms of public
life. McRobbie (2009) suggests this visibility needs to be understood in terms of Gilles
Deleuze’s Luminosity: “Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would
show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself
and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze 2006,
45). She explains how this form of luminosity puts constraints and conditions on girls’
visibility in so far as they are only really visible as ideal citizen consumers in a market
defined by “spectacular femininity”:
This luminosity captures how young women might be understood as currently
becoming visible. The power they seem to be collectively in possession of is
‘created by the light itself,’ visible but marking out the terrain of the
consummately and reassuringly feminine. Women are actively engaged in the
production of self…That is, it becomes increasingly difficult to function as a
female subject without subjecting oneself to those technologies of self that are
constitutive of the spectacularly feminine (McRobbie 2009, 60).
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The girls of Gossip Girl discussed in chapter three reflect this understanding of post-
feminist visibility the most, as both Blair and Serena are brought into the public eye only
to be highly regulated and policed by the blog and community of other post-feminist
girls. Their extremely affluent economic and social positioning as well as their residence
in New York City allows them to publicly traverse an extravagant world of spectacular
femininity where the technologies of self are exercised through the consumption of
fashion, dieting, socializing, and gossiping in a constant effort to self-perfect and
conform to idealized expectations of femininity. As discussed in the chapter, this
spectacular femininity is also strategically structured in the networked publics of the
diegetic Gossip Girl blog and of Alloy and the CW’s transmedia extensions more
broadly.
Beyond representations of post-feminist visibility and agency, in order to examine
the way television discourse was embedded and structured in the new media extensions,
chapters two and three also look at how discursive “clusters” of particular television
genres (defined by Jason Mittell (2008)) formed around the girls’ media properties iCarly
and Gossip Girl. The iCarly transmedia property, for example, was a discursive
formation produced through the aesthetic convergences of digital media and the
television sitcom as well as the economic motives of online expansion, the production
constraints of cable television, and the history of tween girl televisual representation. The
intertextuality of the iCarly sitcom drew attention to the way it modeled itself in relation
to previous sitcoms featuring tween girls, but also how it tried to position itself in relation
to digital media production and the network’s online extensions. iCarly therefore traded
in some of the contradictory representational strategies that result from society’s
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historical anxieties about watching girls grow up on television (Douglas 1995) and some
of the narrative limitations of the sitcom format despite its promotion of a form of digital
citizenship for girls.
The Gossip Girl transmedia property, on the other hand, was structured around
and through the discourses of the soap opera, which included particular gendered
assumptions about its audience and gendered modes of address. As Louisa Stein (2009)
notes, the Gossip Girl second life portal extended the visibility of spectacular femininity,
consumption, and technologies of self that defined the heightened melodrama of Gossip
Girl’s fictional world. And, the narrative of the Gossip Girl Social Climbing game was
similar to Jenny Humphrey’s melodramatic arch on the show. The game used the soap
opera’s methods of narrative advancement based on the spread and concealment of
information as well as its form of audience address that “trains” viewers in a particular
type of post-feminist consumption tied to the contemporary neoliberal economy of mass-
customization. Together the two case studies show how the generic discourses of
television impact the new media extensions and transmedia content of the properties, and
also how an ideal post-feminist girl consumer becomes the imagined target audience.
Using this framework chapter four looks at television as a malleable discursive
formation impacting the development of YouTube, which is typically defined as a hybrid
space of commercial and participatory practices (Burgess and Green 2009, 88).
Specifically, chapter four explores how even though YouTube was originally a space
dominated by the participatory cultures of young males, Alloy’s investment in the
platform indicates not only that girls are increasingly uploading and viewing videos on
the site, but also that it might be the place for YouTube to reinvent girls’ television
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online. The chapter points out how it is no coincidence that as YouTube begins
contemplating how to further monetize and professionalize the platform, it relies on
Multi-Channel Networks like Alloy Digital who are experienced with targeting niche
consumer sets, encouraging internet activities towards consumption, and shaping diverse
individualized internet users into idealized commodity audiences similar to those targeted
on cable television. Moreover, even though Alloy supports the unique and experimental
animated web series Pubertina to publicize the platform’s commitment to quality,
diversity, and its focus on niche content, their effort in branding channels to attract and
adhere to particular audience demographics desired by advertisers undermines the
representational potential and participatory community of the show. Therefore Alloy’s
other efforts in producing branded web series with post-feminist sensibilities fit in better
with its desire to monetize commodity audiences on YouTube. But they also point to the
seemingly dismal future of teen television online and exemplify the continuing efforts of
neoliberal digital capitalism to undermine participatory cultures and feminism,
particularly online (McRobbie 2009).

