3.3: Production Culture as Spec Work

A broader question remains: how do these three interpenetrating labor regimes—and the spec world in particular—spur media industries to build para-industrial buffers and cultural fronts to survive? What specific cultural practices (chatter, written and visual expression, artifact making, habits and rituals) do these competing labor arrangements ramp up in ways that the “old” industries did not? Moments of industrial contestation and change greatly accelerate para-industrial cultural expression, chatter, and spec work. In some ways, this is a pitched battle.

Table 3.2: Cultural Practices of Three Paraindustrial Labor Regimes

	Craft World	Brand World	Spec World
Cultural Chatter	Self-legitimation, boundary-policing, controlling entrants	Cross-promotion, tradeincest, fake buzz, insider leaks	Sharing, discovery, self-marketing, replicating industry
Cultural Expressions	Professional/expert blogosphere, clip reels, WGC/snark	The showrunner-Twitterverse, EPKS, value-added web site	UGC, demo films, spec scripts, spec scenes, Facebook
Cultural Habits and Rituals	Open houses, bake-offs, technical demos, migratory crew-org	Summits, markets, trade conventions, TCAs, upfronts	Pitchfests, shootouts, hailing-stunts, networking, bartering

As the model above suggests (see Table 3.2), each regime uses culture for different ends. The threatened craft world, for example, favors “self-legitimation” strategies, boundary policing of amateurs, and the rigid control of entrants via high barriers to entry. Its cultural expressions (online, offline, in-person) cultivate “professionalization” and the careful maintenance of socio-professional communities. Even so, preoccupation with technical “experts,” masters, and mentors keeps even the social media and trade rituals of the craft world to a quaint, almost predigital scale (open houses, bake-offs, how-to’s).

Brand world does not need to stage culture this way to sustain socio-professional craft communities. Yet it faces considerably more cultural work to bring sense or rationality to its worldwide licensing, reformatting, high-concept, and franchising schemes. Success in brand world means mastering cross-promotion among the conglomerate’s platforms, systematic leaking of “insider” info, development of incestuous relations with the “trade” media, and creation of fake buzz. While this cultural chatter once worked via the press junket and the electronic press kit (EPK), the showrunner “Twitterverse” is perhaps the most effective tangible expression of current brand-world chatter.

The cultural chatter strategies of spec world are well known from social media, Twitter, and Facebook: sharing, self-marketing, networking, and bartering. Socio-professional cultural expressions here include: worker-generated content (WGC) mirroring user-generated content (UGC); stealth stunts and staged online “scenes” aimed at “hailing” the attention of higher-ups; circulating demos to facilitate one’s “discovery”; “friending” for lateral movement across job classifications; and tweeting to build migratory crew networks. Professionals have learned spec-world postures—trade rationalizations, spin, hype, and dissembling—partly from online social media practices, then combining these with indigenous “sharing” traditions from their own craft histories.