Saturday, Nov. 17 -- Opening Remarks

Jason Mitchell, Middlebury College (Blog); Jonathan Gray, Fordham University (Blog); Lee Harrington (soaps), Miami University.

JG: Barthes and the work and the text (a work becomes a _meaningful_ text when people engage with it) -- How do we foster the better creation of texts? Peripherals like the Star Wars toys // transmedia storytelling; these texts add to the engagement in the core text. "Passion Points" (from yesterday) [JG's blog]. Using qualitative measures can be best because metrics can't get at certain data.  Passion points may be best got at from doing qualitative evaluations rather than quantitative.

LH: 1) what's the value of user-gen content to other users, for example? How could we measure answers to this question.

2) Access costs // scarcity of time // who wants to access it? // and who does industry want to access these media
+Age: too much time spent on millenials (or the 18-49 year olds), although economically sound, perhaps, but older folks do want to be marketed to by things other than big pharm;

How do we implement meaningful qualitative methods on a mass-audience scale? LH:Qualitative is slower than mass metrics
JG: and there seems to be hostility between academia and industry. But we can offer industry a great deal, although
JM: the qualitative isn't thought of as generalizable.  --> But we can ask how we can share these findings with industry<--
JG: qualitative research means you should go into things open for surprise, but that works academia, and industry isn't comfortable with this.
SF: mentions that industry still sees qualitative research in terms of focus groups. 
JM: Qualitative gets at media consumption as contextual, tied to an interpretive community; focus groups don't do this. 
JG: We need move beyond focus groups, and online groups/communities allow for more accurate qualitative results.

JM: skeptism regarding academia creating ties to industry as selling out; but hopeful for new researchers breaking this down;
SF: what's the value of our research to industry?; LH: it can work, but we need to write accessible texts for industry.

Also, move beyond millennials to "transgenerational" viewing model and "surplus audiences", for example:

JM: drug dealers using the WIRE on HBO as a model for criminal activity (the surplus audience), while being targeted for middle-class, white guy HBO subscribers.