Vicki Mayer
Tulane University, Communication, Faculty Member
- Communication, Critical Theory, Media Studies, Media Labor, Critical international political economy, Cultural Geography, and 25 moreCultural Economy, Cultural Policy, Creative Industries, Broadcasting policy, Political communication, Cultural Studies, Audience and Reception Studies, Latino/A Studies, Audience Studies, Production studies, Philosophy, Business, Political Philosophy, Entrepreneurship, Latinos, Film Studies, Politics, Youth Culture, Media and Cultural Studies, Youth Studies, Communication Studies, Creative Economy, Media History, Television Studies, and Digital Mediaedit
- My scholarship is interested in communication and work, including communication industries and labor, creative and cu... moreMy scholarship is interested in communication and work, including communication industries and labor, creative and cultural production, amateur, professional, and audience labor, the production of workers and their identities as workers (a.k.a. production studies)...edit
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes... more
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
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Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center... more
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
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A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered 'essential workers' during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time.
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What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth... more
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
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This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development... more
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions.
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A genealogy of feminist studies of media policy and governance.
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Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) as our cue, we delve into the gendered patterns of authorship and citation in review articles written about the discipline. These review... more
Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) as our cue, we delve into the gendered patterns of authorship and citation in review articles written about the discipline. These review articles have proliferated via a publishing industry bent on selling handbooks. Using the standard methods used in other forms of gender network analysis, we focus on the citations in the first 100 articles of The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, the ICA’s resource guide to the study of communication. Our data show strong disparities with regards to the number of women authors and articles about women’s scholarship as well as the citation of scholarly sources written by women in articles written by men. Based on the empirical evidence, we believe it is time for an intervention in communication scholarship. We suggest standards to enforce both personal and structural accountability. We want to make sure that violators of a feminist commitment to diversify our discipline be called on to make change happen, or else.
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Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood... more
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.
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Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article... more
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
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Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions 16.1 (2016).
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To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC Press, 2016.
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This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communication scholar Cicilia MK Peruzzo. Published in CSMC 2015.
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See online for best audiovisuals http://flowtv.org/2015/09/pedagogy-and-where-sh-happens-in-digital-humanities/
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Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby, Lexington Books, 2015.
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May 2015 Louisiana Cultural Vistas Magazine
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The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the... more
The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the privatization of public space and the impacts of these respatializations on New Orleans as a place. The images in the essay provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering” from hurricanes and other disasters.
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This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the... more
This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the manufacturing hub for the digital technology. Through an analysis of three physical spaces in Manaus implicated in the creation of digital television, the article exposes the political, economic, and social conditions that support, and ultimately contradict, national digital television rhetoric that focuses only on the uses of digital television.
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... The sociologist and former screenwriter Leo Rosten conducted what he called a ''Middletown'' study of the film indus-try, combining reams of quantitative data on studio expenditures... more
... The sociologist and former screenwriter Leo Rosten conducted what he called a ''Middletown'' study of the film indus-try, combining reams of quantitative data on studio expenditures and labor earnings with trade accounts and interviews about the culture of production.Ω A ...
... 7 The now staid phrase for explaining media production ascreativity within constraints ... Caldwell,Production Culture:Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham ... 6 Nicholas Garnham, Political... more
... 7 The now staid phrase for explaining media production ascreativity within constraints ... Caldwell,Production Culture:Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham ... 6 Nicholas Garnham, Political Economy and Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Mass ...
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From the Velvet Light Trap Dossier: Media Space in Perspective
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This essay relies on descriptive‐historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk‐radio program. After a political‐economic analysis of the more general... more
This essay relies on descriptive‐historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk‐radio program. After a political‐economic analysis of the more general rise of the talk‐radio format, the authors emphasize how Limbaugh in particular works to propagate a class‐based understanding of social and political reality. Some of the difficulties of sustaining such a portrayal in an era of unprecedented job insecurity among middle managers and professional employees are stressed.
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This is an interview conducted in 2006 by Ned Sublette for Afropop.com.
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Radio interview on WWNO
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On the WSJ Blog Think Tank
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Op-Ed in The Advocate
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Published in Flow 10(9): 2009
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published in Youth Media Reporter 3(6): 2009
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“Latino Media.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia on Latinos, Vol. 3, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González, 92-98, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Journal of Communication 57, no. 2 (2007): 404-407
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Latino Studies 2, no. 3 (2004): 445-452.
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International Review of Modern Sociology. 30, no. 1 (2002): 107-8.
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This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the... more
This article asks us to consider spatial dimensions embedded in Brazil's digital television transformation by looking at the symbolic significance of the medium in Manaus, a transnational city-region which will most likely be the manufacturing hub for the digital technology. Through an analysis of three physical spaces in Manaus implicated in the creation of digital television, the article exposes the
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This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the start of a coeditorship for the journal. A look back at Daniel Schiller’s book Theorizing Communication supports the coeditors’ conception... more
This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the start of a coeditorship for the journal. A look back at Daniel Schiller’s book Theorizing Communication supports the coeditors’ conception of a media studies that broadly understands communication as labor.
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This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home... more
This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series’ creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Communication, Media Studies, Ethnography, and 13 moreAudience Studies, Audience and Reception Studies, Media Ethnography, Critical Production Studies, Production economics, Placemaking, Production studies, Treme, Value, Valor, Communication and media Studies, Media Industry Studies, and Matrizes
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In the snarky atmosphere of the Twitterscape, the short but public tiff between director David Simon (The Wire, Treme), celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, and Bravo Television's programming executive Andy Cohen looked like it had all... more
In the snarky atmosphere of the Twitterscape, the short but public tiff between director David Simon (The Wire, Treme), celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, and Bravo Television's programming executive Andy Cohen looked like it had all the makings of a street game of the dozens..