The Discourses of Technological Girlhood
In thinking about how and why contemporary popular girls’ television circulates
gendered ideas about new media technologies to an audience of girls, I realized that many
of these media products were based not only on the discursive constructs of television
genres, but others as well. One of the main discursive formations impacting the
representations of girls and technology is the implied generational divide. Even though
adults 18-49 are by and large the earliest adopters and most frequent users of social
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media and other digital media technologies and platforms, the notion that millennial
youths are “the digital generation” and using media in profoundly new and different ways
than their parents or elders is what Serra Tinic (2013) describes as a “packaged truth”:
when discourse is produced through dominant narratives perpetuated by industry leaders.
It’s a myth serving to justify the latest and greatest in market research and target
marketing services (often simultaneously justifying the increased surveillance of kids and
teens through data-mining practices), while also masking a lot of the economic, social,
and political realities impacting youths’ access to digital media technologies (Seiter 2005;
Hargittai 2010; Ito et al. 2008). The myth continually assumes a white, upper middle
class child or teen and disregards the fact that not all youths have access to newer digital
technologies nor do they all use media in the same way once they do. It also masks the
fact that family income continues to be a barrier for many youths owning technology and
that ethnic and cultural norms, particularly around gender, continue to impact youths’
perception and use of digital media technologies (Seiter 2005). Therefore it continues to
further marginalize those youths of varying race, class, gender and sexuality that are seen
as less desirable to advertisers and are already left out of so many media and cultural
representations.
This generational divide is also exacerbated by discourses of post-feminism that
Angela McRobbie (2009) suggests work to “undo” feminism. As a product of a media
culture in the 1990s that ironically circulated sexist and misogynistic representations of
women and girls, younger female audiences dis-identified with feminism because it was
associated with humorless, old, unglamorous women. This ironic post-feminism
continues today as exemplified by the “Crazy Stalker” ad described in the introduction to
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this dissertation, but the generational divide is intensified in countless media texts for
girls today. For example, in her paper, “Nursing at the Screen: Post-feminist Daughters
and Demonized Mothers on Toddlers and Tiaras,” Tisha Dejmanee (2013) describes how
this divide is reinforced on the cable reality program about child beauty pageants. She
draws attention to how the show positions the girl contestants as rational mature agents
making “choices” in a neoliberal culture. They are then placed in opposition to the
monstrous depictions of bad motherhood on the show—where the mothers are constantly
scrutinized for pushing their daughters to perform and supplying them with endless candy
and soda to help them stay awake, among other “horrors.” Similarly on Gossip Girl
Serena and Blair constantly fight and disagree with their mothers, frequently coming to a
head in some spectacular blow out over “proper” feminine/feminist behavior or when
“protecting” their public reputations. Whereas in iCarly they never even mention Carly’s
mother, continually make jokes about Sam’s selfish, immature and neglectful mom (who
is relegated to a cameo appearance played by Jane Lynch), and place the dominant
representation of motherhood on the shoulders of Freddie’s neurotic hyper-sensitive and
controlling mother “Mrs. Bensen.” Together these representations privilege forms of
personal post-feminist agency over collective feminist politics, work to drive a wedge
between generations of women while delimiting cross-generational identification, and
frequently perpetuate notions of generational digital divide.
Despite the circulating discourses about the universality of access and skill for the
“digital generation,” girls are continually represented as less technically able than boys,
particularly on television. As discussed in chapter two, even though the girls produce
their own web show on iCarly, they live up to many gendered stereotypes in regards to
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technological skill and use. Sam expresses little to no interest in using technology outside
of basic email and consuming activities, often making fun of Freddie for caring about
technology beyond that. Carly shows more initiative towards using the Internet and other
technologies for schoolwork, researching aspects of the web show, or “cyber stalking”
her new boy friend, but Freddie is the “expert” and shows more of an innate gift for all of
the technical aspects of producing the show. On Gossip Girl, although Blair and Serena
manipulate the Gossip Girl blog to exert social power several times throughout the series’
run, in general they use technology little more than as basic communication via text. In
fact, as the television series concluded, Dan Humphrey reveals that he’s been “Gossip
Girl” the whole time, reiterating the stereotypical gender hierarchy of boys’ superior
technological use and expertise.
These stereotypical gender representations related to technological skill
proliferate across television beyond the case studies explored in this dissertation. For
example on CBS’s The Good Wife Alicia’s teenage son Zach is the tech expert, often
uncovering clues for one of his mom’s cases or helping out with his dad’s campaign,
whereas Alicia’s daughter Grace is seen as less tech savvy and even considered in danger
of an internet predator in one of the episodes. The girls on ABC Family’s popular Pretty
Little Liars (also an Alloy property) are similarly depicted in relation to technology.
Although technology plays a major role on the series, the girls are usually depicted as the
passive victims of cyberbullying via text and email. When they want to use digital
technologies to discover more clues in solving the series-long mystery of who killed their
best friend Allison or discover who’s behind the cyberbullying, the girls typically turn to
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one of the girls’ boyfriend Caleb for his skills with breaking cell phone protections and
circumventing firewalls.
Like the girls of Pretty Little Liars, there have been several television programs to
emerge with teens and young women wielding technologies, but this use is continually
portrayed as dangerous, even life-threatening. As mentioned in the introduction, Louisa
Stein argues that despite this danger shows like Veronica Mars, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little
Liars, and Revenge “give voice to millennial female perspectives, as the girl protagonists
in the shows use technology to shape the plot, connect with one another, and to guide
viewer experience of the narrative” (Stein 2012). Yet, it is important to ask how a girl
viewer might come to understand new media devices as dangerous as a result of these
dominant representations. As mentioned in the introduction, just as television was an
important place for girls to first learn about feminism in the 1960s, television is an
important place for learning about new media technologies in the early 2000s. There are
multiple contributing factors to why we see so few women in the science and technology
fields, but one of the claims of this dissertation is that it is difficult to aspire to something
that you do not see. Moreover, although to some girls it may make technology more
appealing or “sexy,” it can be discouraging when one actually sees girls using
technologies and it is repeatedly reinforced as something dangerous. Therefore, although
Carly may not be considered an expert, there is something representationally important to
the fact that she made using technology fun, much like her predecessor Clarissa Belding
before her who used a first generation personal computer to make funny video games and
aid in various schemes against her brother Ferguson on Clarissa Explains It All.
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There have been some television representations of girls and digital technology
that have less danger associated with them, one of which is MTV’s Awkward. The show
follows an unpopular 15-year-old Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards) as she gains
immediate, yet unwanted, popularity at her high school when her fellow classmates
mistakenly think she attempted to commit suicide. Thereafter, the show centers around a
love triangle between Jenna and two best friends (Jake and Matty), and Jenna’s blogging
provides the narrative structure for each episode, much like it did for Carrie Bradshaw
(Sarah Jessica Parker) on Sex and the City and now Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) on
Girls. In a brief piece for In Media Res Amy Hasinoff (2012) suggests that Jenna’s blog
“seems to be positioned as relatively unremarkable, merely providing a justification for
her voice-over narration.” She draws attention to the fact that the blog is seemingly
private, except for her one anonymous and supportive reader. And, even when Jenna
chooses to make her blog public to her whole school she experiences few negative
consequences beyond too much fascination with her love life. Hasinoff sees this as a big
step away from girls being positioned as always already vulnerable to various dangers
associated with digital technologies, but questions, then, whether in narratives like this
blogging becomes just a slightly more public from of diary introspection, feminine
narcissism and post-feminist self-work. Although I enjoy Awkward, I don’t see it as
breaking new ground for the representations of women and technology one way the other.
Jenna’s “awkwardness” is consistently recouped into hegemonic heterosexual femininity
throughout the series. Yet, I think it is important for scholars to continue interrogating
why the television industry is invested in representing particular representations of girls
and technology and not others. This dissertation contends that the “danger” and “anxiety”
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around digital media in these texts is symbolic of the television industry’s fears of how
digital media technologies and platforms are impacting television’s business model’s,
particularly the massive amounts of advertising dollars spent targeting girls and women.