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Historical evidence reveals that the definition of Latino mass media is a fragile but useful way to examine how cultural identity is forged through economic and industrial practices. Focusing on the development of Latino media and their... more
Historical evidence reveals that the definition of Latino mass media is a fragile but useful way to examine how cultural identity is forged through economic and industrial practices. Focusing on the development of Latino media and their political economy in San Antonio, Texas, the researcher describes four constructions of Latino producers and audiences: segmentation, massification, pan-ethnicity, and fragmentation. These constructions demonstrate that these media were sites for Latinos to define themselves as producers and audiences within the structural constraints of race and class in two nations, Mexico and the United States. The paper concludes the coexistence of these constructions today could be interpreted as positive signs of growing multiculturalism or negative effects of global trends that divide Latinos by class.
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Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes... more
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
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with different participants. Through these interviews Light traces an act he calls as disconnective practice: ‘Disconnective practice [...] involves potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs in relationship... more
with different participants. Through these interviews Light traces an act he calls as disconnective practice: ‘Disconnective practice [...] involves potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs in relationship to a particular site, within a particular site, between and amongst different sites and in relation to the physical world’ (p. 17). Disconnective practice is a question of power; the user has the power to connect but also the power to not to connect. Light shows that the power in disconnecting exists equally in the domains of private and public. One of the illustrating examples is the coming-together of personal and work life in which social media plays a significant role. Users have to choose if they ‘friend’ their colleagues on Facebook, and if they do they enter the regime of self-censorship. As one of the interviewees mentioned ‘I’m not friends with anyone on Facebook that is senior to me at work [...] I do not want to be connected with them in a kind of social sense’ (p. 83). Furthermore, in the workplace the question of using social media is not only a personal choice but also a way for employers to use disconnective practices as means of power. By implementing either technical blocking or organizational policies, employers can prevent employees from spending time on social media. The examples where users have to negotiate whether they choose to connect or disconnect with these sites and the services they provide are important and shed light on our current culture of connectivity. Light shows in a compelling manner that our connections and disconnections with social networking sites mediate public life and shape ways we interact with each other. Looking at disconnection, or examining, mapping and using disconnective practices, will allow us not only to understand human relationships on social networking sites but will also give insights into how these platforms work technically, culturally and politically. I find it is easy to agree with Light’s concluding argument that in addition to connections we need to understand and develop scholarship around disconnection: ‘Connection is fundamental to the operation of SNSs [...] But connection cannot exist without disconnection and therefore I believe it is just as fundamental to our understandings of what SNSs can be and how we make sense of them’ (p. 159).
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This essay relies on descriptive-historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk-radio program. After a political-economic analysis of the... more
This essay relies on descriptive-historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk-radio program. After a political-economic analysis of the more general rise of the talk-radio format, the authors ...
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Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes... more
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
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Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center... more
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
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The speakers presented their Digital Humanities projects Freedom on the Move and ViaNolaVie
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This paper was presented at Paper Session 1 – Digital Labour on the Ground 2
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This essay combines the experiences and participation of women’s studies members from four campuses in New Orleans, Louisiana. It reflects both on the damage suffered by women in the academy and the strides that have been made in the... more
This essay combines the experiences and participation of women’s studies members from four campuses in New Orleans, Louisiana. It reflects both on the damage suffered by women in the academy and the strides that have been made in the post-Katrina environment.
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International Review of Modern Sociology. 30, no. 1 (2002): 107-8.
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When HBO producer David Simon heard that he had won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2010, he quipped that his wife, a noted author herself, told him the morning after: ‘Hey Genius, you forgot to take t...
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This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development... more
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions. This article is based on a paper presented at the Media in Transition symposium (Utrecht, June 28, 2018), in the Industries and Infrastructures panel organised by Judith Keilbach. Also published in this issue of ECS are Amanda D. Lotz, ‘Unpopularity and cultural po...
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MediaNOLA seeks to locate the people, processes, and places through which a city makes its culture. Through a research and reference portal, MediaNOLA would educate scholars, students, and citizens about origins of this culture, the ways... more
MediaNOLA seeks to locate the people, processes, and places through which a city makes its culture. Through a research and reference portal, MediaNOLA would educate scholars, students, and citizens about origins of this culture, the ways it develops from the social networks located across the city's human landscape. This planning grant would help archivists and community media practitioners work together with technical staff to devise an interactive site that joins and maps digital archival images of the city's cultural production with oral histories that have a through-line based around work, from the trades people who supported the city's thriving print, music, and audiovisual cultures to the consumers who become part of the performance for Mardi Gras and second-line parades.
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This paper analyzes the continued propensity of men to cite other men, and more importantly, to NOT cite the work of women, in Communication Studies. After documenting the continued and troubling persistence of the erasure of women's... more
This paper analyzes the continued propensity of men to cite other men, and more importantly, to NOT cite the work of women, in Communication Studies. After documenting the continued and troubling persistence of the erasure of women's scholarship, the paper argues for intervening at the points at which the field reproduces itself.
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth... more
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
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Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article... more
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
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field and overshadowing the study of content, production and consumption, this highly original and thought-provoking volume does a good job of pointing out the remaining gaps in the field and makes a strong case for considering... more
field and overshadowing the study of content, production and consumption, this highly original and thought-provoking volume does a good job of pointing out the remaining gaps in the field and makes a strong case for considering distribution from technological, economic and political standpoints. Media infrastructures indeed are not neutral but embedded within systems of power and inequality, and this volume opens up potentially new and revealing lines of inquiry in the study of contemporary media distribution.