Beyond gendered stereotypes around technology, another one of the dominant and
troubling discursive formations circulating in the contemporary youth media industry to
emerge out of this research is that girls “like” or “want” product placement in their media
texts. Stemming from the long history of denigrating girls’ taste, particularly around pop
music, girls are continually described in trade and popular discourse as having an easy
sell when it comes to the blatant commercial properties that are designed and targeted at
them. While the discourses of masculine taste hierarchies emphasize how references to
commercial motives within media texts hinder the creative expression of media producers
and exploit viewers’ emotional connection to characters in order to sell products, girl
viewers are usually excluded from being able to make these taste distinctions (Rosenthal
2007). This was repeatedly emphasized in the press and trade discussions about Gossip
Girl that highlighted girls’ interest in the show’s fashions, but extends to other texts and
consuming habits as well. For example, in tracing the legacy of demonizing and
degrading girl music fans in discourse about television music programs and their
audiences, Norma Coates argues that this discourse suggests “an on-going project of
policing while guiding and justifying not just girls’ taste, but popular taste as constructed
through hegemonic flows of capital and culture” (Coates 2011).
Some girls undoubtedly find pleasure in the fantasy spectacle of clothes and
designer products littering the worlds of these girls’ media texts, as I surely did.
Rendering judgment on fashion and beauty can allow girls to feel like their opinion
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matters and given the sheer amount of cultural and economic energy directed at them
around fashion and beauty, they can feel like an informed commenter when sharing that
opinion with members of a shared community. Yet, many girls could prefer the symbolic
comfort of Lindsey Weir’s military jacket, which she wore in almost every episode of
Freaks and Geeks over the fashion show of early 80s designer styles (like the CW’s
newest franchise The Carrie Diaries). They also could arguably appreciate Angela
Chase’s limited and recycled wardrobe of baggy sweaters and men’s flannel shirts from
My So-Called Life that spoke to queer or working class teens. These shows as well as
ABC Family’s sort-lived Huge, about over-weight girls at summer camp, explored
girlhoods outside and beyond the hegemonic femininity of spectacular capitalist
consumption. Despite critical acclaim and developing loyal cult followings though, these
shows were cancelled due to “low ratings.” But, looked at from the critical media
industries perspective outlined in this dissertation, these different versions of girlhood
didn’t offer the same expansive avenues of monetization through lifestyle branding,
merchandising, and transmedia storytelling beyond the television property that could tap
into what Sandra Lee Bartky refers to as the “fashion-beauty complex” (Bartky 1993, 42)
and supplements low ratings on show’s like Gossip Girl. This means that even in a more
niche-based and expansive media environment, girls are still encouraged to participate in
a rather narrowly defined televisual culture of spectacular femininity made up of
shopping and self-work, leaving little time for political engagement, grass-roots
organizing, community involvement, or other pleasures.
The study of industry discourse like those traced above can reveal a lot about the
way power operates in and through the media industries. Often these discourses are not
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obvious and are deep-rooted assumptions based on industry lore or seemingly common
sense. For example, in Below the Line Vicki Mayer (2011) discusses how the discursive
formation of “the line” (stemming from a budgeting convention that distinguishes
between creative/professional and other roles) led to distinctions between types of labor
that could be classed as intellectual, creative, or managerial, and types of labor that could
not, which ultimately has material and economic implication in the lives of workers. The
types of labor, consuming habits, and technological capabilities of women and girls are
continually subject to similar discursive constructions. Girl audiences are imagined and
produced based on highly gendered discourses of taste and cultural assumptions that are
frequently operationalized to support an unstable media industry. As much as the
contemporary neoliberal media industry talks about target marketing and adjusting to
personalized niche tastes, in many ways contemporary girls’ media culture represents a
re-massifying of girl audiences. You can see it at any birthday party for girls when the
expected costume continues to be one of pastel party dress and sequined shoes and the
girl who arrives in jeans and a graphic tee or hoodie stands out. Beyond just specific
instances like these, the case studies in this dissertation are meant to serve as examples of
what Serra Tinic (2013) calls the theory and method of articulation in critical media
industries studies—examining the process of discursive articulation through industrial
processes and representation, which demands us to explore questions of agency and
diversity in the media industries.

The Future of Girls & Technology:
It is important to point out that the case studies presented in this dissertation do no
249
adequately reflect the rich textual and demographic diversity of contemporary girls’
media culture, or accurately convey girls’ own views about these issues. Like much
hegemonic girls’ media, the texts and representations explored here are
disproportionately white, heterosexual, and middle class. The broader girls’ media culture
in comparison is one that has become increasingly more diverse, interactive, and
participatory for girls, especially on the Internet through the widespread use of digital
platforms. Angela McRobbie (2012) notes that partially due to the “hostile un-doing of
feminism produced by post-feminism,” and partially due to the accessibility and
interactivity provided by new media technologies, we’re seeing a rise in feminist
discourses in the media and public sphere more broadly, especially on blogs like Jezebel,
Everyday Feminism, Racialicious, and Feministe. Jessalynn Keller (2012), for example,
has published an article “Virtual Feminisms: Girls’ Blogging Communities, Feminist
Activism, and Participatory Politics” and is writing a dissertation exploring the complex
and diverse ways that girls, in particular, are using blogging communities to participate in
a feminist political activism that reflects their needs as contemporary young feminists
within a neoliberal cultural context.
Although, it’s disproportionally seen more in affluent Western societies, girls
around the world are increasingly taking the initiative to create their own spaces to
explore gender and femininity in relation to feminism. They are also beginning to receive
more and more public attention, especially sixteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson, who started
the online magazine produced by and for girls, Rookie Mag. The self-identified feminist
Gevinson has appeared on numerous talk shows and has been the subject of a variety of
editorials, even getting her own TED talk, illustrating a more positive and less-ironic
250
acceptance of feminist themes and young feminists in American society. Feminist
scholars should continue to explore the significant work enacted by these girls and their
practices, and I think it’s especially important that feminist scholars continue to
interrogate how girls and all young people accept, negotiate and resist various images of
themselves and their culture in the media.
Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of ideology and hegemony helps us think
through the relationships between power and culture in girls’ media texts. Feminist
scholars should remember to acknowledge possible alternative interpretations and
potential negotiations with hegemonic capitalist culture. For example, at the 2013 Society
for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago, Mary Celeste Kearney (2013)
presented a paper, “Sparkle, Glitter, Shine: The Post-Feminist Luminosity of
Contemporary US Girls’ Film and Television” in which she examines the “sparkly”
aesthetic of girls’ media culture as a product of neoliberal capitalism and post-feminism.
In reading this aesthetic through theories of affect and queer theory, however, she
contemplates whether this seemingly hegemonic femininity has subversive potential?
Can little girls covered in sparkle be seen as “little drag queens” that disrupt gender
binaries and draw attention to both the performance of gender and the constructed nature
of femininity as Judith Butler (2006) describes?
Kearney’s provocation seems applicable to the case studies analyzed in this
dissertation, particularly Gossip Girl, which can be read as “Camp” and therefore
somewhat subversive in relation to gender. The teen soap opera has in the words of Susan
Sontag, “the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the
naive” (Sontag 1964). The show’s extravagant parties and fantasy wardrobes, but most
251
especially the knowing and winking voiceover narration of Gossip Girl voiced by Kristen
Bell, draw attention to what Sontag calls “the essence of Camp,” which is “its love of the
unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Josh Schwartz evokes the Camp sensibility in
they way he designs the world of Gossip Girl with a sleek glossy aesthetic: “Camp is a
certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic
phenomenon…not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of
stylization.” Yet, it is in the characters of Chuck and Blair, embodied by Ed Westwick
and Leighton Meester, where Gossip Girl’s Camp truly comes to life. Chuck’s queerness,
symbolized in his dandy wardrobe of pink ascots, draws attention to Camp’s
acknowledgement that “the most refined form of sexual attractiveness consists in going
against the grain of one’s sex.” While Sontag insists, “Camp is disengaged, depoliticized
– or at least apolitical” this attention to the artifice of gender is culturally and potentially
politically subversive. It begs us to ask, as well, if the “mean girl” bitchiness of Blair
Waldorf can be seen in terms of Alex Doty’s conception of the subversive diva:
…divas offer the world a compelling brass standard that has plenty to say to
women, queer men, blacks, Latinos, and other marginalized groups about the
costs and rewards that can come when you decide both to live a conspicuous
public life within white patriarchy and try to live that life on your own
terms…even in defeat there is something gloriously iconoclastic about the ‘bitch’
(Doty 2007 italics mine).
Accordingly, the show’s world of “spectacular femininity” and the character’s
containment within in it can be interpreted in terms of Camp subverting the hegemonic.
Although it may take time for this reading to sink in as Sontag explains: “It’s simply that
252
the process of aging, of deterioration provides the necessary detachment” to appreciate
Camp.
iCarly too has aspects of subversive gender performance. Sam’s masculine
toughness and disavowal of certain feminine rules of decorum and grace reflects what
Kathleen Rowe (1995) deems “the unruly woman.” Like other unruly women that came
before her, such as Roseanne Barr Arnold, Sam is a “noisy, joke-making rebel or ‘woman
on top’ who uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority.” Sam
frequently exhibits both physical prowess and biting wit over men and boys throughout
the series, which is rare in girls’ television properties. Her love and affection for Carly,
highlighted in several episodes where she is jealous of Carly’s friendships with other
girls, points to a lesbian or queer reading of Sam. Yet, the show works tirelessly to
recuperate Sam into hegemonic heterosexual femininity in several episodes where she is
the subject of the typical tween girl “tomboy taming” narrative (Pike 2009) or when she
and Freddie develop a romantic relationship. Both iCarly and Gossip Girl therefore
reflect a long history of the corporate media industries recuperating potentially
subversive gender practices and identities into hegemonic femininity.
While I am invested in supporting girls’ online participatory practices and the
disruptive potential of fan communities that subvert hegemonic discourses of girls’ media
and culture, this dissertation is an exploration of the ways in which the girls’ media
industry strategically tries to control many of these practices by structuring their own
forms of media convergence that work to reinstate its role as cultural gatekeeper. As
Suzanne Scott notes, “In convergence culture everyone is encouraged to consume in a
participatory fashion, even if that participation is limited and monitored” (Scott 2011).
253
All of the case studies analyzed in this dissertation recuperate the participatory culture of
girls towards the economic goals of hegemonic femininity or work to contain
participation. The Gossip Girl transmedia property was perhaps the most blatant example
of this as it seamlessly integrated product placement into a fictional world of the text
where designer labels and luxury brands are part of the lexicon. The CW and Alloy
worked to extend this world out into other new media extensions, never denying the
inextricable relationship between the narrative and consumerism of the show. In fact it
used the generic traits of the soap opera to structure its transmedia extensions and
audience address around particular forms of gendered consumerist engagement. iCarly’s
containment of girls’ participatory culture was more subtle and needed an understanding
of Nickelodeon’s commitment to branding consumer citizenship within the sitcom format
as well as how some of the narrative containment of the sitcom corresponds to the
participatory containment in Nickelodeon’s media convergences. Chapter four then draws
attention to the ways in which MCN’s like Alloy Digital are working to apply the
industrial logics of cable television onto the YouTube platform, particularly in an effort
to court and shape youth viewers into commodity audiences.
Together these case studies show how many of the current characters, storylines,
and industry discourses of girls’ media at this moment are strategic maneuvers on the part
of the corporate girls’ media industry to regain control at a time of industry instability
and increased consumer autonomy. They confront an inherently dynamic and
unpredictable youth market and an unstable industry environment by clinging tightly to
more stable gender scripts and mythologies that have served corporate culture well. The
industry is turning to traditional television genres, tropes, and modes of representation
254
that encourage a form of gendered consumerism that works to condition young female
viewers and media users to consume and use media according to their rules. With this
analysis I hope to emphasize how important it is to incorporate gender into the theories
and methodologies of critical media industries studies research, and hope that we can
both apply this perspective to future studies and expand it to include other marginalized
groups.
Drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of online adolescent media, the
shifting and gendered nature of transmedia storytelling, and developing trends around
data-mining and target marketing opens up our understanding of important issues
surrounding privacy, consumption, gender and labor, which contribute to our
understanding of media and by extension our view of the world and our place in it. In
particular, this analysis also shows that industrial discourses and strategies circulating
around girls and technology—including industrial anxieties, transmedia storytelling,
walled gardens, data-mining, and target marketing—shape the visual forms, storytelling
practices, and consumption contexts of the broader early 21st century’s convergent media
culture.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Nygaard, Taylor (author)

Core Title The virtual big sister: television and technology in girls' media

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/18/2013

Defense Date 04/10/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag convergence,Girls,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-feminism,Technology,television,Transmedia

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Seiter, Ellen (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email taylor.nygaard@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-292562

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